Top Trends of Visual Presentation Examples in 2024
Quynh Anh Vu • 27 Oct 2023 • 6 min read
What are the Visual Presentation Examples ? For many people, delivering a presentation is a daunting project, even before it turns to hybrid and virtual displays due to the pandemic. To avoid the Death By PowerPoint phenomenon, it is time to adopt new techniques to make your presentations more visual and impressive.
This article tries to encourage you to think outside of the slide by providing essential elements of a successful visual presentation, especially for the new presenter and those who want to save time, money, and effort for the upcoming presentation deadline.
Table of Contents
- What is a Visual Presentation?
- What is Visual Presentation Examples Types?
How to Create a Visual Presentation?
What makes a good presentation visual, frequently asked questions, how ahaslides supports a good visual presentation.
As mentioned before, you need a presentation tool to make your presentation more visual and engaging. The art of leveraging visual elements is all intended visual aids make sense and kick off audiences’ imagination, curiosity, and interest from the entire presentation.
The easiest way to create interaction between the presenter and the audience is by asking for rhetorical and thought-provoking quizzes and quick surveys during the presentation. AhaSlides , with a range of live polls, interactive questions, image questions, creative fonts, and integration with streaming platforms can help you to make a good visual presentation in just a second.
- Types of presentation
- College presentation
- Creative presentation ideas
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What is The Visual Presentation?
So, what are the visual presentation examples? When providing as much information as possible, many presenters think that text-heavy slides may help, but by contrast, they may lead to distraction. As we explore the characteristics of good presentations, illustrations and graphics play an important role to deliver compelling content and turn complex concepts more clearly, precisely, and instantly to understand. A Visual presentation is the adoption of a range of visual aids on presentation to ensure information is easier to understand and memorize.
In addition, visual aids can also help to keep presenters on track, which can be used as a cue for reviving a train of thought. They build better interaction and communication between presenters and the audience, making them notice more deeply what you are saying.
What is Visual Presentation Examples Types?
Some possible visual presentations include infographics, charts, diagrams, posters, flipcharts, whiteboards, and video presentation examples.
An infographic is a collection of different graphic visual presentations to represent information, data, or knowledge intended more visually quickly and clearly to grab the audience’s attention.
To illustrate quantitative data effectively, it is important to make use of graphs and charts. For both business use and research use, graphs and charts can show multiple and complex data in a way that is easy to understand and memory.
When it comes to presenting information systematically and logically, you can use diagrams. A diagram is a powerful tool for effective communication and brainstorming processes. It also is time-saving for people to read and collect information.
A Poster, especially a research project poster, provides brief and concrete information about a research paper straightforwardly. The audiences can grab all important data and knowledge and findings through posters.
A flipchart and whiteboard are the most basic presentation aids and work best to supplement lecture slides. Excellent whiteboard and flipchart composite of well-chosen words, and clear diagram will help to explain complex concepts.
A video presentation is not a new concept, which is a great way to spread ideas lively and quickly attract the audience’s attention. The advantages of a video presentation lie in its animation and illustration concepts, fascinating sound effects, and user friendly.
In addition, we can add many types of visual aids in the presentations as long as they can give shapes and form words or thoughts into visual content. Most popular visual aids include graphs, statics, charts, and diagrams that should be noted in your mind. These elements combined with verbal are a great way to engage the listeners’ imagination and also emphasize vital points more memorable.
It is simply to create more visual presentations than you think. With the development of technology and the internet, you can find visual presentation examples and templates for a second. PowerPoint is a good start, but there are a variety of quality alternatives, such as AhaSlides , Keynote, and Prezi.
When it comes to designing an effective visual presentation, you may identify some key steps beforehand:
Visual Presentation Examples – Focus on your topic
Firstly, you need to determine your purpose and understand your audience’s needs. If you are going to present in a seminar with your audience of scientists, engineers, business owners… They are likely to care about data under simple charts and graphs, which explain the results or trends. Or if you are going to give a lecture for secondary students, your slides should be something fun and interesting, with more colourful pictures and interactive questions.
Visual Presentation Examples – Animation and Transition
When you want to add a bit of excitement to a slideshow and help to keep the listener more engaged, you use animation and transition. These functions help to shift the focus of audiences between elements on slides. When the transition style and setting are set right, it can help to give fluidity and professionalism to a slideshow.
Visual Presentation Examples – Devices for interactivity
One of the approaches that improve communication between audiences and the use of visual aid is using technology assistance. You don’t want to take too much time to create well-designed visual aids while ensuring your presentation is impressive, so why not leverage a presentation app like AhaSlides ? It properly encourages participant engagement with interactive visual features and templates and is time-saving. With its help, you can design your presentation either formally or informally depending on your interest.
Visual Presentation Examples – Give an eye-catching title
Believe it or not, the title is the most essential part of attracting audiences at first sight. Though don’t “read the book by its cover”, you still can put your thoughts into a unique title that conveys the topic while piquing the viewer’s interest.
Visual Presentation Examples – Play a short video
Creative video presentation ideas are always important. “Videos evoke emotional responses”, it will be a mistake if you don’t leverage short videos with sound to reel in and captivate the audience’s attention. You can put the video at the beginning of the presentation as a brief introduction to your topic, or you can play it as a supplement to explain difficult concepts.
Visual Presentation Examples – Use a prop or creative visual aid to inject humour
It is challenging to keep your audience interested and engaged with your audience from the whole presentation. It is why to add a prop or creative visual aid to pull your audience’s focus on what you say. Here are some ideas to cover it:
- Use neon colour and duotones
- Tell a personal story
- Show a shocking heading
- Use isometric illustrations
- Go vertical
Visual Presentation Examples – Rehearsal and get feedback
It is an important step to make your visual presentation really work out. You won’t know any unexpected mirrors may come out on D-day if you don’t make the rehearsal and get feedback from a reliable source. If they said that your visual image is quality or the data is overwhelming, or the pictures are misunderstood, you can have an alternative plan in advance.
Incorporate visual or audio media appropriately. Ensure you arrange and integrate suitable data presentation in your slides or videos. You can read the guidelines for visual aids applications in the following:
- Choose a readable text size about the slide room and text spacing in about 5-7 doubted-spaced.
- Use consistent colour for overall presentation, visual aids work better in white yellow and blue backgrounds.
- Take care of data presentation, and avoid oversimplification or too much detail.
- Keep the data shown minimum and highlight really important data points only.
- Choose font carefully, keep in mind that lowercase is easier to read than uppercase
- Don’t mix fonts.
- Printed text is easier to read than handwritten text.
- Use the visual to emphasize punctuation in your verbal presentation.
- Say no to poor-quality images or videos.
- Visual elements need to be strategic and relevant.
Got a question? We've got answers.
What well-designed visual aids should have?
Why is it important to keep visual aids simple, what is the purpose of visual aids in classroom.
Quynh Anh Vu
More from ahaslides.
20 Great Examples of PowerPoint Presentation Design [+ Templates]
Published: January 17, 2024
When it comes to PowerPoint presentation design, there's no shortage of avenues you can take.
While all that choice — colors, formats, visuals, fonts — can feel liberating, it‘s important that you’re careful in your selection as not all design combinations add up to success.
In this blog post, I’m sharing some of my favorite PowerPoint tips and templates to help you nail your next presentation.
Table of Contents
What makes a good PowerPoint presentation?
Powerpoint design ideas, best powerpoint presentation slides, good examples of powerpoint presentation design.
In my opinion, a great PowerPoint presentation gets the point across succinctly while using a design that doesn't detract from it.
Here are some of the elements I like to keep in mind when I’m building my own.
1. Minimal Animations and Transitions
Believe it or not, animations and transitions can take away from your PowerPoint presentation. Why? Well, they distract from the content you worked so hard on.
A good PowerPoint presentation keeps the focus on your argument by keeping animations and transitions to a minimum. I suggest using them tastefully and sparingly to emphasize a point or bring attention to a certain part of an image.
2. Cohesive Color Palette
I like to refresh my memory on color theory when creating a new PowerPoint presentation.
A cohesive color palette uses complementary and analogous colors to draw the audience’s attention and help emphasize certain aspects at the right time.
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It‘s impossible for me to tell you the specific design ideas you should go after in your next PowerPoint, because, well, I don’t know what the goal of your presentation is.
Luckily, new versions of PowerPoint actually suggest ideas for you based on the content you're presenting. This can help you keep up with the latest trends in presentation design .
PowerPoint is filled with interesting boilerplate designs you can start with. To find these suggestions, open PowerPoint and click the “Design” tab in your top navigation bar. Then, on the far right side, you'll see the following choices:
This simplistic presentation example employs several different colors and font weights, but instead of coming off as disconnected, the varied colors work with one another to create contrast and call out specific concepts.
What I like: The big, bold numbers help set the reader's expectations, as they clearly signify how far along the viewer is in the list of tips.
10. “Pixar's 22 Rules to Phenomenal Storytelling,” Gavin McMahon
This presentation by Gavin McMahon features color in all the right places. While each of the background images boasts a bright, spotlight-like design, all the characters are intentionally blacked out.
What I like: This helps keep the focus on the tips, while still incorporating visuals. Not to mention, it's still easy for me to identify each character without the details. (I found you on slide eight, Nemo.)
11. “Facebook Engagement and Activity Report,” We Are Social
Here's another great example of data visualization in the wild.
What I like: Rather than displaying numbers and statistics straight up, this presentation calls upon interesting, colorful graphs, and charts to present the information in a way that just makes sense.
12. “The GaryVee Content Model,” Gary Vaynerchuk
This wouldn‘t be a true Gary Vaynerchuk presentation if it wasn’t a little loud, am I right?
What I like: Aside from the fact that I love the eye-catching, bright yellow background, Vaynerchuk does a great job of incorporating screenshots on each slide to create a visual tutorial that coincides with the tips. He also does a great job including a visual table of contents that shows your progress as you go .
13. “20 Tweetable Quotes to Inspire Marketing & Design Creative Genius,” IMPACT Branding & Design
We‘ve all seen our fair share of quote-chronicling presentations but that isn’t to say they were all done well. Often the background images are poor quality, the text is too small, or there isn't enough contrast.
Well, this professional presentation from IMPACT Branding & Design suffers from none of said challenges.
What I like: The colorful filters over each background image create just enough contrast for the quotes to stand out.
14. “The Great State of Design,” Stacy Kvernmo
This presentation offers up a lot of information in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming.
What I like: The contrasting colors create visual interest and “pop,” and the comic images (slides 6 through 12) are used to make the information seem less buttoned-up and overwhelming.
15. “Clickbait: A Guide To Writing Un-Ignorable Headlines,” Ethos3
Not going to lie, it was the title that convinced me to click through to this presentation but the awesome design kept me there once I arrived.
What I like: This simple design adheres to a consistent color pattern and leverages bullet points and varied fonts to break up the text nicely.
16. “Digital Transformation in 50 Soundbites,” Julie Dodd
This design highlights a great alternative to the “text-over-image” display we've grown used to seeing.
What I like: By leveraging a split-screen approach to each presentation slide, Julie Dodd was able to serve up a clean, legible quote without sacrificing the power of a strong visual.
17. “Fix Your Really Bad PowerPoint,” Slide Comet
When you‘re creating a PowerPoint about how everyone’s PowerPoints stink, yours had better be terrific. The one above, based on the ebook by Seth Godin, keeps it simple without boring its audience.
What I like: Its clever combinations of fonts, together with consistent color across each slide, ensure you're neither overwhelmed nor unengaged.
18. “How Google Works,” Eric Schmidt
Simple, clever doodles tell the story of Google in a fun and creative way. This presentation reads almost like a storybook, making it easy to move from one slide to the next.
What I like: This uncluttered approach provides viewers with an easy-to-understand explanation of a complicated topic.
19. “What Really Differentiates the Best Content Marketers From The Rest,” Ross Simmonds
Let‘s be honest: These graphics are hard not to love. I especially appreciate the author’s cartoonified self-portrait that closes out the presentation. Well played, Ross Simmonds.
What I like: Rather than employing the same old stock photos, this unique design serves as a refreshing way to present information that's both valuable and fun.
20. “Be A Great Product Leader,” Adam Nash
This presentation by Adam Nash immediately draws attention by putting the company's logo first — a great move if your company is well known.
What I like: He uses popular images, such as ones of Megatron and Pinocchio, to drive his points home. In the same way, you can take advantage of popular images and media to keep your audience engaged.
