Every presentation is unique – your content, story, and brand all require special consideration to make sure you are reaching your audience as effectively as possible.
But even though they are all different, most slides face some of the same key challenges: too much text, cluttered and distracting layouts, and unprofessional design choices.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a PowerPoint expert to take your slides from average to amazing. With this simple one-page guide to better PowerPoint presentations, you can correct the toughest mistakes with some simple changes. That means major results in a small amount of time!
3 things a great slide needs
Let’s start with what you need to make your slides effective. Regardless of the content, considering these 3 areas will help strengthen your message and engage your audience.
Slide Essential 1: A clear focus
The core focus of PowerPoint is to break ideas down into smaller chunks (or slides). This is what makes a PowerPoint presentation different from a lecture or speech, where you are simply talking through a longer piece of content.
With that in mind, you should think about each slide as both a self-contained moment, as well as part of a larger story. For now, we want to focus on that single moment.
Each slide should have a single main idea, something that is clear to your audience and easy to remember. That doesn’t mean your content needs to be simple, it just means that you need to identify the main takeaway that you want them to have when you are done.
To identify the focus of your slide, just ask yourself some simple questions:
What am I really trying to say in this slide?
Is it clear at a glance what my message is?
Slide Essential 2: A strong visual hierarchy
This next tip is directly related to the first one. A visual hierarchy helps to support your content by making it clear to the audience what the main point is, where they should focus, and what order the eye should follow.
You can establish your hierarchy through font size and emphasis (bigger and smaller, bold and regular, etc), placement on the page, or really anything that prioritizes one piece of content before another. This will really depend on your template, your content, and your level of design skill.
To test whether you have a visual hierarchy established, here is a simple test:
Grab a coworker, and show them your slide for 5 seconds. Then, ask if they know what the main point is. If there’s any uncertainty, you need to keep refining.
Slide Essential 3: Consistent design
While we believe that a considered design can work wonders for a presentation, what matters more than fancy designs and complex animations is just making sure everything is clean, aligned, and consistent.
For example, if you have images that aren’t aligned to each other, or text boxes that overlap, not only are you creating visual chaos, but you’re also making it harder to establish the key message and visual hierarchy we mentioned above.
To help you with cleaning up your layout, PowerPoint has a few easy ways to easily align your slides.
You can choose a text alignment in your toolbar. Under the Arrange tool, you can select Align > Distribute to choose a variety of positions
You can also go to View > Grid and Guides > Smart Guides to see alignment when you select an object, or turn them on from the same menu to see them all the time, depending on your preference
3 presentation fails to avoid at all costs!
Now that you have a sense of what your slides need to be their best, let’s look at a few of the things you should avoid to stop your slides from getting in the way of all those big improvements you just made.
Slide Fail 1: Too much text
Everyone has seen this problem in action: a slide pops on screen, and every inch is covered in text. Big type, little type, bullet points, smart art, tables, highlights, bold, italics, and more, all crammed into one small rectangle. Sure, there is probably someone who thinks that all this stuff is important. But if you are in the audience, you have no idea if it is or not because you can’t really read anything at all. This is a presentation (and story) killer.
There are two easy questions to help resolve this:
Ask yourself “how much of this do I really NEED to have on this slide?” In our experience, most slides could remove 50% of the content without losing the message. Give it a try and see for yourself!
Ask yourself if it all needs to be on one slide. It’s very common for people to say “I want to make this presentation tight, so let’s keep it to 10 slides.” The reality is that more slides doesn’t have to mean more time, and breaking up a dense slide into two can help you focus your message.
Slide Fail 2: Too many fonts and colors
If your slide features different fonts for titles, body copy, and call outs, or if you have 5 different colors all screaming at the audience from across your slide, you’re more likely to give someone a headache than inspire them to act.
Once again, the answer is to simplify. Here are some simple rules to get you to a cleaner, more approachable layout:
Stick to two fonts at max!
Use color intentionally – in other words, don’t just add visual flair, make sure each use of color has a purpose, like emphasizing an idea or creating contrast. Speaking of contrast, it’s also a good idea to make sure your slides are accessible to all audience members. PowerPoint has built-in tools to help – check out this article for more.
Slide Fail 3: Too many visuals
PowerPoint slides are powerful visual tools, but too much visual noise can drown out even the most meaningful message. If you have icons, photos, Clip Art, shapes and more all crowded onto a slide, you are likely to lose even the most interested audience members.
So instead of trying to engage them with endless visuals, make sure that every image is working to support the main message on your slide. Choose photos that support your ideas, color blocks that highlight text, or simply remove icons or other decorative elements that aren’t really adding anything (or that aren’t acting as a replacement for some text that you removed after Slide Fail 1).
The One-Page Guide to Better PowerPoint Presentations
If that seems like a lot to remember, we’ve got yet another simple solution: Just print out this simple checklist and you’ll have a reminder to follow along with each time you start working on a presentation.
The Good
Do my slides have a clear focus?
Do they have a strong visual hierarchy
Is there a consistent design?
The Bad
Is there too much text?
Are there more than 2 fonts or 3 colors?
Did I remove any unnecessary visuals?
The Test
Give someone 5 seconds to see your slide
Ask if they can spot the main takeaway
If not, go back through the checklist
That’s all it takes to make great slides!
You don’t need art skills or design experience to create engaging slides (though sometimes it helps). If you’re intimidated by going under the hood with your slides, or just aren’t sure where to start, try applying this checklist and seeing the results.
To see what these principles can do with real-world slides, view our slide transformation portfolio.
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About the author
Kyle Kartz is the Creative Director of Storytelling at VerdanaBold. He is an expert copywriter and strategist, with experience driving major campaigns for global brands in multiple industries. He is passionate about communications, the outdoors, and cooking.