What Is Presentation Design?
What could be better than a presentation, especially when showing data, research results, or brainstorming? A set of slides, perfectly aligned like chain mail links, helps your ideas look solid. Indeed, you can quickly find and put together the required information, but what about the nuances that seem not obvious at first glance? So what is presentation design, and why is it important to you? So let's start with the essential details.
Presentation Design: Its Definition and Importance
Surely you already guess that presentation design is a combination of certain elements. For example, you should consider text optimization, font selection, color, and background selection. Other design elements are icons and figures. In other words, combining visual and textual elements forms the basis for the overall design.
As you can see, now you know more about the basic terminology and are unlikely to ask questions like, "What is presentation design?" But why is proper structuring of slides and visual information so important? The fact is that there are many types of presentations. Each is aimed at a specific type of audience and ultimate goals. So let's look at a couple of presentation graphic design examples to understand the essence of design activities.
Educational Presentations
Imagine that you are a student and need to create a report, present a scientific idea or support your hypothesis. In this case, you should craft design presentation slides like a pro. For example, add your research data, emphasize the importance of each fact, and highlight where people should focus on what stands out. In other words, the design gives you a chance to grab people's attention.
Investor Pitch Decks
Imagine that you are creating a presentation for investors, showing annual growth, the success of a new team, or the prospects for expanding your business. How to design a presentation to keep your management happy with your work? Surely you should work on visual elements and provide concisely formed information. Investors and top managers don't have time for hour-long lectures, so your slides must be highly informative. At the same time, good design should make them as light as a feather, so people don't have to spend much time researching each line.
Webinar Presentations
Such presentations are essential for lead generation or informing your audience about some crucial aspects. So this is where presentation graphic design matters, as you need to motivate people to take a certain action. For example, suppose the slides are interesting enough and easy to understand. Then your audience will willingly take any action.
Sales Presentations
Not everyone knows the answer to questions like, "How to design a presentation to boost sales?" However, the answer is somewhere nearby. Do not forget that this presentation aims to present products and services and motivate people to take certain actions. In this case, the design allows you to launch verbal and non-verbal triggers to encourage people to buy. Pick the right visuals and slogans, and you'll see things get better.
Report Presentations
Imagine that you are the head of a department and your boss asks you to prepare a report on the company's progress. To get started, you should find presentation design inspiration ideas. Don't forget that you must add tables, graphs, charts, and other graphic elements to let your boss know all about the company's success. You can achieve the desired results by balancing data, graphics, and text.
Keynote Presentations
What if you need to prepare a speech and craft slides? Your keynote presentation is like a springboard for capturing your ideas and transitioning between you and your audience. Stick to design presentation basics since each slide should contain only a part of the information you want to convey to the audience. Your goal is to form a thought base and avoid heavy slides with paragraphs of text. So this is where good design avoids failure.
Presentation Design Tips for Beginners
Nothing is better than analyzing a few good ideas before crafting your presentation. Perhaps you will find the right ideas to start and avoid common mistakes. Here are tips to help you craft your slides better.
1. Use No More Than 6 Lines of Text
You don't need to add a wall of text to every slide because it will look weird. Instead, add up to six lines to emphasize any fact or information. First, you are unlikely to read all the information from the slides. Secondly, the final audience will be able to focus on the most important aspects you want to highlight. As you can see, these design tips for presentations help grab people's attention without piling up tons of text on your slides.
2. Stick to 2-3 Fonts and Colors
Now let's talk about your presentation's typography and color scheme. Usually, young users tend to use dozens of fonts and colors when it comes to crafting slides. But this strategy is not the right one, as you will blur your audience's attention and make your slides uncomfortable to read. So, choose one font for your headers and another for your body copy. Use one or two main colors throughout, then throw in an accent color for good measure. And don't forget that your color combinations must match! Don't ignore presentation design tips like this if you want your work to be worth it.
3. Pay Attention to Visual Hierarchy
Usually, beginners ask, "How to make slides look good?" There are dozens of answers, but the most important one concerns visual hierarchy. In other words, this means that the order someone reads info on your slide should be obvious. Use font size, color, or weight to structure information and give your audience a clear signal to build a hierarchical chain. This trick will allow you to emphasize certain parts of the slides to make your presentation look more informative.
4. Take Advantage of Powerful Visuals
You probably need presentation design inspiration ideas to figure out how to craft your slides. Look at good samples, and you will see one common pattern: an engaging presentation takes advantage of visual elements. So you should add videos, photos, illustrations, icons, and even charts to make your presentation look perfect. Sometimes text isn't enough to convey your ideas, so you must take care of the visuals. Your slide should tell a story, not create logical barriers for your audience.
Final Words
As you can see, slide design is critical, especially if you need to convey any information to your audience. Memorize all the ideas and facts above, and you can stand out from the crowd. Either way, you'll have more ideas to start slide crafting, so don't waste your time!