PowerPoint Presentation Examples for the Best Slide Presentation
Mastering a PowerPoint presentation begins with the design itself.
Get inspired by my ideas above to create a presentation that engages your audience, builds upon your point, and helps you generate leads for your brand.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness. This article was written by a human, but our team uses AI in our editorial process. Check out our full disclosure to learn more about how we use AI.
Don't forget to share this post!
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120+ Presentation Ideas, Topics & Example
By Ryan McCready , May 08, 2023
Did you know that 46% of people can’t sit through a presentation without losing focus?
That’s why I wanted to learn how to make a presentation that will captivate an audience. After looking at hundreds of different authors, topics and designs, I’ve assembled over 100 presentation ideas and tips on how to design a compelling presentation for:
- Social media
- Online courses
- Pitch decks
- Lead generation
In this blog, you’ll find 120+ presentation ideas, design tips and examples to help you create an awesome slide deck for your next presentation.
To start off, here’s a video on the 10 essential presentation design tips to make sure that your presentations don’t fall under the YAWN category.
1. Use a minimalist presentation theme
CREATE THIS PRESENTATION TEMPLATE
The best designs can also be some of the simplest you see. In the Airbnb pitch deck below, they use a minimalist color scheme and font selection.
A minimalist design is sleek, organized and places the most important thing in focus: your information. There are no distracting stock images, icons, or content. Everything on this unique presentation feels like it belongs and works together perfectly.
Learn how to customize this template:
2. Use a consistent design motif throughout your presentation
Here’s a go-to tip to for a cohesive presentation design: use a design motif. The motif could be a recurring shape (like circles, lines or arrows) or symbol (like a leaf for “growth” or a mountain for “goals”). For more ideas, check out our guide to common symbols and meanings used in design .
For example, this presentation template uses circles as a design motif. The same circle icon is used in three different colors to add a bubbly touch to the design. The team photos are also incorporated using circle frames:
3. Use an eye-catching presentation background image
Like with any type of design work, you should want to catch the eye of your audience. In a presentation, this should be done from the beginning with a compelling background image or a color gradient.
In this presentation template, the creators were able to do just that with a landscape photo. When a presentation like this is seen on social media, during a webinar or in person, your audience will definitely listen up.
4. Visualize your points with icons
Icons are the perfect visuals to include in presentations. They’re compact and can convey a concept to your audience at a glance. You can even combine multiple icons to create custom illustrations for your slides.
Use the Icon Search in Venngage to find illustrated and flat icons:
5. Use a black & white color scheme for a corporate presentation design
In the presentation below there are only two colors used: black and white. Now, you might be worried that only using two colors is boring, but it all comes down to balance.
Playing off the ideas of classic minimalism, the designer made this presentation look sleek and professional. And now your content can be the main attraction of your presentation as well!
6. Repurpose your slide deck into an infographic
Different types of presentations serve different purposes and sometimes it helps to work smarter, not harder when you are creating a unique presentation. In fact, the spacing, layout, and style used in this presentation makes it easy to repurpose the same images into an infographic.
This allows you to create two unique pieces of content from one idea! Which is exactly what Officevibe did .
Join Venngage’s CEO, Eugene Woo, to learn how you can design impactful infographics that will help maintain trust, increase productivity and inspire action in your team.
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7. Break your genre mold for a fun presentation idea
When I first clicked on this creative presentation from SEMrush, I was not expecting to be transported into a comic book. I’m glad I clicked because it may be the most unique slide deck I have ever seen. Going this extreme with your presentation ideas may seem a bit risky, but to be able to break the mold in this age of cookie-cutter presentations is worth it.
To leave a lasting impression on your audience, consider transforming your slides into an interactive presentation. Here are 15 interactive presentation ideas to enhance interactivity and engagement.
8. Make your presentation cover slide count
As I was scrolling through all of the presentations, this one made me stop in my tracks. It could be that I have a life-long love of Star Wars, or it could be that their presentation cover slide was designed to do just that: grab your attention. That’s why you should not stick with a boring, text-only title slide. Don’t be afraid to use icons and illustrations to make a statement.
9. Alternate slide layouts to keep your presentation engaging
Keeping your audience engaged throughout an entire presentation is hard, even if you have been working on your presentation skills . No one wants to look at slides that look exactly the same for an hour. But on the other hand, you can’t create a unique masterpiece for each slide.
That’s why I’m very impressed with what the designers did in the presentation example above. They use a consistent visual theme on each slide, but alternate between vertical and horizontal orientations.
The swapping of orientations will show people that the presentation is progressing nicely. It can help you make a strong, almost physical, distinction between ideas, sections or topics.
10. Make your audience laugh, or at least chuckle
Sometimes you need to not take your business presentations too seriously. Not sure what I mean? Go check out slide number 10 on this slide deck below.
If you did not actually laugh out loud, then I don’t know what to tell you. Small illustrated embellishments can be very powerful because they evoke an emotional response and to gain your audience’s trust.
Did you know 70% of employees think that giving a good presentation is an essential workplace skill? Check out the top qualities of awesome presentations and learn all about how to make a good presentation to help you nail that captivating delivery.
11. Supplement your presentation with printed materials
Printed takeaways (such as brochures and business cards ) give audience members a chance to take home the most important elements of your presentation in a format they can easily access without using a computer. Make sure you brand these materials in a way that’s visually consistent with your slide deck, with the same color scheme, icons, and other iconic features; otherwise, your recipients will just end up scratching their heads.
If you’re giving people multiple materials, try packaging them all into one convenient presentation folder. There are over 100 styles with a wide range of custom options, so feel free to get creative and make your folder stand out. Sometimes a unique die cut or an unusual stock is all you need to make something truly memorable. Here are some brochure templates to get you started.
12. Only use one chart or graphic per slide
Having too much information on a slide is the easiest way to lose the focus of your audience. This is especially common when people are using graphs, charts or tables .
In this creative slide deck, the author made sure to only include one focal point per slide, and I applaud them for it. I know this may sound like a simple presentation tip, but I have seen many people lose their audience because the slides are too complex.
13. Keep your employee engagement presentations light
Sometimes you need to get away from stuffy, professional presentation ideas to capture your audience’s attention. In this case, Officevibe used some very colorful and playful illustrations to stand out from the crowd.
I mean, who could not love the plant with a face on slide number 9? And if you want to see some more icons and illustrations like this, be sure to check out our article on how to tell a story with icons.
14. Feature a map when talking about locations
Including a map in your creative presentations is a fantastic idea! Not only do they make an interesting focal point for your slide layout, they also make location-based information easier to understand.
This cool presentation example by our pro designers at Venngage uses maps to visualize information. This map both dominates the screen, and also displays all the locations being covered.
15. Use a font that is large and in charge
If you are presenting to a small group or a packed stadium, make sure your audience can see your text! Use a large and in charge font that can be read from even the nosebleed seats.
Honestly, you really never know where your unique presentation will be seen. It could be seen in a conference room or conference hall, and everything in between. Be ready to present almost anywhere with a bold and easy to read font.
16. Use pop culture references to build a fun presentation
Using a meme or pop culture reference is another way that you can jive with your audience. It can be used to quickly get a point across without saying a word or create a moment that you can connect with the room. For example in this presentation, they used Napoleon Dynamite to give the audience feelings of nostalgia.
17. Use more than one font weight on your presentation cover slide
Just like you would never use one font on an infographic, you should never use just one font on your presentation (for more tips, read our guide on how to choose fonts ). In this presentation example from HubSpot, they use a bunch of different font weights to add emphasis to key words and ideas.
As you can see, they use a bold font on the presentation cover to bring attention to Steve Jobs name. This makes it easy for the audience to know what your presentation is going to be about from the beginning as well.
18. Use a color theme for each idea
Color is another extremely powerful nonverbal tool that you can use to guide your audience. By using a different color for each section of your creative presentation, Dell is able to clearly indicate when they are switching points or ideas. Going from green to orange, and even red almost effortlessly.
This is a great way to design a list, guide, or a how-to presentation as well. And each color can be assigned to a different step or number with ease.
Need help picking the perfect color palette? Start here !
19. Use illustrations instead of pictures
An easy way to keep your design consistent throughout your unique presentation is to use illustrations like in this slide deck by Domo.
They used illustrations instead of pictures to show off their subject on slide numbers 4-10 and it looks fantastic. This will ensure that the audience focuses on the content, instead of just the photo they could have used.
It also helps that illustrations are a top design trend for 2020 .
20. Use contrasting colors to compare two perspectives or sides of an argument
Contrasting colors can be used to quickly show each side of topic or an argument. For example in this presentation, they use this trick to show the difference between their company and the competition.
They use color very effectively in this example to show their company is better, in a nonverbal way. With a lighter color and illustrated icons, the company is able to position them as the better choice. All without saying a word.
Now if they would have used similar colors, or a single color the effect wouldn’t have been as strong or noticeable.
21. Include your own personal interests
This example is one of the most interesting and cool presentations I have seen in awhile, so I suggest checking out the entire thing. The creator inserts a bunch of his personal interests into the slide to make his presentation about education fun and relatable. And they even use a Super Mario Bros inspired presentation cover, so you know it has to be fantastic!
22. Try to stick to groups of three
How many major ideas should be present on your presentation aid? Never break your presentation layout down into anything more than thirds. This means there should be at most three columns, three icons, three ideas and so on. A great example of this idea starts on slide number 9 in this slide deck and continues throughout the rest of the presentation.
Here is a great three columned slide template to get started with.
23. Add a timeline to help visualize ideas
One of the best ways to visualize a complex process or historical event is to use a timeline presentation. A list of all the steps or events is just not going to cut it in a professional setting. You need to find an engaging way to visualize the information.
Take the presentation example above, where they outline the rise and fall of Athens in a visually stimulating way.
24. Label your graphs & charts
If the people at Pollen VC had not added those annotations to the graphs on slide number 5, I would have definitely not known what to make of that graph.
But when you combine the visuals on a graph with descriptive text, the graph is able to paint a picture for your audience. So make your graphs easy to understand by annotating them (this is a chart design best practice ).
Create a free graph right here, right now!
25. White font over pictures just works
There is a reason that you see so many quotes or sayings in a white font that are then overlaid on an image. That it is because it just works in so many situations and the text is very easy to read on any image.
If you do not believe me, look at the slide deck example above where they use a white font with a few different fonts and about 100 images. Plus the presentation template is chocked full of other tips on how to create a winning slideshow.
26. Color code your points across the whole presentation
Here is another example of a presentation that uses color to keep their points organized. In this case, they use 10 different pastel colors to match the 10 different tips for employee engagement.
Check out our guide for how to pick the best colors for your visuals .
27. Use a simple flow chart to break down a process
If you’re a fan of the movie Step Brothers , you may have heard of Prestige Worldwide before. In this fun presentation example they are back to sell you on their business model and growth plans.
This time, the presentation will be effective because it actually talks about what the business does.
Instead of making a music video, they use a helpful flowchart template to explain their business model. I would recommend following their lead and creating a dynamic flow chart to visually break down any process. Try making your own flowchart with Venngage.
28. Make your slide deck mobile friendly
As more people move to mobile as their main device each year, making your presentations mobile-friendly is becoming increasingly important. This means that the text is large and there aren’t too many small details, so everything can scale down. Just like in this presentation example from the creators at Globoforce.
29. Don’t be afraid to include too many examples
If you are presenting a complex idea to a group, especially a large audience, I would recommend having a ton of good examples. Now, I would try not to overdo it, but having too many it is better than having too few.
In this creative presentation, the people at With Company spend about 20 slides just giving great examples of prototyping. It doesn’t feel too repetitive because they all are useful and informative examples.
30. Use consistent visual styles for an elegant presentation design
I have already written extensively about using icons in all of your design projects . I haven’t talked as much about matching icons to your presentation template.
But that’s just as important, especially if you want to create a professional presentation for your audience.
As you can see in the example above, the designer used minimalist icons that fit the slide designs. All of the other graphics, charts and visual elements fit together nicely as well.
Plus the icons don’t distract from the content, which could ruin a stellar presentation.
31. Use a consistent presentation layout
In this example from Bannersnack, they use a consistent layout on each of their slides to help with the flow by using the same margins and text layout.
It’s a solid presentation example because they help the user know where to look immediately. It may seem like they are playing it safe, but anything that can speed up the time it takes for a user to read the content of the slides, the better.
