What’s Important in Presentation Design?
06.02.10
I have watched videos and looked at the websites regarding presentation design and have found some important factors that make for a successful and hopefully entertaining presentation:
- Use lots of photos. The use of photos, particularly strange or interesting ones, can really engage an audience and get them thinking. A great photo can be a good opening to a presentation, or can set the tone of the entire presentation. Also, photos are much more visually stimulating that filling slides with text.
- Keep text and bullet-points to a minimum. There is no point to filling a slide with words from a text book or filling it with the exact words that are coming out of the presenter’s mouth. The audience does not want to read all of the text, especially if it is small or in a color/font that is difficult to see. Also, the audience does not want to be read to. It is better to keep text to a minimum, and use more interesting things such as pictures or video on the slides.
- Set a limit. People can only focus on so much at a given time, so keep the information on each slide simple. Do not try to overload the presentation with too much information. Also, make a change every few minutes to keep the audience engaged. Maybe start with a story, then move to slides with images and text, then after a few minutes, switch to an interactive activity or a video. A presentation that has identical slides and the presentation talking on and on will probably not be interesting to the audience and much of the material will probably not be absorbed.
Clearly, there are several ways presentations can be made better by design, but these are just some of the main ideas I got from the sources that were suggested.