How to Design a Professional Presentation

It is important that your PowerPoint presentations be designed well. Great presentation design improves the presentation and supports it, while a bad design draws away from the points and ideas that you want to get across. Let’s take a look at a few tips on how to design a professional presentation.

Design Guidelines

Some basic design elements must be considered with every presentation. Those design elements are;

• Color
• Font choice
• Layout
• Special effects

In order to create a truly effective presentation, you must understand how to properly use these different design elements. Let’s take a closer view of each one.

Color

The color choice is a big part of any presentation. You should be careful when choosing the colors for the slide background, accent text, and fonts.

Colors create powerful visual messages. The wrong color choice could give the audience the wrong idea of your brand and message and cause them to misinterpret it.

Color choice also gives small businesses a chance to brand their presentation around their business. You should choose a presentation template that best matches the color and design scheme used by your business. It should fit well alongside other business items like your website, stationary, and business cards.

Font Choice

When considering fonts for the presentation, be sure to think about the font size and font type. While there are some fonts that are good for informal use, they might not be as good for professional presentations. Be sure to select fonts that can be easily read.

The size of the font is an important consideration when putting together a presentation. One frequent mistake people make when putting together a presentation is that the text is too tiny for the audience to see.

Last but not least, be careful about using different kinds of fonts in the presentation. If you want to use multiple fonts then choose fonts that go well together to avoid distractions.

Layout

The layout of a presentation refers to how the slides are arranged. The layout is related to the content of the presentation. You should know what kind of material you want to showcase before laying out the presentation.

Review what you have written down and try to envision what kind of slide should you use to present the different points. Some presenters will make thumbnails or storyboards to help with this.

Remember that the slides should be clean and straightforward without any extra fluff. You shouldn’t clutter them with information or use too many graphics. Avoid inserting too many things on one slide and using images that could draw focus away from the content. Once you know what kind of slides you need for your presentation, then you can worry about the essential design decisions.

Special Effects

Effects such as animations and transitions are great for making a presentation even better. Even so, you should be careful to avoid overusing them. Too many animations and transitions can distract from the message.

Use Presentation Templates

If you aren’t a graphic designer but still need to put together a presentation you might be worried that you’ll never make anything good.

The good news is that there are many professional PowerPoint presentation templates available that can give you the coherent, well-designed presentation you want.

Templates are a great way to quickly put together a presentation too. There are some benefits of using templates when designing a presentation;

• They save time It takes time to put together a presentation. With a template on your side, the design work has been made for you already. Generally, all you’ll have to do is put the information in.
• Professional Layouts Professional presentation templates are often made with several different slide layouts, stylish features, ready-made diagrams, and graphics that are all constructed to work well together.
• Proven Templates are often backed up by user reviews. You can witness for yourself how well these templates have worked for other people. They are also often designed and made by professionals.
• Save Money There’s no need to hire a professional designer to make a template for you when you just download a ready-made one.
• Fully Editable Most presentation templates can be easily customized by changing color schemes, adding the company logo, or performing other small edits.

One of the most common presentation mistakes we see is people not bothering to use templates or PowerPoint add-ins at all. Don’t let your presentation look inconsistent with mismatched design elements, mismatched colors, and confusing design layouts. Premium presentation templates can solve these problems for you by providing you with a unique layout with a stylish, professional design that you can put to work immediately.

Slideson

Free professional PowerPoint and Google Slides presentation templates. Boost your presentations with Slideson! Want to write for us? Become a contributor.