32. Use loud colors as much as possible
This is one of my favorite presentations because of the highlighter yellow they chose to use as their main color. It is actually very similar to one that I saw presented live a few years ago and I have used this same approach in a few presentations ideas of my own.
33. Pull your design motif from your content
If you are talking about an interesting topic, why not use the topic as the main design motif in your creative slide deck? For example, in this presentation about sketchbooks, the creator uses a sketchy, handwritten motif. It is something simple that helps the audience connect with the topic. Plus, it allows you to include a ton of great examples.
34. Utilize a call & answer cadence
In this SlideShare about how to create a presentation, Peter Zvirinsky uses a two-step process to present a point. First, he presents the header presentation tip in a speech bubble. Then he shows a supporting point in a responding speech bubble. This gives the presentation a conversational flow.
35. Repurpose ebook content into a creative presentation
This slide deck was adapted perfectly from a Seth Godin ebook into the presentation example you see above. In the slide deck, they take a piece of content that would usually take a while to read and cut it down to a few minutes. Just remember to include only the most important ideas, and try to present them in a fresh way.
36. Add a timed outline to your presentation
We have already covered how important it is to have a table of contents in your slides but this takes it a bit further. On the second slide of the presentation below, the creator added how long each of the slides should take.
This is great because it helps your audience know the pace the presentation will take and will help keep them engaged. It also will help them identify the most important and in-depth parts of the presentation from the beginning.
37. Use a “next steps” slide to direct your audience
One of the worst things you can do as a presenter is to leave your audience without any idea of what to do next. A presentation should never just end because you ran out of slides.
Instead, use a conclusion or “next steps” slide like in the example above to finish your presentation. Sum up some of your main points, tell your audience where they can get more information, and push them to take action.
38. Go a bit crazy with the design
Sometimes you need to throw convention to the wind to create something unforgettable. This presentation from Velocity Partners does just that, and I think it is one of my favorite ones from this entire roundup.
They use unconventional typography, quirky icons, and unusual presentation layout to make each slide surprising.
39. Make your slide deck easy to share
If you are looking to get a lot of eyes on your presentation I would make sure people will want to share it on social media. How do you do that? By presenting new and interesting value. This means your content needs to answer a common question and your design needs to be clutter-free. For example, look at this very social media-friendly. The slides are simple and answer questions directly.
40. Use shapes to integrate your photos into the slides
Want to include a bunch of images in your presentation? I say do it!
Now most of the time you would add a raw image directly to your slide. However, if you want to present images in a professional way I would recommend using an image frame .
Like in the example above, you can use these frame to create a collage of images almost instantly. Or provide a similar visual theme to all of your slides.
Overall, I believe it’s a great way to add a new visual component to your presentation.
41. Hijack someone’s influence in your marketing slides
If you are stuck in the brainstorming phase of your presentation, focusing on a brand or influencer is a great place to start. It could be a case study, a collection of ideas or just some quotes from the influencer. But what makes it effective is that the audience knows the influencer and trusts them. And you are able to hijack their awareness or influence.
42. Put y our logo on every slide
Whether you have a brand as powerful as Moz, or you are just getting started, you should always have your logo on each slide. You really never know where a presentation is going to end up–or what parts of it will! In this presentation template, Moz does a good job of including their branding and such to get others interested in Moz Local. Don’t have a logo yet? Our logo design tips will help you create a logo that’s iconic and will stand the test of time.
43. Lead your audience to it
In this example, the creator uses something very similar to the call and answer approach I mentioned above, but with a little twist. Instead of just throwing all the info up at once, they use three slides to build to a particular point and include a subtle call to action in the third slide.
44. Make visuals the focal point of your presentation slides
If you haven’t noticed, illustrated icons are having a revival in 2020 and beyond. This is likely because minimalist icons dominated the design world for the past decade. And now people want something new.
Brands also like using illustrated icons because they are seen as genuine and fun.
And because they are so eye-catching you can use them as focal points in your presentation slides. Just like they did in the creative presentation example above.
Picking the perfect icon is tough, learn how you can use infographic icons like a pro.
45. Use a quirky presentation theme
In this slide deck, the authors show you how to become an Animation Ninja…and they use ninja graphics and icons extensively. This caught my eye immediately because of the amount of work that I knew was behind this. It takes a lot of time and effort to line all of the content and graphic up to create a cohesive theme, but the payoff can be massively worth it.
46. Use a consistent background image
I am a big fan of the way that Aleyda Solís uses only a single presentation background image throughout her presentation.
By using this tactic the audience is able to focus on what is happening in the foreground. Plus it gives the whole presentation a different feel than all the other ones I have looked at.
47. Summarize your points at the end
It’s a good idea to summarize your points before you end your presentation , especially if you’ve covered a lot of information. In this presentation example, Deanta summarizes exactly what they do on slide numbers 16-18. They also provide their contact information in case their audience has any more questions. I think that every presentation should use this same approach, especially the ones you are presenting outside of your company.
48. Use a minimalist presentation template
This slide deck from QuickBooks uses a minimalist theme to help the audience focus on what is important, the content.
There were only five colors used in the entire presentation and the graphics were simple line drawings. This made it easy to read and very pleasing to the eyes.
49. Split your slides length-wise
Here is a simple template you can use to separate your headers, or main points, from your body text in a presentation.
Instead of using a solid presentation background, split the slide in half like Sequoia did in their slide deck. They used their brand color for the title portion and a neutral white for the supporting content.
Use this company report template to create a very similar slide right now!
50. Embrace a bold color scheme throughout your presentation
My favorite part of the creative presentation example above is the use of complementary colors in each slide. As you can see, not one of the slides use the same color scheme but they all feel related connected.
This approach can be used to make your presentation visually unique, without abandoning a cohesive theme or idea.
51. Put text in the top left corner
English speakers will instinctively try to read text from a top to bottom, left to right orientation. I would recommend using a left alignment for your text and adding additional things from top to bottom, just like Aaron Irizarry did in this presentation layout.
52. Break up your tables
A plain table with a white background with black or gray lines are difficult to read on a computer screen, so why would you create one for viewing on a large presentation screen? You shouldn’t!
Instead, follow Intuit’s lead and break up the rows with a bit of color. This applies to data visualization in general , but think it is even more important when it comes to presentations.
53. Present connected information in a visually similar way
In this startup pitch presentation example, they have a ton of information to get through. But they present their most important slides, the problem and solution, in a visually similar way.
By using a similar layout on each slide, the audience will be able to quickly make a connection. If you want to present two connected pieces of information, use this tactic.
From the font to the layout, it’s all basically the same. The main message they’re trying to impart is a lot more impactful to the reader.
If they would have used two wildly different presentation layouts, the message may have been lost.
54. Roundup expert tips into one presentation
If you are looking for useful insights into the topic of your presentation, talk to some influencers in your niche. These are called “expert roundups” in the content marketing world and they are incredibly shareable.
Plus, they are pretty easy to create and have a great shelf life. In the example above, we talked to a gaggle of marketing experts about what makes a SlideShare great.
55. Use bold & brash colors throughout
B old colors usually make your presentation template a lot easier to read and remember. Like at this slide deck made by our talented designers, which doesn’t shy away from bright, bold colors.
Want to pick a perfect color palette for your presentation? Read this blog on the do’s and don’ts of infographic color selection .
56. Make your graphs easy to read & interpret
It should not require a Master’s degree in statistics to understand the graphs that someone uses in a presentation. Instead, the axis should be easy to read, the colors should enforce the point, and the data should be clearly plotted.
For example, in this presentation on slide numbers 14 and 25, the graphs nail all of those tips perfectly.
57. Condense your presentation into a memorable line
If you can, try condensing your information into a simple one-liner to help the message stick with your audience. In slide number 36 of this presentation, Mika Aldaba does just that and shows that “Facts + Feelings = Data Storytelling.”
He does this again a few times throughout the presentation with other memorable one-liners.
58. Bring attention to important figures with colorful icons
If you’re including a figure or number on your slides, I’m guessing you want the audience to actually see it.
That’s why I would recommend using an icon or graphic to highlight that figure. Maybe use a color or icon that isn’t used anywhere else in the presentation to make sure it really jumps off the screen.
In the presentation example above, all that’s used is a simple circle to make each figure a focal point. It’s really that easy, but many people leave it out of their presentations.
59. Anchor Your Text With Icons
Having your text or content floating out in the white space of your presentation is not a good look.
Instead, you should use anchor icons to give the text something to hold onto and draw the audience’s eye. If you need some examples of good anchor icons, check out slide numbers 4, 7 and 9 in this presentation example.
60. Add semi-opaque lettering as a presentation background
A neat way to keep your slide deck organized is to number your slides or points using semi-opaque lettering in the background.
Then, place your slide content on top of the opaque lettering. This helps your audience know that you are on the same point or idea, plus it just looks really good when done right.
61. Use simple or minimalist borders
An easy way to class up your slides is to put a border around your text. Take this presentation from Venngage that uses a couple of different types of borders to make their slides look professional.
Plus it helps keep all of your content contained on the slide!
62. Feature one idea per slide
Nothing is worse than a confusing, cluttered slide. Instead of trying to pack a bunch of ideas into one slide, focus on one core idea on each slide. If you need to flesh the idea out, just make another slide.
Having trouble condensing your slides? Our presentation design guide can help you summarize your presentations and convey a singular idea with a clear focus.
63. Keep your style consistent with your brand
You might be tempted to switch up the style of your creative presentations each time, but think again. If your brand is known for fun and lighthearted content, like Officevibe, let that be your style throughout all of the presentations you publish under that brand. This will make your slide decks recognizable and will enforce your brand’s message .
64. Use accent fonts to emphasize important numbers
Some people hate pie charts with a passion, but I think they are perfect for presentations. Especially if you want to bring attention to a figure or percentage point .
In this simple example, the pie charts are used to visualize each figure in an interesting way. Plus the pie charts fit the circular and fun theme of the rest of the presentation very well.
65. Use patterned and textured presentation backgrounds
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Adding some subtle textures, icons or shapes to the presentation background can help make your slides more interesting. This is especially effective when you are only showing one point per slide, because it makes the slide design less sparse.
You can even switch up the colors on your shapes or textures to match the theme of the slide like DesignMantic did in this presentation.
66. Illustrate complex or confusing concepts with icons
Ideally, you don’t want every slide in your deck to just be text. Instead, switch things up every few slides by using just pictures.
This slide deck by Gluwa uses icons to create little diagrams to illustrate their presentation ideas. Their slides still communicate concepts to the audience, but in a new way.
67. Overlay stock photos with color
One problem many people encounter when creating a presentation or slide decks are finding photos with a consistent style. An easy way to edit photos to make them consistent is to add a transparent color overlay. In this example, Change Sciences uses a blue overlay on all of their photos. Plus, the color you choose can also help convey a particular mood.
68. Use black and white blocks
An easy way to make your text pop, particularly on a photo background, is to use white font on a black blog background (and vise-versa). Check out this slide deck by Abhishek Shah, which uses this trick in an effective way.
Now if you want to become a better leader this year, check out some of our favorite leadership infographics .
69. Use photos with similar filters
Using a bunch of photos with wildly different filters can be jarring in a business presentation. To maintain a consistent flow, use photos with a similar filter and color saturation.
Take a look at this example from HubSpot across slide numbers 1-6 and you can see what I mean.
70. Visualize your points with diagrams
Sometimes the best way to get your point across is to throw some diagrams into the presentation mix. But be sure to make is something that the audience can pick up on in three to five seconds tops.
For example, Jan Rezab uses a diagram to illustrate what takes up time in our lives on slide numbers 4, 5, 7 and 9!
71. Get experts to share tips
If you want to provide even more value to your audience than you can offer yourself, why not call in some expert reinforcement? See what experts in your field have to say on the topic of your presentation and include their tips and insights. Plus you can hijack their influence and expand your audience fairly quickly.
72. Mimic a popular presentation style
Uber’s pitch deck helped them raise millions of dollars in venture capital eventually leading to the glorious moment when they IPOed this year.
Aside from our sleek design upgrade (hey, we love good design!), this pitch deck template is the exact same one that Uber used to go from Idea to IPO.
And who knows? Maybe you might start the next Uber. But to raise money, you will need to create flawless business pitch decks to impress investors and raise those dollars.
73. Plan your presentation idea ahead of time
I know that minimalist designs are all the rage this year, but there is a big difference between a well-thought-out minimalist design and a lazy design without the finish touches. The same goes for a cluttered design with too many things going on at once.
