Designing effective presentation slides

The purpose of a presentation is to convince your audience of your research, point of view or business idea. You want to convey information as clearly as possible to your audience. Designing a good PowerPoint presentation with various slides is important, as they support your goal of convincing the audience. Designing effective presentation slides is the basis of this goal. A slide is effective if it allows the viewer to draw their own conclusion but one that is based on what you show and tell them. Therefore, it is important that you design your slides so that it connects with your audience, so make sure you research carefully who you have sitting in front of you.

In addition, you should carefully consider what you want to achieve with the presentation. The goal of a presentation is to force a certain change, but what change is that?

The first impression

So designing effective presentation slides is related to the aspects mentioned above. A slide must be convincing, which is the most important thing. A first impression of the slide is essential. Through the first impression, people make an image of the person in front of them, and following, an image of her or his possible ideas. A creative PowerPoint can help you create a good first impression. It grabs the audience’s attention, making them keep looking. What is also very important for the first impression is that it looks neat and tidy. When there are some spelling mistakes or blurred pictures in the slide it gives a bad impression to the audience, this makes the audience doubt your content as an expert. So you want to avoid this at all costs when trying to design a good PowerPoint presentation.

Avoid losing attention

What you want to avoid at all times while giving a presentation is losing the audience’s attention. Designing a good PowerPoint presentation can help you with this. By not overloading your slide with chunks of text and lots of pictures, you prevent people from dropping out. If there is too much to see, the audience will not know where to look and will lose attention. 

Create calmness

The purpose of your creative PowerPoint is to convince your audience in order to force a change. Designing effective presentation slides can help you achieve this goal. When the audience experiences calmness after looking at a slide in the presentation, the slide and the story around it are more likely to be effective and force change. Ensuring that there are points of recognition in the slides creates calmness for the viewer. This includes making sure the slides have the same font and style of icons and images. If this is always different for each slide it can cause irritation for the viewer. Another point to watch out for when designing effective presentation slides is that too much text is also distracting and chaotic. So make sure the slide is not full of text, but use, for example, the 5/5/5 principle. This means that each slide may contain 5 lines of text with a maximum of 5 words in each line. Do this for a maximum of 5 consecutive slides. Then, for variety, it is good to make a slide without text, this also creates calmness in the audience.

With this information, you can start with designing effective presentation slides to convince your audience of your message.

Our content slide design service helps define what is truly important in your content slide design to minimise text and maximise readability. Check out the link for more information!