No matter how good a speaker you are, it is better to have a visual presentation with illustrations, graphs, or key points. Specialists, who are engaged in presentation design, speaker training, and training in PowerPoint, tell you how to do a presentation properly.
However, a visual presentation is only a part of your project. Preparing your speaking part is much more important because it depends on your success. In such a way, you can't manage without the paper writing service Writingapaper.net, which provides both writing and editing your speeches, essays, reports, and so on. From this case, you get a well-written and superior speech, which you really need for a killer presentation.
Why do you need a presentation?
The right presentation will help to persuade, teach and even sell. And it is a mistake to think that presentations are only needed at meetings or for defending a diploma.
When and who can benefit from presentations:
- Sales managers: presentations can be part of a commercial proposal when you want to sell a product or service;
- Candidates: It is a convenient way to show your portfolio when you introduce the company you want to work for;
- Teachers: it is easy to put instructions, tables, and teaching materials on slides;
- Speakers: to keep the audience's attention and explain even complex information.
Common mistakes when preparing a presentation
To begin with, let's understand exactly how you should not make presentations if you want your audience to understand you and not get bored.
The main mistakes when making presentations:
Overloading slides with text. It is impossible to listen carefully to the speaker and read from the slide at the same time. You end up either listening to the speaker and ignoring the presentation (especially if there is a lot of information on the slide) or reading from the slide and the speaker just sounds in the background like a radio.
The speaker reads the presentation. It's a common mistake that young speakers can do. They try to do a perfect presentation and push all the information on the slides, but in this case, do we really need a speaker? The presentations should contain only 20-30% of the information you speak. All the rest must be written by you, or the best essay writing service on your notes. You can check and inspire with Apple’s presentations. It’s a perfect model of representing new product, project or service.
Complicating the slides. Choose 2-3 basic colors rather than using the whole palette. A monochrome background for text often looks more dignified than a photo that doesn't match the content.
‘Thank you for your attention slide.’ This kind of ending to a presentation is outdated and meaningless. It's better to place a call-to-action and your contacts. Immediately show what you're encouraging listeners to do and leave ways for them to contact you.
How to do your presentation properly
Before you open the software and start making slides, you should understand the basic principles of creating presentations.
First, work on the content. Write out all the text you want, or order the content from the best writing services, and then make any necessary changes. After that, you can design the mud board - the mood palette of the future design. This helps you find interesting ideas for current presentations and develops your "taste in design".
For inspiration, look for good animated websites on Awwwards, and sample interfaces on Behance or Dribbble. You can subscribe to design-related tags on Instagram.
To think slides ahead, use Storyboards, another useful tool when creating presentations. It has been used extensively since Walt Disney: studio animators would hand-draw the key points of a cartoon for approval by the whole team.
1 idea - 1 slide. This will help you avoid the accumulation of information on slides, and make it easier for the viewer to follow the logic of the presentation.
Presentations for live and mailed presentations should be designed differently. For a slide presentation, put less text on your slides because you can supplement it with your own words, while for a mail presentation, put more text.
Attention to photo selection. A photo can be a friend in your presentation as well as a foe. For example, to show movement, you could choose a photo of a car, or you could use a turtle. These two images evoke different associations: a car represents speed, and impetuosity, while a tortoise represents slowness, perhaps even in a negative sense.
It is also important to choose illustrations that match the content. Here's an example of an anti-example: this slide is meant to refer to a sales funnel, but it's difficult to understand immediately.
It's better to spend more time, but find a photo of good quality. Photobanks and photo-sharing sites Unsplash, pixabay, Flickr, and Shutterstock can help.
Study the presentation software in which you are working. For example, once you understand what tools and features there are in PowerPoint, you will discover more features and speed up your work.
5 Best Software Programs for Presentation Creation
The choice of presentation creation software is quite wide, but the experts advise you to use these 5.
PowerPoint
It is the best-known program, available for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. The newer version of Microsoft 365 (PowerPoint 2016, PowerPoint 2019) can use Morph, which allows for smooth transitions and a more engaging presentation itself.
BENEFITS – timeless, classic
DISADVANTAGES - the templates are too recognizable
Keynote
It’s the standard free software for macOS and iOS owners with essentially the same functionality as PowerPoint.
BENEFITS - simple interface
DISADVANTAGES - macOS and iOS only
Prezi
Prezi dispenses with the conventional slide show format to create a non-linear, large canvas presentation. At the same time, you can interact with the content in any way you want with camera rotation, motion, and zoom.
BENEFITS - non-standard, large number of templates
DISADVANTAGES - the program is paid, the interface is in English only
Canva
The program is available for iOS and a web version. Canva offers many paid and free slide templates. Conveniently, it's easy to customize each of them to your liking, changing them beyond recognition.
BENEFITS - you can customize everything: add or delete objects, choose colors, icons, and fonts
DISADVANTAGES - you can change the size of your slides in the paid version with a subscription
Crello
It’s the free Canva counterpart. Presentations can be created on your own, or you can use creative templates that are completely customizable. There's also a search for paid and free images and the option to download your own.
BENEFITS - basic interface
DISADVANTAGES - web version only
Skills you need
As I mentioned above, a presentation designer needs to have analytical thinking as well as the ability to understand data, search for information from different sources, evaluate it, rewrite it, and build tables and diagrams.
It is important to know English. Large companies often need presentations in English for internal or external communication. Small firms use them to find investors or enter new markets. Overseas clients of course communicate only in English.
You have to write texts competently, to paraphrase huge amounts of information from the client into more comprehensible and capacious lines. This is a very important part of the job, often one of the most valuable.
Resources you need
Most presentations are made under NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and contain confidential information, so it is almost impossible to find anything relevant on the Internet, apart from presentations at event broadcasts.
You should keep an eye out for large-scale conferences, big company events, and designer talks. There you will see good presentations and how they work with the audience. But you have to put everything through your filter. For example, presentations at different TEDx in the world are not always of the same quality.
See and get inspired: behance.net and dribbble.com. Any web design-related resources such as awwwards.com. Many of the principles overlap and can be used in individual presentations. Trends in style are also consistent with the web.
A beautiful, well-designed presentation will help get your message across. Even non-designers can create presentations that you want to watch again and again.