That’s why it’s worth it to take the time to really plan out your presentation ideas and design concepts. Take this slide deck about storytelling by HighSpark. A quick glance will tell you that they put a lot of thought into designing their slides.
74. Use tables to compare your brand to the competition in sales presentations/pitch decks
There are a lot of ways to visually compare similar things in this day and age. You could use a comparison infographic , or even a venn diagram!
However, when it comes to presentations I think that the simple table is best. Especially if you are comparing more than two things, like in this presentation example.
With a table, you can clearly lay out all the pros and cons of each idea, brand or topic without it being overwhelming to the audience. Plus, virtually everyone knows how to follow a table, so your information will be easy to consume.
See more examples of the best pitch decks .
75. Blend icons & content effortlessly
Usually, icons are used as eye-catching objects detectors or anchors for text in a slideshow. But they can be used for so much more than that!
Like in this marketing presentation from Constant Contact they are very large but do not distract from the content.
76. Make your audience want more
This tactic has been used by everyone since the idea of marketing was invented (or close to that). In this presentation example called “100 Growth Hacks, 100 Days” the creator only shows the audience the first 10 days of it and then uses a call to action at the end of the presentation to encourage them to seek out the rest.
The only risk with these kinds of presentation ideas is if your initial content is not great, you can’t expect your audience to seek out more information.
77. Use memes (for real, though)
Usually, memes do not have a place in a serious business setting, so maybe don’t use them for formal presentations. But if you’re covering a lighter topic, or if you’re going for a fun presentation that will connect with your audience, don’t be afraid to throw a meme or two into the mix.
The audience immediately knows what you are trying to say when you use a popular meme in your presentation. For example, on slide number 7, the creator uses a meme to show that it will be hard to create great content
78. Include a slide that introduces your team in pitch decks
In this presentation example, the creators decided to include their team on a slide. I think it’s a great gesture.
Showing your team can help the audience put a face to your brand and make the whole company feel more genuine. So if there is a team that has helped you get where you are today, give them some recognition!
79. Feature a complementary color palette
Even though I am not a formally trained designer, I still understand that proper color usage is the base of any good design. Although not all of the tenets of color theory work great for presentations, complementary colors are always a great pick.
Take a look at the color usage in this business presentation from Gary Vaynerchuk below . The purple and Snapchat yellow, which are complementary colors, look fantastic and the content jumps off the screen.
80. Use a heavy or bold font
The very back of the room should be able to read your content if you are giving a group presentation. To ensure that your entire audience can read the slides I would not only use a large font, but also use a heavy font. If you are confused by what I mean by a heavy font take a look at this unique presentation example by Slides That Rock.
81. Do the math for your audience
If you are going to use a graph in your presentation to compare data you should do the match for your audience. Do not make them do the calculations in their head because you will quickly lose their attention. For example, on slide number 5 the people at Sickweather lay out exactly what figures they want the audience to take from the slide.
82. Use unique colors for different sections
The example below has 145 slides but it does not feel overwhelming or confusing.
That’s because each section has a different corresponding color, which makes it easier to flip through the slide deck and find a particular part.
83. Give your presentation a catchy title that anyone can remember
What I really love about the presentation example above is that it features a catchy tagline on the second slide–“The 3S Framework.” It’s simple but it works!
This motto helps outline the structure of the presentation, and each slide referring back to it. Plus, the tagline will give the audience something to latch onto and remember from the presentation.
84. White backgrounds are not always bad
A lot of people think that plain white background is a boring presentation faux pas. So the first thing they do is add color or image, which is not a bad thing at all.
But I also think that when used correctly, like in this example, plain white backgrounds can lead to beautiful presentations.
85. Split the header text from the body text
This idea is very similar to the one-two punch tactic that I talked about above, but it spreads the content over two slides as opposed to a single slide.
Use this design choice when you have fairly easy to follow presentations, like the one below from Steve Young. I know that this is effective because it allows the audience to focus on the main point before he drives it home with the supporting details.
86. Feature circle image frames
I am a big fan of the design choices that Frank Delmelle uses in this slide deck about content strategy. He uses circles as his main design motif and frames his images in circles as well.
87. Talk directly to your audience
This slideshow tops out at 70 slides but it’s a breeze to flip through. That’s because the creator, Ian Lurie, decided to present it in the form of a conversation instead of a classic slide deck.
While each slide only has one or two sentences, it flows just like a friendly chat. He also includes the necessary pauses, breaks and other conversational tics that helps make it even more convincing.
88. Illustrated icons are key this year
Icons add a fun and functional element to your designs. In this presentation by Iryna Nezhynska, they use illustrated icons to make a potentially intimidating topic seem manageable.
89. Highlight key numbers and percentages
Surprising percentages have the ability to excite and shock an audience. To make the percentages on your slides even more impactful, present them in a different color or font than the rest of the text.
In the presentation example above, Contently uses that exact tactic to bring more attention to key numbers.
90. Use a gradient as your presentation background
Just like bold color schemes, gradients are a current social media graphic design trend . They may feel retro to some, but I believe they will be around well into the future.
Gradients are perfect for presentation backgrounds because they are so versatile and eye-catching. I mean, you can literally create a gradient with any colors you can think of! And they look a lot more interesting than a simple flat background.
So embrace the future and use a gradient in your next presentation!
91. Track the steps in a process
In this example, the creators from O.C. Tanner add a very interesting feature to their slides, starting on slide number 6. If you take a look at this business presentation template, you will see that they number the steps in a process and track which step they’re on at the bottom of the slides.
92. Use mind blowing font pairings
The creator of this slide deck uses at least 10 different types of fonts. And it looks fantastic because they know that one font choice is boring. But this does not mean that you should use a bunch of random fonts–pick font pairs that play well together and keep your font choices for different types of information consistent throughout the presentation.
93. Make your ideas as obvious as possible
Your audience shouldn’t be guessing at what you mean. That is why I think that this presentation example from In a Rocket is so powerful because they make the information easy to digest.
Learning to code can be challenging, but they break the information down with simple diagrams and clear examples. Heck, I have not touched CSS in a few years and I could still follow what they were instructing.
94. Use images that will actually scale
A large mistake that you can make in your slide deck is using low-quality images. They may look great on your computer, but as soon as the slides are put up on a screen, the low quality will show. In this example by ThoughtWorks, all of their presentation background images look great and will scale well to a bigger screen. And that is even after the image compression that LinkedIn most likely does!
95. Take risks with your presentation layout
I honestly was blown away the first time I saw this presentation because it capitalized on such a risky design idea. The creators from Weekdone literally turned their presentation into an 8-Bit video game. A nd if you are looking for something that will stick with your audience, I would take a few creative cues from them!
96. Seriously, you better use memes
In this day and age memes are mainstream, so why wouldn’t you use them in a creative presentation? These do not have to be the coolest meme that all the hip kids are sharing, they can be some of the classics. Like the one that Dana DiTomaso uses on slide 16 to emphasize that it’s a trap!
97. Follow a clear design rhythm
I really like how this presentation introduced each new point in three or four steps, using the same design. It gave the presentation a rhythm that flowed almost like a song!
I would recommend using this approach if you have to introduce multiple points per slide.
98. Use LOTS of icons
If you have made it this far in the list you have already probably seen how effective icons are in presentations. They are the perfect way to support your ideas and make your presentation more pleasing to the eyes.
For example, take a look at all the icons SlideShop uses in this presentation. Almost every slide has at least one icon and a few have more than ten!
99. Give each slide its own spark
I know this goes against earlier points I had about creating a cohesive theme in your presentation layout, but everyone knows that rules are made to be broken (if you can do it better)!
In this slide deck, the team at Officevibe literally created different designs for all 27 of their slides. And to top it off, each of the designs fit the quotes they used extremely well.
100. Use LARGE header cards
An easy way to stick to that “one piece of content on each slide rule” is to use header cards. They are basically the header that you would normally use in a blog post or article, but it gets is own slide before the content. Here is an example of that idea in the real world in this presentation from Brian Downard.
101. Ask your audience questions
I think one of the most common elements I saw in all the slide decks was that they asked the audience questions. You can use questions to engage with your audience and get them thinking a bit harder about the topic. The Site By Norex team did an exceptional job of this when they explored what the topic of what makes up a brand.
Need some more info about creating a memorable brand? Check out some of the best branding stats for 2020 and beyond!
102. Introduce yourself and your brand
I would say that a majority of presentations that I looked at in this list just jumped right into the content without an introduction to the author or brand in the actual slide deck.
This introduction is very important because it establishes your credentials from the beginning, especially if someone is just reading the slide deck. In this example from Losant, they do just that by spending the first few slides telling the audience who they are.
103. Mix up your mediums
Finally, this slide deck effectively marries two very distinct content forms together: digital images and hand-drawn illustrations. In this example, Freshdesk uses the timeless classic of a comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes, in something so modern to inform the audience in a fun way.
104. Show off your credentials
Just like with any piece of content, people are more likely to believe what you are saying if they know what your company does. That is why I really like when people insert their qualifications right into the presentation slides. Just like Andreas von der Heydt, from Amazon, did at the beginning of this presentation about thinking big.
105. Highlight key data points
If you are presenting a chart or graph on a dry topic, I would recommend using a single color to highlight the most important data point. For example, the investment firm a16z uses orange to highlight the data points they want their audience to focus on in each of their charts.
Check out some examples of how to highlight your key information in bar charts .
106. Show your audience where to find more information
A lot of people end their presentations by literally just running out of slides, and that is the wrong way to do it. Instead, CBInsights consistently pushes their readers towards another piece of content at the end. This is also where you can insert a call to action!
107. Tell your origin story
Source
This idea is kinda similar to showing off your company qualifications at the beginning of your presentation. But with this approach, you are trying to make an emotional connection with your audience instead of just showing off accolades.
And Rand from Moz does this extremely well in the presentation example above.
108. Use one focused visual
This presentation uses a central visual of a structure, with each slide moving down the levels of the structure. This is incredibly powerful because the entire presentation is about sinking your company, and the visual they designed mirrors that idea perfectly. Using one focus visual also makes your slide deck design cohesive.
109. Don’t take presentation design too seriously
Sometimes we get caught up trying to make the perfect presentation and it ends up making us crazy!
But in this presentation example, Jesse Desjardins uses a mix of wit and hilarious retro images to create a memorable and light-hearted presentation.
110. Use size to your advantage
I am a big fan of using bubble charts and other charts that use size to compare two pieces of data. That is why I like this pitch deck from the ShearShare team that utilizes a size-based chart on slide number 9. The chart is used to illustrate the massive growth potential in their industry.
111. Split section headers from the main content with different background colors
In this presentation, Seth Familian uses alternating colors in a very interesting way. For each of the title slides, he uses a black color background, but for the content slides he uses a white background.
This helped the readers follow along and comprehend what was on the page even faster. And when you are presenting to hundreds of different types of people, this can make or break your presentation.
112. Have a conversation with your audience
Take a conversational tone in your presentation is a great way to encourage your audience to participate.
In this slide deck example, we presented a simple storyline and use questions to engage with the audience throughout. And it helped create a flow throughout the presentation template that is easy to follow.
113. Include your branding throughout your presentation ideas
Another thing that people seem to forget when they are working on a presentation is to include their business’s branding. You honestly never know where your work is going to be shared, so it is important to make sure people know it’s yours. HubSpot does an outstanding job of this on all their presentations, as you can see in the bottom left corner of each slide.
Plus you have spent a ton of time creating your brand guidelines , might as well use them.
114. Include multiple slides to build to your main point
Try using multiple slides to build to your main point. This helps you walk through the components of one overarching point while also building suspense. In this slide deck, the creator uses 6 slides to build up to one main point, adding a new illustration to the diagram on each slide.
115. Split the difference
Use either the left or right side of the slide to hold your text and the opposite to display an image. If you are using a photo or graphic as the main background in your slides, this is a great way to keep things organized.
116. There are millions of fonts out there…use them
Hey, I love simple fonts just as much as the next guy, but sometimes you need to step up your font game to stand out. For example, WebVisions uses a very gritty, probably custom font in their unique presentation that fits the topic extremely well. Take a look!
117. Build your presentation content around icons
Try using icons as the focal points of your presentation layout. This example from Omer Hameed uses icons to draw the audience’s eyes right to the middle of the presentation, where the main points and headers are located.
