A guide to designing a professional presentation

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Have you ever felt something seemed a bit off when delivering a PowerPoint presentation? If you are unfamiliar with the basics of PowerPoint, making a slide presentation might be difficult. A poorly planned powerpoint presentation may cause confusion, boredom, or even annoyance. 

Concentrating for any length of time during a presentation can take time and effort. Without engagement, you’ll lose the crowd. In the meantime, they’ll fiddle with their phones and chat with others in the room. If this happens, you might be concerned, and the audience might prefer another venue.

Direct communication is the key to engaging a larger audience. Here are some suggestions to make your presentation more interesting:

Adding a Professional Aspect to Your Presentation

  • Avoid reading the presentation slide by slide.

You’ll lose your audience’s interest if you give too much information. Include your essential points, keywords, and talking points in the slide show text. You shouldn’t only read your slides out loud if your audience can read and hear them. Listening and speaking actively during a verbal presentation is better than reading aloud. A spoken word is more concise, informal, and direct than a written word. By reading text, you ruin a presentation.

  • Consider who you are speaking to.

Is your presentation going to be attended by coworkers? Amusing effects and comic clipart can look unprofessional around coworkers. If you misuse humor, your audience might think you don’t know what you’re talking about. Make sure you know your audience to adjust your presentation accordingly.

  • Size of the font matters

It can be challenging to choose the right size font. On the one hand, your audience must be able to read anything you put on the screen. On the other hand, you don’t want your text to take up too much space on your slide. You can be sure that your writing will always be readable with a minimum size of 20 points for the header and 18 points for the body. You can do the same with tablets, TVs, laptops, computers, and beamers.

  • Avoid overloading the presentation with animations.

When you watch every word zoom across the screen in a presentation, it’s painful. Consider whether it would be just as compelling without effects like these. Does it obtrusively delay information? If this question is answered with a yes or maybe, leave out the impact.

  • Don’t use animations all the time.

You don’t have to ignore animations and other effects entirely. If used judiciously, subtle effects and animations can enhance your presentation. Show the bullet points as you speak rather than showing them ahead of time.

These tips will help you deliver a professional presentation next time.

Three PowerPoint presentation ideas for professionals.

  • Enhance large pictures

You can use images as placeholders in PowerPoint presentations. The majority of these placeholders are relatively small. They let you add text next to your photos, but they can also reduce their impact. If you have any essential pictures, ensure they fill up the entire slide. These slides will not have much text, but the correct view may still be helpful to highlight a critical point.

A word of caution: This is only effective if your photos are sufficiently large. Their resolution, or number of pixels, must match your monitor’s full quality. Otherwise, the images could appear distorted.

  • Create creative fonts.

You may be familiar with the theme fonts for PowerPoint templates. You will need more than one typeface to make your presentations seem professional. Headers and titles use one typeface, while bullet points and paragraphs use another. The standard font combinations, however, are pretty dull.

  • Create a palette of colors.

Pre-made color schemes are included in the PowerPoint template. Many color combinations available online are dull, like the typeface combinations. You can also duplicate the color scheme of an advertisement or illustration, but be careful not to use more than two or three primary colors. SlideUpLift has many great contemporary colour schemes. As with these business powerpoint templates you can customize theme colors as well.

To Sum Up

Making an impact starts with engaging your audience. Your presentation should pique their curiosity, entice them, and capture their attention.

Your presentation delivery should establish a connection with your audience so they can understand your presentation’s professionalism. Additionally, make sure there is enough time for questions and discussion.

You’ll leave a lasting impression when you make eye contact with your audience, use body language, speak clearly, and demonstrate energy.

Creating a PowerPoint presentation masterpiece requires knowledge, practice, and persistence. To avoid repeating your mistakes, start with a template. Pre-made Google Slides Themes and PowerPoint templates can help you if you’re short on time.