In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to design and prepare the content for maximum effectiveness. Note that in this tutorial I don’t go through how to give a presentation, I’m showing you who to design your presentation. Ok, after we made this clear let’s start!

Introduction Slide

Your first slide of your presentation should always be about yourself, or your group. State clearly with big and bold letters your name, subject of your presentation and with smaller letters the year, course/company and contact details. Include nothing more on the first slide. It should be all about typography, use fancy letters, smart positioning, and font styling in a smart way.

Useful links:

http://ilovetypography.com/2008/02/28/a-guide-to-web-typography/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/05/20/the-showcase-of-big-typography-second-edition/

Background

Your presentation’s background should be meaningful but subtle, making the text over it, easy to read. You can’t be doing a presentation on human anatomy for example and have a seascape as a background! Your design should be fresh, trendy and attractive. If you can’t think of anything, a simple white background, would most of the times do the job, especially if you are utterly bored to make an awesome presentation design, like me now! Your choice of colours is also very important. If you don’t know about colours, check out the links below.

Useful links:

http://www.slideshare.net/egiaccardi/the-art-of-colors

http://www.worqx.com/color/combinations.htm

http://www.colormatters.com/colortheory.html

Less is more

One of the most important, don’t overwhelm the listener with information. You’ll only create confusion amongst them! Structure each presentation slides clearly, with headings, sub headings and bullet points. On every slide, footer should also be included with the author and the slide number (for example: “Slide 10/20”). Remember, your presentation slides are only a summary of the topics you are talking about, don’t allow the listener to read too much from your slides.

Increase the anticipation

Don’t just click through the next slide, revealing all the information you’re going to talk about, because people tend to go over whole set of information and don’t follow your pace. Instead, reveal only the point which you are presenting having the next ones hidden. To do so,

create a new text box. Paste the information in. Select the text box and add an effect, an animation. Make sure that you have the text box animation happening when you click your mouse. This is the first block of text that will be appearing when you click the mouse. Create a new text box and paste the second block of information in, and follow the same routine as with the previous one.

Engage with the audience

Presentations are all about how you present information. To make the presentation more interesting for the listener, ask a question, state a fact, a “did you know?”, ask to solve a small and quick mind puzzle and so on! This will differentiate you from the others and place you above them, making your presentation a memorable one.

Make a rich content presentation

People are visual creatures! Make sure you create a visual presentation which supports the information you present. Have a rich content presentation with images, videos, animation etc. Make sure you have sound available, it’s better to prior ask about the facilities, and be aware of different video formats. A good place to convert video for free in any format is Mediaconverter.

Make use of these tips when creating your slides and with good preparation and a clear, straight-to-the-point presentation of information you’ll make your audience have a unique experience that will place you over the competition.

Do you have any other tips to share with us? If yes, post them below in the comments section!

As a bonus I created a quick 2min presentation to see what I’m talking about. Download the source files.

Download the source file used in this tutorial: DOWNLOAD SOURCE FILES