118. Mix up font style to emphasize important points
If you would like to draw some extra attention to a certain word or idea, switch up the font to one that is bolder. For example, in this oldie but goodie presentation from HubSpot they use a heavy sans-serif font to highlight ideas, as opposed to the serif font for the other text.
119. Add personal touches to your presentation
If you want to create a truly unique presentation, add personal touches. In the slide numbers 6-13 from this presentation, the creator adds something to their design that no one else could ever have: they use original drawings they did themselves.
120. Harness the power of your own brand colors
Sometimes people forget that they already have a battle-tested color palette that they can use in their brand colors . I try to incorporate one of our brand colors in most of my designs and it makes so much easier to choose colors.
In this simple presentation example, Spitfire Creative used a palette that had both of their brand colors throughout the slideshow.
121. Used dark-colored blocks to highlight words
I have seen this trick used in a lot of presentations and it works well. Highlight certain words or phrases by laying them overtop a colored rectangle. Take slide number 7 in this presentation example as a great guide. Use it to bring attention to a saying or idea you really want your audience to remember.
122. Show the audience your mug
This presentation example comes from the same presentation as a previous one, but it was too good not to share. Throughout the slides, you will see Rand from Moz pop up to add a human element to the design. Using an image of your team or yourself can put the audience at ease and make it easier to connect with the presenter.
123. Include a helpful table of contents
I only saw this presentation idea used a few times throughout my research, but I believe it should be used a lot more. A table of contents will help the audience know what to expect and keep their focus throughout. Especially if you are creating a presentation that is a bit longer than normal.
124. Do not post just screenshots, do more
Screenshots of a program or app are very common in any blog post, but I think you can do a little better when it comes to presentations.
So instead of just posting a boring screenshot, add a little more to the slide by using illustrations and product shots. If you are not sure what I am talking about, just check out how great the screenshots look at slide numbers 7 and 8 in this presentation.
125. Highlight keywords using BOLD color
Here’s another slide deck that uses different colors and blocks to highlight keywords. If you are going to use text-heavy slides, then make sure the key points are easy to pick out. Take this slide deck: starting in slide number 4, they highlight exactly what they want you to take away from the text on each slide!
Enough presentation ideas for you?
You made it! I applaud you for making it through all those presentations. Hopefully, now you have a few nifty presentation ideas ready for when you need them.
The next step is to create a presentation that will captivate a meeting room, an amphitheater, and even the world (hey, it doesn’t hurt to dream big).
.css-1qrtm5m{display:block;margin-bottom:8px;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:14px;line-height:1.5714285714285714;-webkit-letter-spacing:-0.35px;-moz-letter-spacing:-0.35px;-ms-letter-spacing:-0.35px;letter-spacing:-0.35px;font-weight:300;color:#606F7B;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1qrtm5m{font-size:16px;line-height:1.625;-webkit-letter-spacing:-0.5px;-moz-letter-spacing:-0.5px;-ms-letter-spacing:-0.5px;letter-spacing:-0.5px;}} Best Practices The #1 rule for improving your presentation slides
by Tom Rielly • May 12, 2020
When giving presentations, either on a video conference call or in person, your slides, videos and graphics (or lack of them) can be an important element in helping you tell your story or express your idea. This is the first of a series of blog posts that will give you tips and tricks on how to perfect your visual presentations.
Your job as a presenter is to build your idea -- step-by-step -- in the minds of your audience members. One tool to do that is presentation graphics, such as slides and videos.
Why graphics for your presentation?
A common mistake is using slides or videos as a crutch, even if they don’t actually add anything to your presentation. Not all presentations need graphics. Lots of presentations work wonderfully with just one person standing on a stage telling a story, as demonstrated by many TED Talks.
You should only use slides if they serve a purpose: conveying scientific information, art, and things that are hard to explain without pictures. Once you have decided on using slides, you will have a number of decisions to make. We’ll help you with the basics of making a presentation that is, above all, clear and easy to understand. The most important thing to remember here is: less is more.
Less is so much more
You want to aim for the fewest number of slides, the fewest number of photos, the fewest words per slide, the least cluttered slides and the most white space on your slides. This is the most violated slide rule, but it is the secret to success. Take a look at these examples.
As you can see in the above example, you don’t need fancy backgrounds or extra words to convey a simple concept. If you take “Everything you need to know about Turtles”, and delete “everything you need to know about” leaving just “turtles”, the slide has become much easier for your audience to read, and tells the story with economy.
The above example demonstrates that a single image that fills the entire screen is far more powerful than a slide cluttered with images. A slide with too many images may be detrimental to your presentation. The audience will spend more mental energy trying to sort through the clutter than listening to your presentation. If you need multiple images, then put each one on its own slide. Make each image high-resolution and have it fill the entire screen. If the photos are not the same dimensions as the screen, put them on a black background. Don’t use other colors, especially white.
Your slides will be much more effective if you use the fewest words, characters, and pictures needed to tell your story. Long paragraphs make the audience strain to read them, which means they are not paying attention to you. Your audience may even get stressed if you move on to your next slide before they’ve finished reading your paragraph. The best way to make sure the attention stays on you is to limit word count to no more than 10 words per slide. As presentation expert Nancy Duarte says “any slide with more than 10 words is a document.” If you really do need a longer explanation of something, handouts or follow-up emails are the way to go.
Following a “less is more” approach is one of the simplest things you can do to improve your presentation visuals and the impact of your presentation overall. Make sure your visuals add to your presentation rather than distract from it and get your message across.
Ready to learn more about how to make your presentation even better? Get TED Masterclass and develop your ideas into TED-style talks.
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How to Create an Inspiring Presentation for your Workshop
Have you ever been at a presentation or workshop and found yourself forcing your eyes to stay open?
Bored out of your mind, and struggling to focus, the host is bleating on… and on. The concepts are too hard to follow, the words becoming a meaningless, tiresome cloud. Next time you struggle to sleep, it’ll be this guy’s waffling drivel that’ll send you to the land of nod.
Together, we’ll discover how to put the “Pow!” back into PowerPoint.
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A step-by-step guide to planning a workshop, how to create an unforgettable training session in 8 simple steps, 47 useful online tools for workshop planning and meeting facilitation.
In this article we’ll explore:
- Why visual presentations are important
- What to consider when planning presentations
How to design an engaging visual presentation
- How to choose an engaging format
- Which tools are best for designing presentations
- Tips on how to deliver your workshop presentation
Why Are Visual Presentations Important?
The purpose is to share brilliant ideas with an audience. This might be a piece of work or an educational concept in a workshop; the aim is to communicate with people, make them feel something , and take action. We all want our audience to leave an event feeling motivated and inspired, and that the workshop was of value.
The importance of visuals is often overlooked, either due to a lack of confidence in working with visual design, lack of time or both. For a workshop facilitator, using visual aids could actually save time, better represent our ideas and concepts to a group, and help you present more confidently. “How?”, you ask.
When it comes to saving time, a picture is really worth a thousand words. There is no need to type up your presentations or make wordy bullet points on every slide when a simple image can share the message for you.
Visual presentations put across an immediate message. Images are emotive and can deliver a story much faster than words, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text . An image that can share an idea, can be more memorable than trying to remember very specific terminology.
Creating visuals becomes part of a wider conversation in inclusive communication. Images are universally understood, and the eyes can “read” a picture with less effort than reading and comprehending several paragraphs. Imagine describing the color blue as a phrase. It is much easier to present it as it exists.
Graphics are easy to share, and 65% of us are Visual learners . For anyone who has missed out on the meeting, a visual booklet can do the job of sharing the subject with them, and the added benefit of being able to view it in their own time. The power of social media also plays a huge part in the spreading of information and well-designed infographic slides can take your presentations and workshops outside of the room, with the potential to make a global impact. Sharability goes further with visual elements.
For me, a visual presentation is a lifesaver! Using slides has saved me a lot of time and made me feel more confident whilst presenting too. I don’t fumble around with notes, as the visuals can act as a prompt to remind me of where I’m at in my talk.
When presenting online, I find the value of visuals and slides even more important. It takes the attention away from my actions, and onto the graphics themselves. The participants can hear what I’m saying, but their eyes focus on the visual information which helps in retaining information and ideas beyond the workshop.
What to consider when creating a visual presentation
I’m naturally quite a visual person, and I’ve often wondered if I could make a visual presentation without planning first what it is that I want to say. As an experiment, I gave it a go and it was a huge struggle. So, if you think that designing visuals is something that only designers can do and that they find it easy… it doesn’t and they don’t.
As a starting point: get out a pen and paper and write down everything you want to say. This ensures you have all of the ideas and information out in black and white . I find that by leaving space between the writing and structuring, coming back at it with fresh eyes is a perfect way to work without feeling rushed. I rarely add to what I’ve written, it’s mostly about removing.
Recently I had written a LOT of information for an event. A day later, I took a second view to edit. A lot of writing is quite self-indulgent, so it helps to consider the audience . I cut up sections of the paper, keeping only what was the most necessary information , and collated it together. The rest of the sentences didn’t make the cut. You can try the editing exercise here .
Less is More- an exercise in editing #presentation #presentation skills #writing #workshop #meeting design This exercise is ideal for editing written content in a hands-on way. A simple and effective exercise for editing workshop content or presentation text for talks. Use it when you have to write for a specific audience and want them to stay focused on the most important information.
As an expert in your field, it’s likely you’ll have a lot of content, and editing is so valuable to ensure your audience has relevant details. Don’t bore their socks off 😉
So now that you have an idea of your core content, you can move along the process, considering these factors before jumping into the design stages:
Let’s start by asking, “ who is your audience? “
- if you are being commissioned to present a topic to a pre-determined group, then you’ll need to cater to their understanding of the topic. You’ll want to ensure that the information will be relevant and meets or goes beyond their expectations.
- if the topic is of your own choice, and the angle you’ve chosen to take, who do you want to take part? Finding them, and attracting them to the workshop will be part of your marketing efforts, as well as how you plan your structure and content.
We wouldn’t plan a workshop for ten-year-olds in the same way we might for adults. Consider what tone of voice you might use, the style in which we present how we use slides, and the content itself. You won’t be able to do this for each and every individual, but how you determine and empathize with your listeners can be done by creating a persona, or several personas .
Create an overarching idea of who might be present, then consider how to engage them and meet their needs by asking yourself the following in more depth:
Why are they there?
Let’s look at their reason for attending your event. Have they come to learn from you in particular? If you are a specialist in your field and the workshop is an area of great interest to people, you’ll most likely have a deep understanding, and along with that, expectations to be filled.
Have they come to gain a better understanding of the topic? Are they there to challenge themselves and their existing views, or perhaps yours?
How much do they know already?
Are your participants already proficient in the topic you’re delivering? You’d hopefully know this in advance of your workshop so you can adapt your material, and create a pitch in line with the group’s knowledge. If their experience level is unknown, an opener to your discussion might be to ask about their subject knowledge, ideas and expectations. That way you can tailor your language and approach.
It helps to be well versed in your workshop, to select sections you can skip out in favor of diving deeper into more advanced information. Improvisation isn’t usually a skill you’d immediately connect with presenting, but with practice, learning how to improvise can become an empowering tool to have.
For beginners, you’ll most likely take an introductory approach. This doesn’t mean it has to be dry or boring. Make it more interesting and engaging by weaving in an interactive exercise, or team debate within your presentation design. That way, the participants can gather more hands-on experience to support their understanding. This can of course use visual handouts, such as a workbook, or include a well-designed visual exercise on an interactive whiteboard.
What is their background and communication style?
Your presentation style, language, and cultural references should be considered in the writing and designing process. I recently attended a workshop on how we can create better inclusion for diverse audiences by considering the language we use. It really made me think about how we often lean towards using English as a “default” language, and how words often hold different weights and contexts in other languages.
Remote workshops and presentations mean we may have a very diverse audience than if we were presenting in-person, in one location. Online could mean 140 people in different time zones across different countries with different backgrounds. Being aware of differences makes it easier to use inclusive, easy-to-understand language in your presentation so that no one feels alienated. Speaking with clear articulation will make a big difference in how you are understood.
You might have the best workshop on the planet, but if you don’t communicate in the style of your group, the impact will be lost. Do they want a short and snappy talk with a clear outcome at the end? Some audiences appreciate a motivational and inspirational talk that is led through emotional storytelling. Knowing their communication preferences can win over or lose your audience.
Before you begin designing your presentation, it’s important to consider what your purpose is. This is your mission statement, your project brief and your raison d’être. Here is where you want to ask yourself, what is it that you want your audience to think, feel or do? Are we creating an emotional impact or an educational goal?
