5 Tips for an Effective Presentation

Delivering a PowerPoint presentation is not mere reading from slides, it is like an art form that requires proper planning and preparation so that the story is brought out clearly. People have ideas but they generally lack expressing them over PowerPoint and hence the storyline goes missing, this, in turn, leads to an uninterested audience.

We are aware that content plays a pivotal role in a presentation but the design is what makes the presentation speak for itself and give professionalism to the storyboard. In this article, we will point 5 common mistakes in the slide design that one can avoid and become an effective presenter. 

1. Clean slides

PowerPoint presentation should not contain all the information. All the micro details should be left out for the presenter to convey ideas. This will make the audience engaged and interested in listening to the details as well as it will not clutter the slide with too much information. 

Too many data points in a PowerPoint template generally make the audience confused to go through the content or listen to the presenter, thus leaving an uninterested audience. Instead, use bullet points or pictures to convey your message, but make sure not more than 5 bullet points are covered in a single slide

2. No Animations, slide transitions

Animations or slide transitions are nothing but tools of confusion, they take the audience’s focus out of the message and shift it into unnecessary drama. So do not overcomplicate your deck, if you are persistent to use transitions make sure to use something simple like fade-in/fade-out, rather than disappearing squares or changing colors

3. Single color scheme and font

The biggest mistake that can make your presentation look unprofessional is the use of different fonts across the complete presentation and not having a single-color scheme. So, before marking it as complete make sure the headings, subheadings, and the text all follow the same font. 

Also, the use of different color schemes will fade away the cohesiveness of the entire deck and the flow of storyboarding will be lost.

4. Appropriate template

We know our audience and content but the template that we chose has synchronized with content? Make sure that the template is relevant to the theme of the presentation, for instance, a formal business deck should not be having balloons in the background. 

These days it is much simpler to get hold of an appropriate template, websites like SketchBubble hosts pre-designed PowerPoint templates for numerous categories like Business, Marketing, Health, Environment, Strategy, Management, etc. These pre-loaded templates come in very handy even to take care of fonts, color schemes, charts, graphs, graphics, content-appropriate infographics, etc. to give a proper visualization of the presentation story. If you do not have time to edit the slides yourself, you can also get the professional presentation designed from freelance market places Fiverr or Upwork.

5. Clean Graphics

Well, not everyone is versed with photoshop or can afford a designer, but the least we can do is avoid some common mistakes while adding an image. The most important being, adding an image with white background over a black background slide or any other color slide. Also, never keep cropped, stretched, crushed, and/or watermarked image, it is always better to have no image at all than having a distorted one.

Understanding such common mistakes will provide you reasoning for ineffective presentations. Hope the tips that we have shared will help you avoid such common mistakes and assist in having a better understanding of an effective PowerPoint presentation.