Designing Effective Presentations that Stand Out

Tyler Kurz -

People love to hate slide "decks". Can you blame them? There are plenty of lousy presentations with bad clip art, poor font choices, too much text, and distracting animation. It doesn't have to be this way.

Presentation Design Building Blocks

A good presentation starts by following three simple rules: the cardinal rule, the 10-minute rule, and the rule of three.

The Cardinal Rule

The most important rule to follow is that content is king. Spend most of your time building great content. Edward R. Tufte, the data visualization pioneer, once said, "design cannot rescue failed content."

The 10-Minute Rule

In his New York Times bestselling book Brain Rules, author Dr. John Medina states, "audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion".

The Rule of Three

Your audience can recall information better when you present your content in groups of three. On The Team W's behavioral science blog, psychologist Susan Weinschenk notes that "researchers working in the field of decision-making tell us that people can't effectively choose between more than 3 to 4 items at a time."

Design Process and Structure

I have found that the following design process works best for me through lots of trial and error.

Understand Your Audience

Your objective is to maximize the value for your audience. Try to understand your audience member's perspectives and personalities.

From the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Communication, "Audience analysis involves identifying the audience and adapting a speech to their interests, level of understanding, attitudes, and beliefs. Taking an audience-centered approach is important because a speaker's effectiveness will be improved if the presentation is created and delivered in an appropriate manner."

Slide 10 in the embedded presentation has an audience analysis checklist to use if you are stuck.

Build a Narrative

Visualize what you want to say and write it down. Every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Define your structure.

Communications expert Nancy Duarte states, "The most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved. That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently — to move from what is to what could be. And by following Aristotle's three-part story structure (beginning, middle, end), they create a message that's easy to digest, remember, and retell."

Storyboarding

Spend a large portion of time sketching out your slide designs on paper first. I use a notebook dedicated to presentation storyboarding. By spending more time at this step in the process, you save a significant amount of time when you start creating your slides.

Explore the best way to communicate your message on each slide, and pay attention to the flow from one slide to the next.

Slide Design Fundamentals

Using Color

  • Do not use more than 2-3 colors
  • Use different shades of the same color
  • Eyes prefer black or dark grey text on white or off-white backgrounds
  • Avoid high contrast backgrounds and images
  • Remember the cardinal rule; the content should shine, not the colors
  • I like to pick one primary color, one accent color, and a grey

Choosing Fonts

Best summed up in Butterick's Practical Typography,

Typography matters because it helps conserve the most valuable resource you have as a writer—reader attention... good typography can help your reader devote less attention to the mechanics of reading and more attention to your message. Conversely, bad typography can distract your reader and undermine your message.

Font pairings should complement each other. I would recommend pairing a sans serif and a serif for paragraphs of text.

This site uses Merriweather Sans (sans serif) and Merriweather (serif). When in doubt, stay within the same typeface family and use different weights and styles within the same family.

Slide Flow

  • How you structure your slides is important
  • The flow of your slide tells your audience's eyes where to go and focus
  • Generally, you want your flow to be left to right or up to down
  • Steer clear of flashy shapes and convoluted diagrams
  • Make sure you draw attention to the most important content
  • Learn how to use whitespace properly

Using Data Visualizations

  • Please keep it simple!
  • Learn the basics (fonts, colors, design, chart type selection, depth of analysis)
  • Ask yourself, do I have the correct data?
  • Remember garbage in equals garbage out when choosing the right data
  • Horizontal bar charts are often the best choice; pie charts not so much
  • Let the data speak for itself, don't mess around with the axis

Images & Icons

  • Never use clip art
  • Stick to illustrations and images that complement your content
  • If it doesn't fit your presentation style and brand, don't use it
  • Icons are a great way to compliment your content without taking up space
  • Check out the list of free / premium sources at the end of this post
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration.
~ Jeffrey Zeldman

A Quick Note on Delivery

  • Your slides look great and tell a compelling story. It's time to present
  • Good delivery takes practice, practice, and more practice
  • Consider writing out your speech and recording yourself
  • Turn nerves into positive energy
  • Make eye contact, smile, and use positive body language
  • Make sure you pause throughout your presentation; it's impactful

My Go-to Resources

Places to find inspiration:
Envato Market, Dribble, and Behance

Software I use:
PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva

Where I get my icons:
flaticon, ICONS8

Illustrations
free illustrations, unDraw

Best images:
Unsplash

Mock-ups:
Placeit, Canva

Font Resources:
Typewolf, Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, Butterick's Practical Typography