Be as clear as possible with your core message, making it as specific as possible, so that you can keep this in mind throughout the process of writing, editing, designing and delivering presentations. This will keep your focus sharp, and avoid any unnecessary derailments taking your viewers away from what it is you hope to achieve.
Common purposes are to: inspire, inform, persuade or entertain .
- I want to inspire the audience to help reduce food poverty by leading a cookery workshop using supermarket waste.
- I want to inform the group about the future of rural tourism, so they might consider how they could adapt their own farming businesses to host visitors.
- I want to persuade my team to reduce our use of plastic in the fashion industry, by presenting a viable alternative made from mushrooms.
- I want to entertain by pretending to be a Martian visiting Earth for the first time . My purpose is to help the participants understand their product from a new perspective!
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home #creative thinking #idea generation #remote-friendly #brainstorming #energizer #team Use Craig Raine’s poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home to spur creative thinking and encourage perspective shifting in a group. After a warm-up, you can then use this martian perspective to describe your product or service and gain new insights and ideas.
I recently designed a workshop called Design Thinking for Beginners and ran a SessionLab show and tell session aimed at facilitators who would like to run the workshop for teams new to design thinking. If you missed it, you can watch it back here. My purpose was to inform the attendees of the challenges newbies have with design thinking, and how they can make it a fun and digestible process.
I chose to relate each stage of design thinking to an everyday project of choosing or baking a birthday cake. My presentation was broken down into manageable chunks. Describing design thinking could be a laborious task, but keeping the text definition simple, with plenty of white space highlighted the point in one sentence.
For the workshop itself, I incorporated interactive exercises throughout the process to lock in the understanding of design thinking and how we generate ideas. For the ideate stage of design thinking- I created a game show style exercise called the Ideas Vault where I chose to create a fun layout like a 90s computer game. The design process worked by gathering inspiration using a mix of pre-made Canva templates and adding my own twist. I talk more about Canva and design tools here .
The way you choose to structure a visual presentation will depend wholly on the purpose. The way you communicate your key message should be crafted in a way for the audience to follow along easily and act on those all-important takeaways at the end.
A solid structure will also make sure your points are clear so that you stay calm and on track when presenting. The structure of your topic, when written down and broken into manageable chunks will help hugely when it comes to creating the visual elements later. (we’ll get to that in the next section!)
Some common ways to structure your presentation could be
- Problem > Solution > Impact. Which you might use if your purpose is to inspire the audience to take action on a topic, by showing them a viable solution.
- You may start with an informative session and create a workshop as we mentioned before, to lead people through a learning process.
- A creative structure might be through storytelling , which might inspire and entertain. Once upon a time, this event happened, followed by the outcome and moral of the story.
- In any case, your presentation could follow the classic layout of: introduction, main body & conclusion, and you’d have a good foundation for your content.
Introduction
You have the first few seconds to grab people’s attention. First impressions are just as important as they’re made out to be! The introduction is the most important part, where the group will connect with you and decide if they want to listen to you or not. What would be a great hook for the audience to immediately buy into your presentation from the start?
Some people introduce themselves at the beginning- but you don’t have to. If you’re beginning with a story, this can be a very effective way to warm up your participants and make sure they’re really listening to you. Then you can introduce yourself when you know they have your attention, and they value what you have to say.
A quote or a provocative question or fact can get people thinking. You may use a thought-provoking image, which could be a prop, a video or a photo that introduces your presentation from the get-go. If you are offering a solution, go straight to the problem in your introduction.
Main body of presentation
Now that you’ve got your audience’s attention, and they have gathered an understanding and are intrigued to learn more, we can delve into the juice of your subject.
The main body involves presenting the data, and the important pieces of information. If you are offering a solution to the problem you introduced, expressing this with a visual, we place the subject right in front of them, and they don’t have to work so hard and use their imagination.
The main body doesn’t have to be a one-sided conversation. Listen! You might ask the group to interact, asking for their perspective. A talk or workshop can be a dialogue between the presenter and the group.
Your conclusion should be as snappy and engaging as your introduction. It may even loop back to the provocative question, or challenging problem. You’ll want to consider the impact on the attendees and most importantly, what you want them to do next! What action do you want them to take beyond the workshop?
What are the key takeaways? Highlight them as Problem > Solution > Impact.
An effective class should tie up the opening question and objective, but still leave space for further exploration and discussion. Like a great film! They should not be saying, “I’m glad that’s over”. If it’s been designed with the audience in mind, they should feel something- energized or excited.
Now that you’ve written the content and designed the structure, here are our top tips to get you creating impactful visuals to complement what you present verbally. We’ll cover:
- How to design your slides and what information to include
- How typography impacts accessibility and design
- Making smart color choices for both emotional connection and accessibility
Designing your slides
When approaching a blank canvas, it can be hard to know where to start. Some people start with deciding how many slides they’ll use- the question, “How many slides are too many slides?” crops up regularly in these types of articles. Expert presenters say not to go over 20 visual slides, but this will of course depend on the length and complexity of your subject. Another tip is not to spend more than a minute on each slide to keep it snappy and people engaged.
If I am creating a presentation from scratch, I’ll start with the first slide, and keep it very simple before moving on to the next one. Always asking “what is this slide saying? ” The first slide will be the title of my discussion, which will be visible to everyone joining the room. It sets the tone for what the topic will be about. If we were creating one around the topic of designing workshop slides, it might look like this:
I think the most important thing to remember is that each slide should have its own purpose, and not be overloaded with text. Where possible, use an image rather than words and think about how we might convey this message visually. Always start by defining the message and asking what the key takeaway for participants is. You can always further explain verbally.
When choosing an image, consider the audience and their context- a local photograph they can relate to, or a familiar face will often have more to say than a generic stock image.
Text will likely be used on your slides, and how much text is too much? If you begin planning your content by writing it all out and keeping only the most important parts, designing your slides will be a lot easier. I’d always recommend editing continuously throughout the process to create a meaningful message. If you can say something in 3 bullet points rather than 10, please do! Your audience will have a much easier time retaining the information.
“Good design is invisible”
Unless the subject of your presentation is about typography, it’s probably not the best time to be cracking out your most recently found, favorite font that’s “a bit different” or unusual. Stick to standard, trusted and most legible fonts that audiences can read and are familiar with. Otherwise, they’ll distract from the content. And content is King.
“Good design is invisible”, a true and very useful phrase from Dieter Rams, who considers functionality in design as honest, long-lasting and with as little design as possible. This is a good theory to take throughout the design process. When looking for the right font, consider the tone you are using throughout your delivery too, and the overall message you are giving.
Good typography is your best friend for a presentation. When creating visuals for screens, as mentioned before, we are not typing out our speech word-for-word. Any text that is visually presented will have a very definite purpose as to why it is being displayed. This might be a quote, some data or the title of a book along with some further information in short form. Presentation slides are not a book.
Legibility is the most important thing when it comes to designing your visuals. Sans serif fonts are typically the best option for reading on a screen. Help your audience understand what you are communicating as quickly and easily as possible by ensuring the font sizes are easy to read.
Create contrast and visual interest by choosing two fonts, one for headers and one for any body text. The contrast should still be harmonious, and not jarring to the eyes. Font hierarchy can help the audience differentiate between key points and more specific information. By choosing different weights and sizes, you can ensure your message is clearly heard and understood.
- Minimum font size for main copy and bullets: 18 points
- Preferred font size for main copy and bullets: 24 points
- Preferred font size for headers or titles: 36 to 44 points
Personally, I like to choose font sizes slightly larger than recommended for body text. When we have a text-heavy page, I prefer to give the text plenty of surrounding white space and edit the copy as much as possible. From a design perspective, it helps legibility; and from a content perspective, it doubly ensures only the relevant text is presented on screen. I would definitely edit again at this stage. In this example for screens, the body text is 28pt and written in Open Sans, and the “Ideate” heading is 44pt in Agrandir wide.
Before creating any printed material for presentations, consider if it will truly be used and the environmental impact. I’d usually opt for sharing a digital version for people to refer back to after the workshop. It’s good practice to create a black and white version so that if it is printed out, the printing costs will be lower. There are of course digital accessibility issues, and some people might prefer a printed version. If so, select a serif font for any long text in a workbook or feedback form, with a minimum font size of 10-12pt.
Key points:
- Use Contrast
Deciding on the color scheme for a presentation is one of my favorite parts! Of course, you may have been given a branded color scheme to use, but if you have free reign in color choice and you enjoy the creative process, it can be a lot of fun.
For my show and tell on Design Thinking, I used the analogy of baking a cake and I felt that they conjure up an image of pastels. I used a gradient on the background so that I could use an array of colors without it being overbearing. I selected five key pastel colors for each stage of design thinking and to evoke a playful feel throughout. I was careful not to allow the colors to take over, so you’ll primarily see black and white use of color at the forefront for legibility.
Here are the key elements of how to choose a color scheme to complement your content :
The first, and most important point when choosing colors, is to use contrast. Make sure your text and graphics stand out from the background and are easily seen. Contrast is the difference in opposing colors so that they don’t blend in together A light background should use dark text and perhaps one or two bold accent colors to highlight key points. A dark background should use light fonts.
If you’re unsure of how easy a slide is to read, there are an array of online tools that can check the contrast for you by following the web accessibility guidelines. On Contrast Checker , you can enter the HEX code of the background and foreground colors, and you’ll get an idea of legibility. The sliders in the tool can be used if you need to improve the contrast and amend the color choices. There are also resources to guide you in how to select the color with an online eyedropper tool in case you’re not familiar with the HEX color codes.
Another contrast checker tool also shows the background and foreground with text examples and gives a rating to the accessibility of the text. This website has a whole host of tools, and can even pick a suitable palette for you.
If you’re working with a client, they may already have their own brand packaging and presentation template, including their colors. You may feel that this removes your choice of colors as it has been decided already, for example, they may use an in-house color language to refer to particular data on a graph. But the opposite may be true and might mean further considerations for visuals. It is important to know how to choose because when you create graphics or diagrams because you may have to select colors so that explanatory text can be seen on top of a shape or part of a graph.
When working with a client, it is important to share any documentation with their design team, and the best way to do this is by providing editable files. Working with a designer can massively lift the load on creating your presentation visuals. If there is no design team, but you are given design assets to work with, sharing both your visuals and your presentation agenda for collaboration and sign-off is a must. Create your agenda in SessionLab , and attach your visual presentation for ease of sharability.
Studies have shown that color has an effect on expressing or feeling emotions. It will help to consider the tone that you are using throughout your presentation, the message you are delivering, and how you might want your audience to feel.
Warm colors, in the middle of the color spectrum, that aren’t too bold or too light create a warm and comfortable feeling. Bright reds and oranges can feel energetic and powerful. Or even create a sense of danger. In contrast, cooler colors such as greens, blues and purples can feel calm or evoke a sense of sadness.
We have an exercise that can help identify emotions and grow a better emotional vocabulary, the feelings wheel . It includes a visual attachment displaying the emotions in a range of colors- this may help select a tone for your color scheme.
The Feeling Wheel #emotional intelligence #self-awareness #icebreaker #team building #remote-friendly By growing our emotional vocabulary, we can better identify our emotions, and check in with ourselves. Doing so can help bring a level of self-awareness, and a better understanding of others.
How to choose an engaging presentation format
We are almost there! The content is edited and your visual slides are ready, the next stage is to consider the format in which you’ll deliver your workshop or meeting. This is when you can consider any additional tools that you can use to your advantage when presenting. This might be video, photography or visual data. Or even props. Consider which other visual aids may help people to better understand the process or story you are conveying.
What presentation method will keep them engaged? How will you inspire and capture their imagination?
I’d recommend simplicity, and not try to include every form of media. Consider the purpose and message and select which format delivers it most effectively. Used with intention, video can be great. But animated graphics or flashy text is unnecessary and will add to the cognitive load of your audience, especially if they have any visual impairments.
Video can be very effective, so long as it’s kept brief. If it’s longer than a minute, you may lose the attention of the audience, and the momentum of your presentation. A film clip should be creative and add another dimension, not an infomercial or promo piece, it’s a tool to say something that you cannot put across otherwise.
Films can have great benefits of showing a story. In a TED Talk about the intelligence of crows, the scientist showed a clip of the crow bending a hook to create a tool and fish a piece of food out of a tube. It put across his point better than anything he could’ve said.
