best practices for acing your next presentation design
Offering presentation design services (or PowerPoint design) as one of our key service pillars, we know how tricky it can be to be equal parts entertaining and informative!
It’s the content that carries the presentation, right? Well, in the eyes of presentation designers, it’s a little more complicated than that. Think about it: If your presentation fails to keep your audience engaged, your content is less easily internalised.
Whether you’re pitching for important investors, presenting at a conference, or sharing important updates and new marketing strategies with your internal team, presentation design matters. Having a few best practices up your sleeve to visually optimise your future presentations is a valuable skill not only for designers, but marketers and business professionals alike.
The name of the game in PowerPoint slide design is to find a balance between keeping the attention of your audience, whilst not distracting them from your key message.
Let’s discuss a few best practices for designing presentations that keep this goal in mind.
1. align your presentation with your brand tone of voice
As people, we all have different personalities. We think differently, speak differently, and often present ideas differently. The same goes for companies and brands. In order to set yourself apart from your competitors and stand out above the noise, you have to develop your own distinct tone of voice that is aligned with what you want your audience to perceive your brand.
Is your brand personality or tone of voice fun and humorous? More formal and factual? When designing a PowerPoint presentation, it’s important to maintain your chosen tone of voice throughout. By doing this, you:
stand out as a company
are more memorable
maintain a unified feeling about your brand that encourages your audience to trust you
**Keep in mind that while it’s great to inject your presentation with your brand tone of voice, it’s important to make sure your content remains easily readable and comprehendible.
2. use visual aids to encourage engagement
In the lizard lounge, we often call upon the amazing fact that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. They do say a picture is worth a thousand words, right?
When you incorporate visual aids into your presentation, you can increase your audience’s understanding of your content, create engagement, and promote memorability. Visual aids can also make you come across as more credible, as the most popular form of visuals are often data visualisations or case studies.
Some important things to keep in mind when adding visual aids to a presentation design are:
avoid cluttering
try to keep to one message per visual aid
visual aids must the highest quality possible
remember to have a technical run-through to make sure all your visual aids work as intended
3. choose colours and fonts carefully
Colour can be like magic in a presentation—-when used correctly and responsibly. There’s a fine line between piquing someone’s interest and wowing them with colour, and bombarding them with eye-straining shades that look cluttered and unprofessional. When used sparingly, you can use colour in your presentations to evoke certain desired emotions, and improve memorability by highlighting facts or information you want your audience to focus on.
The same goes for fonts. When designing PowerPoint slides, pick your font and stick to it. Even better—-try to use the same font you use across all your other external communications like your website, pitch deck etc. In some cases, you might be able to get away with two different fonts, but only if they match one another really well.
**Keep in mind that if your chosen font is a custom font, it might not be available on all computers, and could throw off your presentation if you’re not presenting on your local device.
4. invest in premade templates
While it’s not exactly a best practice in the traditional sense, investing in bespoke templates tailored to your business or brand can help you save a lot of time and effort when preparing for future talks, in addition to maintaining a certain consistency across all your presentations as a whole.
With bespoke templates, you can easily swap information in and out without having to start the whole design process from scratch. You’ll also never have to worry about not coming across as sleek and professional. One of the biggest advantages of investing in premade templates, is the ability to make them as branded as possible—and that way your audience always knows who they’re listening to.
check out an animated presentation we made for our clients at Milwaukee:
at a glance
Optimising your presentation with a distinct tone of voice, visual aids, colours and fonts will increase engagement, boost memorability and engage your audience more.
Make sure the content in your presentation design remains readable and coherent.
Avoid using fonts that might not be available on devices other than your own.
Avoid cluttering your visuals, and conveying more than one message per visual.
not sure how to embark on your own animation journey?
we’ve got you covered!