Want to brief your team about something? Or get funding? Or inform customers about the new app launch?
Presentation is a great way of communicating. If prepared and delivered well, presentations can open new doors to opportunities for your business, taking it to new heights.
So, are you wondering what makes for a good presentation?
Is it compelling content, a powerful orator, thoughtful designs, or something else? Well, these are the basics, but you need more. A great presentation inspires action, it educates and entertains, and is easy to understand.
Over time, technology has evolved, and presenters need to follow new trends. Nowadays, you can see modern designs and presentation tools that didn't exist a few years ago.
So, what are the best presentation practices that you should keep in mind
Read on to find out!
Best Practices to Follow for an Impactful Presentation
1. Use Technology Appropriately
Leveraging technology is one of the fastest, most effective ways to enhance your audience’s experience and engagement.
There are many ways to create an immersive and captivating environment. Some examples include multimedia content, polls, quizzes, live demonstrations, handouts, and background music.
2. Go for Bold Opening Slides
Your opening slide will set the tone for your entire presentation. You can use the slide to pique the curiosity of the audience immediately. Using attractive visuals and intriguing headlines will do this for you.
Go for contrasting colors, images without text and thought-provoking questions for appealing
opening slides.
3. Use Analogies for Easier Explanations
Intelligence is not demonstrated by presenting your content in a complicated manner. It involves simplifying complicated data so it's easily understood, and memorable too.
Analogies help simplify the data. For example, creating a PowerPoint slide is like baking a cake.
A cake needs -
- Proper ingredients in the correct proportion
- Timely baking at the right temperature and time
- Aesthetic look with frosting and decoration
Similarly, a presentation needs-
- The right content in the proper sequence
- Time and pace should be right
- Visually appealing graphics and animations
4. Unique and Stylish Typography
Your font choice is not just an aesthetic choice. Ornate, complicated, illegible, and distracting fonts will actually backfire. Also, for brand integrity, try giving precedence to brand fonts over what’s trending.
For title slide, you can go for artistic designs like intertwining letters, unique letter shapes and sizes, custom fonts, etc. But for body text you need simpler subtle serifs.
Also, if you don’t have a lot of images, use colorful text blocks to show information in a fun way. You can use your brand color palette for that. But, be mindful of contrast to keep the text legible.
5. Changing Trends
According to research conducted by HBR (Harvard Business Review), cited by
Forbes, PowerPoint is not an effective presentation tool. This considers two areas: enhancing information transfer to your audience and improving people’s perception of your brand. This research also concluded that Prezi’s ZUI presentations were more effective, persuasive, engaging, and organized.
Nowadays, dark theme presentations are back because they convey certainty, a sense of security, and professionalism. This trend exploded in 2019 and continues today.
The Salesforce Analytics team conducted a survey on how people respond to charts of different color combinations. They found that charts with dark themes helped users make decisions accurately and faster. (citation:
Invision)
In a nutshell, unconventional presentations are becoming more popular. So, rather than following all the traditional rules, it is wise to incorporate out-of-the-box thinking when designing your slides.
6. Minimalism
Modern minimalism is on the rise for presentations as well. Use of white space will make your presentation look modern, professional, and easily digestible.
Minimal designs like Neumorphism impact the user interface greatly, giving design elements a real-life feel.
- Keep a balance of visuals and texts.
- Go for unique AI-powered custom presentation images and graphics.
- Use one idea per slide with only the most relevant information.
- Use hand-drawn illustrations or doodle to add fun and a more human and friendly touch to your slide deck.
- Unusual abstract elements help to keep the viewer’s focus and are good for adding unconventionality.
7. Big Backgrounds and Bold Colors
Bigger backgrounds create more impact, and you can use big flowing shapes images as background on each slide. Other options include geometric shapes, 3D patterns and animations, creative infographics, vector graphics and asymmetric layouts.
When it comes to colors, upcoming trends are a combination of retro and bold colors like the vibrant viva magenta, dark mode with neon, all-gray, etc. You can go for bolder hues in your custom theme palette to highlight key metrics or use colors in combinations that are attention-grabbing.
That being said, muted colors and pastels are also perfect for pitch decks. Experiment with a monochrome color scheme to include distinct hues and tints like misty jade, mint green, cool pink, bluebird, etc.
8. Animated Slideshows
The use of self-evident visual presentations is on the rise. Slideshows are self-explanatory and don’t need a speaker to explain the content on the slides. Viewers get to swipe or scroll at their own pace and move ahead comfortably as a result.
One of the ways in which you can
engage your audience is by creating animated social slides. You can also go for animated transitions and eye catching images (often over text).
9. Motion Graphics
Along with AI-powered graphics, motion graphics, too, are gaining traction. There are many new techniques you can use in your slides. These include kinetic transitions, animating diagrams, expanding texts, hovering states and animated GIFs.
New visuals and techniques are bound to add more fun and life to your
presentation slides.
10. A World of Hashtags
Social media brought on a new trend with its rise - the era of hashtags. Hashtags, when used correctly, can help you persuade people to share your event on their social media, have an online conversation, and even review tagged comments.
So it's a good idea to have your hashtag created for the presentation and share it with everyone.
11. Use the CRAP Principle
Make use of the CRAP principle. This isn't rude! It's an acronym for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.
Let’s find out the details.
- Contrast – Makes things stand out. You can use it in three ways – manipulating space (near and far, empty, or utilized), colors (dark/light and cool/warm), and typography (bold or narrow).
- Repetition – Repetition will help give a coherent and consistent look to your presentation. This will make scanning the content easy and quick. For instance, you can use the same color for titles and subtitles.
- Alignment – Alignment again makes things easy to scan and read by grouping and aligning related elements with one another. Newspapers make proper use of this principle.
- Proximity – Proximity helps you convey the relation and associations of elements with each other. You can place related items together to show proximity, i.e. the closer they are on the page, the more associated they are with each other.
Summing It Up
Being aware of the latest best practices is imperative to stay on top of the presentation game.
While there are a lot of current trends, it is wise to be mindful of your company's strategy and pick suitable options.
Presentations are subjective, and your choices will depend upon the audience and the content as well.
However, it can feels burdensome to keep updated with the latest trends and build your presentation design from scratch. If this is the case, you can use high-quality, expert-designed editable PowerPoint templates to save yourself a great deal of time, and ensure total consistency in your work.