I use recordings in situations like this, to demonstrate a case study. It’s often more powerful to have the original storyteller sharing their experience than me giving a second-hand account of the tale. Bringing in other voices in this way can add further diversity to your workshop.
Still images
JPEGs are compressed files and are used for photo formats. When a photo is taken, it is a RAW file that is editable. Once it’s compressed to a JPEG, it retains around a tenth of the information, meaning it is a smaller and less detailed file. JPEGS are used in photography, but not in vector graphics (drawings, typography, graphs, etc), as the detail lost can create pixelation if you aim to blow the image up to a larger size.
PNGs retain detail and are editable. They are still compressed files, but the pixels aren’t lost. Any graphics you create should be saved as a PNG, as you’ll be able to keep the image sharp, regardless of the size.
The photography you choose must be relatable. I’m definitely not against stock imagery per se, it’s amazing to have access to a library of searchable images to strengthen what you are saying. But, often you’ll see the same images repeated in different workshops and presentations and they’ll start to lose their meaning, or become too familiar. There are great free resources like Unsplash and if you spend time looking for a more unique way to put your point across, there are lots to choose from.
I’ve also had an Adobe Express subscription which gives access to photography and graphics and templates which you to customize in editing with little design skills. Ideally, being able to take your own photographs, or work with a professional photographer to capture exactly what you want is going to give your audience a far more unique experience. This is often a luxury.
As facilitators, a way around this could be to create our own library of photos that we capture at each presentation. When I’ve run crafting workshops, it feels quite natural to take photographs of the work we are creating. And those who are camera-shy, they’re more open to photographs of their hands in action. Over time, we’ll have a whole collection of resources.
If you enjoy photography, having a good camera as part of your kit might intrigue people, invite people to take photos of each other and the workshop process. This could be an exercise that you do to open or close your talk. Or in some cases, especially if it’s a visual presentation, and not too distracting, invite people to take their own photos and share after with a #hashtag (promo and photos in one!) And of course, get everyone’s signature attesting they are OK with photos.
Visual data & symbols
Visualizing data makes it more interesting, engaging and memorable than cold hard figures. For the majority of audiences, it’s easier to understand in a visual format than in a list of forgettable numbers. By creating charts, graphs or maps, we are able to see patterns and understand the context of the statistics. A pie chart displaying percentages in corresponding colors tells our brain quickly which section has the largest number.
Even when we analyze word-driven data, a visual representation is easier to see straight away. When I’ve worked with community groups in the design thinking process, we’ve often used Google surveys to capture written evidence. This type of qualitative data can be a challenge to sift through, so for an initial overview, a tool like word cloud can show how many times a particular word or phrase appears and turns it into an image. The more times a word appears, the larger it is on the image.
The use of icons and emojis (sparingly! And in context 😉) can add another element of visual understanding to presentations. Illustrations and hand-dawn symbols might better express your point than a photograph too. An opportunity to work with a live scribe or graphic facilitator whilst presenting could add an interesting dimension to a talk. If it involves audience participation, having someone on hand to capture the conversation visually can keep engagement and attention going!
The best tools for designing your presentation
Canva has become a much more powerful tool than it was. You can even edit your workshop recordings with it now! It’s perfect for anyone with little design knowledge as it has great templates for presentations, lots of which are free. It has social media templates too, which are perfect for advertising your upcoming workshop.
Adobe Creative Suite
I do love Creative Suite , and it still is a great package of tools for designers. Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign are the industry standard for design tools and have all the capabilities you’d need as a graphic designer. If that package is beyond your scope, Adobe Express is a great option for pre-made templates and stock imagery. Like Canva, it also works well as an app on a smartphone.
Keynote
Keynote comes as standard with MacBook and has had a whole new upgrade including being able to use the camera on your Mac or an external camera to show yourself directly on the slides. Super handy for an online event! You can also show the screen of a connected iPad or iPhone and it now has co-hosting capabilities.
Of course! SessionLab is where you can keep all of your presentation notes, and break down the agenda into blocks, so if you decide to switch up parts of your presentation- you can drag and drop to a different section of your talk. It is a much easier process, as it will also keep any other attachments or exercises in that block neatly collated in one place. It’s easy to share with any co-hosts or clients before the presentation day arrives!
How to deliver a workshop presentation with visuals
Some people memorize their speech word for word, which can work well if you’re a dab hand at amateur dramatics.
On the other hand, that might feel too stressful or rigid. Bill Murray is famously known to read a script once and throw it away! For you, it may be better to consider the key points you’d like to make, and really know your subject matter so whatever arises, you’ve got it covered. Your visuals might act as a prompt for you too, the main message will be communicated visually, and you can feel free to go into more depth.
The best way to ensure that you nailed the slide design for your session is to practice. It’s important to practice noting your timing, that you’ve covered all the important points, and that each slide transitions smoothly from one to the next. You want the presentation to be as seamless as possible. The best way to practice is in front of someone and gather feedback.
Before our design thinking for beginners show and tell, I rehearsed in front of my fellow team members, instructing them to wear their “facilitator’s hats” whilst listening, so they could hear from a facilitator’s perspective and give constructive feedback.
Afterward, you can continue to add and edit, removing some sections, and making room for more key discussions to be had in-depth. If it is an informal presentation that you will run more than once, it could develop over time. If it is a one-off very important meeting, it’s vital to get as much preparation practice as possible.
Expect nerves
If I get nervous, I purposely talk slightly slower than I usually would naturally, and it calms the nerves down. There’s also no harm in mentioning that you’re nervous, it’s an honest approach and can create an authentic connection.
We’re all human. And no one would expect you to not be nervous. Nerves, to an extent, can be a good thing. They bring a bit of energy and focus to your talk, and a little adrenaline. If you know your subject matter inside out, all you really need to do is breathe, and talk.
Speaking with one of our community members, Yvonne Chin Irving on the subject of nerves, she suggested diaphragmatic breathing, or more a more fun term, “balloon breathing”:
Belly breathe. Slowly. Imagine your tummy has a balloon that fills up when you breathe. Exhale all the air. Notice your tummy as it flattens. Next, breathe in slowly and fill your “balloon” with breath 🎈. Do this a few times to help calm yourself down. You can start this on the way to your session, do it in the car or while you’re setting up for your session. (It really works) Yvonne Chin Irving
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Having a technical rehearsal beforehand can help avoid blips. Ensure the right people have screen-sharing abilities, and that screens in the in-person space work. Iron out any microphone issues or problems with echo prior to the big presentation! On the day itself a technical disaster could strike, so here are some practical tips to circumnavigate these and stay professional:
- Create different formats for your presentation. If it’s a Keynote or Powerpoint, have a PDF version available in case of any tech issues you’ll still have a high-quality version available.
- If including video, have backup screen-shots as images to demonstrate your points in case the video doesn’t run.
- Be analog ready. Know your presentation without the use of slides- or print them out so that if there is a complete technical breakdown, you can confidently present. This might include creating printed handouts for people to refer to when you direct them to do so. Or, if they have their own smartphones, send them the link to your visuals or any important videos to watch back after your talk, to avoid distractions as you speak.
Accessibility
Ensuring your audience has the best experience, requires being aware of accessibility needs. Is access to the building easy for anyone with physical disabilities? Are the seats comfortable, and allow for ease of viewing for people of different heights?
We’ve discussed the best way to use typography for ease of reading for anyone with visual impairments, and when setting up your screen, it is a good idea to see how it will look in the actual event environment. Additionally, you may share larger-print handouts on yellow paper for anyone with dyslexia. This is another reason why knowing your audience in the planning stage will make sure your presentation is enjoyable and accessible for everyone.
Agenda planning
SessionLab is an agenda planning tool that makes presenting a lot smoother! You are able to allocate time to each section of content to keep yourself on track throughout. In your preparation stage, you can attach all of your materials to your SessionLab agenda, knowing exactly when you’ll use each of them. It’s so neatly organized and easy to edit and shift blocks if you decide to change the order of content for a future session.
In conclusion
I hope you have found this guide valuable, and that it inspires lots of ideas when planning your next presentation! There are a wealth of resources dotted around this article, and I’ll include a few more here that I highly recommend:
Lean Presentation Design A whole website by Maurizo la Cava dedicated to presentation strategy
Ted Talk: How to Write Less, but say more is an excellent talk by Jim VandeHai about short and effective communication.
Five Things to Know About Your Audience Before You Present if You Want to Be Successful useful tips on how to empathize with your group for a more successful presentation.
Let us know below in the comments if you have any questions, or any tips of your own to add to the conversation!
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Effective online tools are a necessity for smooth and engaging virtual workshops and meetings. But how do you choose the right ones? Do you sometimes feel that the good old pen and paper or MS Office toolkit and email leaves you struggling to stay on top of managing and delivering your workshop? Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to make your life easier when you need to facilitate a meeting and lead workshops. In this post, we’ll share our favorite online tools you can use to make your job as a facilitator easier. In fact, there are plenty of free online workshop tools and meeting facilitation software you can…
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Engage your audience with powerful visual presentations.
Visual tools are critical to have in any presentation as they’re one of the key presentation aids that will help enhance your overall presentation .
We’ll give you tips on how to develop a sense of good presentation design whether you’re using PowerPoint, Prezi, Google Slides or any presentation software under the sun. The secret to creating a great presentation does not lie in a superior software, but understanding a few universal design concepts that can applied for all types of visual presentations.
Don’t be afraid to use a few presentation templates – there are ways to make the presentation ideas in those templates your own ideas and advance it in several different ways. Let’s make your next presentation on point and designed beautifully.
Presentations Are The Visual Communication Tool To Your Story
In the age of information, people remember facts faster through stories. Keep your bullet points and information short. You can use a rule of thumb to not put more than a paragraph and 3 points per slide to start.
Make your presentation the visual component of your story, but not something your audience has to read. Something that is short and succinct on screen will capture your audience’s attention and make sure they retain the main points of your message.
This does not mean incomplete slides. A common mistake presenters make is putting too little information on a slide in the name of simplicity when in fact they’re leaving out the main context.
A well designed visual presentation has a great story behind it and a well rehearsed voice telling it as well. Engaging the audience is also a great way to associate meaning or connection to the content of your slide decks. Ask questions and tell stories while showing off a great visual presentation! Think of writing the copy like writing for social media – you only have a certain amount of characters to use and a short audience attention span.
General Tips For Visual Presentations
Before you begin creating your presentation, you first need to know what makes effective presentations – storytelling. Such presentations target the audience’s emotions leading to a stronger connection to the audience member and the main point of the presentation.
Below are some storytelling tips for your slides, but remember to keep the presentation itself simple and practice makes perfect. And again, these are more for your spoken component that accompanies the visual component. These tips can be useful because they can be applied to all your presentations in general.
Step 1 is to ask yourself who your audience is and how to convey the key message you have in mind to them. Once you settle on your message, you can start designing your slides with that direction in mind.
You may wonder how to connect with an audience with your slides. Look to your own experiences, your own speaking style and tailor your message to what you know. Not many people want to hear others recite facts with no real meaning driving the story. Ask yourself, “Why does this matter to the audience and why should they care?”.
There is a lot of trust that can be built when the audience has a genuine connection to the presenter. Overall, if you have something that can solve a problem or teach someone complex things, that is enough to form a connection with your audience.
Think of the last app you used, the last email you read or perhaps the last business you purchased from. What was the content or visual elements that pulled you in?
Are you making a PowerPoint, Prezi or other form of visual presentation but it’s taking too much of your time? Enlist the help of Presentation Geeks and consider outsourcing your presentation design . Outsourcing your presentation slides allows you to free more of your time while still getting the results of an interesting presentation. You’ll have the support of expert slide designers who know what presentation visuals work and don’t work thanks to years of presentation feedback and background knowledge.
Color Design Tips For Presentation Slides
When designing your presentation, make sure you take into consideration the colors you’re using. We’ve listed a few background color combinations you might want to consider when developing the overall slide deck and the font to use.
Color Wheel Alignments:
Primary Colors: Red, yellow, blue
Secondary Colors: Green, orange, purple
Tertiary Colors: Yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green & yellow-green
Analogous Colors: These are any three colors which are side by side on a color wheel. (Think green, lime green, yellow)
Complementary Colors: These are colors that are directly opposite of a color wheel. (Think green vs. purple, red vs. blue)
Monochromatic Colors: This is when you use one color and various shades or hues of it. It works well for minimal looks.
