How to Turn Your Boring Deck into an awesome Presentation
The importance of good presentations cannot be underestimated. It can deliver your messages in a better way to your audiences. So what sets apart a good presentation from a boring one? Two factors which are content and design. While your speech might be perfect, the images you show in the presentation can greatly add or detract from the message you are trying to deliver. Here are some effective factors you should keep in mind to make an awesome presentation.
• Don’t use stock template: Never use the stock themes that is included in the software you are using. Stock templates are boring, quite ugly and overused. No one likes looking at the same template again and again. Try to create cleaner presentations by getting started with a clean presentation and building it from there.
• No text-heavy slides: Putting too much information in a slide will not only undermine its purpose, but it will also confuse your audience. Remember that the audience has to listen to everything you say and view the slides at the same time. So always make sure that your slides aren’t too text-heavy. It is not recommended to use more than six lines of text on a single slide.
• Say no to bullet points: There are too many presentations which are filled with bullet points. Keep in mind that no one is going to remember the bullet points you are putting in your presentation. However, they will remember your presentation if the slides are compelling. Try to use each slide for building your case and telling your story. Take each slide to share one idea of yours.
• Use good fonts: While you have the liberty to use whatever font you like for a slide title, it is better to stick to clean, traditional typefaces such as Helvetica for the body text. However, if you think it will look good, then you can use a creative font in the body text as well.
• Size fonts properly: most of the time you design your presentation on your laptop, but the final presentation is shown on a huge screen. So while sizing your fonts, remember that the texts in the presentation should be big enough to read easily by the person who is sitting in the back of the room.
• Contrast: Always maintain a strong contrast between the background and the text in your presentation. For your massage to be eye catchy, there should be a high degree of contrast between the text and the background. If the background image has a lot of variation, some portion of your text might not be readable. In such cases, use of a color bar behind the text will make it legible while making it visually interesting at the same time.
• Use big images: Pictures say a thousand words. Using striking, bold images in your presentation will surely make it aesthetically more appealing. It will catch the attention of your audiences, and it can even make the message you want to deliver more powerful.
In the end, it is up to you to change the way you present the information and it is in your power to make it interesting for the listeners.