Color moods:
Red/Orange/Yellow: Generally these convey a sense of energy, are warm colors and catch your attention. Yellow is a happy warm color on one end and red is very striking and can warn of danger, and symbolizes importance, passion and sometimes violence.
Blue/Purple/Green: These colors are calming, reserved, elegant and often used for corporate slides. Think of how indigo blue is used for many large corporate entities. Green often is branded with earth or medical brands. Purple often conveys a sense of royalty, money and creativity.
Use The Power Of Photography Or Video
Pictures and videos are great visuals to incorporate into any presentation. Remember the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Well, it’s true! Photos help visualize complex information. You’ll often come across a lot of photos in research presentations as they help the audience understand examples better.
They can also save you from having to put a thousand thoughts into the PowerPoint presentation slide!
The first tip we can give to make a great visual presentation is to choose all your photos before you start. This way you can keep the consistency of the images across your slide deck and make sure they’re somewhat alike in terms of composition, mood and brand.
Use free stock photos
You don’t have to take the photos or videos yourself.
There are plenty of free resources and web pages for stock photos online – Unsplash , Pexels , Pixabay , Free Range , Creative Commons and some photos from Freepik are free to use with some accreditation.
Effective photo use
Make sure you pick an image that will focus on the main theme of the slide. One image is usually enough if the image choice is very relevant to the slide. If you have multiple photos, avoid poor or loose placement of photos all over the slide. Try to use a grid or gallery placement and it will immediately enhance the layout of the slide.
If you pick great images, making presentations can be faster. Instead of having to create an elaborate template with multiple elements, a photo with a couple of bullet points can go a long way in terms of capturing attention and making your presentation slides look professional. This is true on any presentation design platform – whether its PowerPoint, Google Slides, etc.
You can also embed videos whether they’re located on your computer, YouTube, Vimeo or other major video streaming sites. If you’re feeling nervous about your presentation or have a complex message that would be hard to condense in one slide, a video is a dynamic way of conveying your message in any type of presentation.
The Typography You Use Matters
Typography is how you will arrange and present the words in your presentation. An audience can engage when text is readable, functional and works well with the other elements in the presentation. Fonts and sizing are a good place to start establishing the tone of your presentation.
Overview of Font Choices
Elegant fonts often denote a sense of luxury or lifestyle tone. Use script fonts sparingly, but as titles they immediately give this polished and high-end look. This should not be used as body text or something lengthy to read. Think about if you sent an email in that text – it would be tedious to read. However, maybe if it were a title or a way to name email, the choice may be more correct.
Corporate fonts often are traditional, serif fonts or clean sans serif fonts that evoke a sense of trust and a clear message. Think of the fonts Lato, Helvetica or Arial – they’re go-to fonts that are easy to read, and work across many systems. This is especially helpful if you are working across teams when creating content or having to approve the content, idea or visuals.
Of course, you can incorporate more stylistic or playful fonts if you want to give your presentation a personal feel. Much like the scripted font, when used sparingly but in large titles, this choice of font can be very effective at conveying a certain personality.
Adding Symbols & Icons To Your Presentation
You can consolidate information by using symbols or icons to direct your eye to information such as an arrow symbol. What if you used a symbol instead of a bullet point? Think of symbols as anchors for the eye to quickly find information. You can collect symbols off free stock sites or use the built-in ones in PowerPoint that are free to use!
Depending on if your presentation is formal or informal , you may also want to consider adding emojis! Emojis are fun ways to express different emotions and can help connect with a younger demographic.
Overall Branding, Tone of Voice & Consistency
Another tool you may have at your disposal is if your brand, business or company has brand guidelines. It will be the guide and compass to your presentation’s information that goes within it. By keeping consistent you can achieve a polished look even if it looks very simple.
Use your business voice to communicate ideas and set the tone for your presentation. Are you in an investment banking business and want people to rely on the information given to you? That would inform perhaps using blues and purples, which are calmer colors and a cleaner look. Are you an influencer who’s buying power and spending choices matter to your audience? Maybe choosing bright colors with personal touches will make the connection. Are you designing an innovative app? Maybe more interactive slides would do the trick.
Use these questions to make sure your text and tone is consistent as this is a foundation of a well articulated brand or personal identity.
Consistent Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is how you will arrange objects and text in relation to one another to guide your user and not confuse the objects and how they should read them in your slides. Setting rules helps differentiate and prioritize what’s important in order.
Look at the difference between these two.
Snoop Dogg just launched a wine and it’s coming to Canada
Daily hive branded content | aug 11 2020, 6:30 am.
Australian winery 19 Crimes recently announced that its new Cali Red wine, created in collaboration with Entertainment Icon, entrepreneur, and hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg, will be hitting shelves across Canada later this summer.
The collaboration offers a refreshing take on celebrity partnerships as the apparent shared values and history between the brand and famous rapper make for a perfectly organic pairing.
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You can see a clear distinction in the example below:
Think of hierarchy of a form of narration or story structure. Your eye goes to the title, then to the subtitle, then to the body copy in a logical manner. Where the eye travels is one of those things we don’t think about often. But you can also utilize eye lines in photos. Is your subject in the photo looking left or right? Consider placing text to where your subject is looking and see how effectively your eye travels to that text.
We’ll look at hierarchy strictly as sizing of words for now, but note you can establish hierarchy with type, white space, alignment, etc. As a general rule of thumb, you should have consistent sizing for your Header (or title slide / slide title), your subtitles and your body text. That’s it! If the sizing in your PowerPoint is consistent, your words will look uniform and clean. Everything will be much easier to read and the eye will be trained to move each slide.
Don’t Forget Your Own Style
Also don’t forget to incorporate your own style and what kind of visuals you like. Even if your early visuals may seem simple, build up that design muscle with the basics and design techniques that look clean and consistent.
You’ll find as you design these basics, you’ll probably start noticing other visuals and things you like in other mediums and presentations. Keep a note or screenshot the presentation that inspired you. Create a mood-board that you can refer to in the future for quick idea inspiration. Copying gets a bad rap, but learning how to design something you like even if it’s a clone copy will teach you many things about design. Build a collection of images that informs everything you do: for your color scheme, your designs, the cadence of images, etc.
That being said, you can also use free stock websites like Freepik for some design layouts inspiration. Creative Market is a paid website but the site offers a ton of design inspiration. This site has design templates for what’s currently in and trending. You can subscribe to an email newsletter on either site to get bite sized design influence each day that goes straight to your inbox.
However, don’t be afraid to try something new!
Once you get to a level of comfortable designing, these new ideas will be much easier to execute with the technical knowledge you amassed when you started. You could even try using a new app to design your ideas to keep your knowledge fresh! (Keep in mind that most online apps like SlideShare use cookies to improve functionality and performance.)
Ask your friends or people at your organization to give you feedback and critique, as that’s also crucial to honing your design skills. The people around you also represent different audiences!
The above image looks boring, right?
That’s because there are no visual elements!
Powerful visual presentations can engage audiences psychologically with both the presentation itself and the energy of the presenter. By understanding a few universal design concepts, you can begin your journey creating wonderful visual presentations and becoming a better presenter ! Thanks for reading this blog post, tell us your tips in the comments below.
Author: Content Team
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17 PowerPoint Presentation Examples That Show Style and Professionalism
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By Iveta Pavlova
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There are way too many bad PowerPoint presentation examples that can bore you to death. Well, today’s post is not about them. We believe that it’s always important to show the good examples out there and follow their lead. We admit it, it was pretty hard to dig out the good PowerPoint presentation examples from the mass. We’ve added our opinion on each piece and why we believe it’s worthy of being included in this collection. Let’s begin!
You may be interested in The Best Free PowerPoint Templates to Download in 2022
1. The Sketchnote Mini-Workshop by Mike Rohde
An eye-catchy PowerPoint presentation example whose content is fully hand-written. What we love about this design, is the high personalization level that is achieved via handwriting. It almost feels like the author is drawing and writing in front of the viewers’ eyes. A digital presentation that conveys a physical feeling.
2. 10 Ways to Spread The Love in The Office by Elodie A.
The following presentation is a real eye candy. We can’t help it, the cartoon style lives in our hearts. An incredibly appealing PowerPoint presentation that brings positive vibes and a good mood through vibrant cartoon illustrations. It gets bonus points for the usage of bullet points and little text.
3. The Great State of Design with CSS Grid Layout and Friends by Stacy Kvernmo
A presentation that tells a story is always a good example that everyone should follow. This PowerPoint presentation has a lot of slides that tell different mini-stories. The way they are depicted is really engaging – they almost look like a sequence of frames that make up a video. This technique really nails the viewers’ attention.
4. We live in a VUCA world by Little Dragon Films
A classy design of a PowerPoint presentation example – a dark theme and white font on top with just a single color accent – red. Such designs are really suitable for serious topics like this one. To soften the contrast between the black background and white font, the author has used a gradient on the background which gives the illusion of soft light in the middle of the design.
5. 2017 Marketing Predictions—Marketo by Marketo
A design that was made over a year ago but it’s still really trendy. In the following PowerPoint presentation example, we can see the combination of 3D shapes, beautiful hand-written fonts, negative space techniques, and more. The overall feeling is of futuristic design. Moreover, they used the color of 2018 – Ultra Violet for their color scheme. Maybe, they did predict the future after all.
6. 10 Ways Your Boss Kills Employee Motivation by Officevibe
Who doesn’t like to see a familiar face? We know your audience does! It’s proven that if you show a familiar face to your viewers, you nail their attention and boost their engagement level. This is the technique used in the following PowePoint presentation. Moreover, the inner slides of the presentation are also cartoons with big conceptual illustrations and little text. The formula for a really good presentation.
7. How to Successfully Run a Remote Team from Weekdone.com
We haven’t really seen many PowerPoint presentation examples with top-view illustrations. The following presentation really reminded us that when presenting to an audience, you should always think: How to make your design stand out from the rest? Well, this one really caught our eye. In addition, we love the bright colors, geometric shapes, and overall flat feeling, all of which are among the graphic design trends for 2022 .
8. SXSW 2018 – Top Trends by Matteo Sarzana
People love visuals and this is an undeniable fact. The whole PowerPoint presentation is built on high-quality photos, each including a little tagline in the middle. We love the consistency, we love the factor of surprise, and we love the high engagement level this presentation creates. Just make sure to back up such presentation type with a good speech!
9. How to study effectively? by sadraus
Semi-transparent overlays, geometric shapes, a video inside… Everything about this PowerPoint presentation screams “modern”. The grayscale coloring is accompanied by a fresh green color accent. The choice of images clearly suggests that the target audience is young people. The overall feeling that we get from this PowerPoint presentation – is youthful and modern.
10. Study: The Future of VR, AR, and Self-Driving Cars by LinkedIn
A presentation about the future should look futuristic, right? The following PowerPoint presentation example is proof that you should always connect the subject of your presentation to its design. Everything in this presentation speaks of futuristic: the choice of fonts, colors, effects, and even some elements look like holograms from the future.
11. 9 things I’ve learned about SaaS by Christoph Janz
A PowerPoint presentation example created in a consistent style by using a blue theme. Why did we include this presentation? We love the fact that the author has shown an alternation of text and visuals (from slides 7 to 22). This technique is proven to hold the attention of the viewer. Moreover, the way the graphics are presented (on a napkin) draws the interest even more.
12. How To Achieve Something Extraordinary In Life by Sultan Suleman Chaudhry
A PowerPoint presentation example that shows consistency and style by using a strict color scheme: orange, beige, and deep blue. Orange and blue are one of the most popular contrasting combinations widely used in all kinds of designs. If you are not sure what colors to go with, simply choose a tested color scheme.
13. New trends to look out for 2018 winter season by FemmeConnection
Geometric shapes and negative space techniques are among the graphic design trends for 2018 which is why we see them often in PowerPoint presentation examples and other designs. In the following presentation, we can see a collection of women’s clothes presented in a very engaging way with the help of rounded geometric shapes, negative space technique, and the color pink.
14. Fear of Failure by Sultan Suleman Chaudhry
Speaking of the usage of geometric elements in the presentation’s design, let’s see another example. An elegant design decorated with circles, triangles, and more geometric details. What else we love about this presentation is that it only has one color accent – light yellow which looks classy and pleasant for the eye.
15. The Three Lies About Your Age by Sean Si
A great choice of fonts, beautiful semi-transparent geometric elements, and trendy futuristic colors. This is one of the PowerPoint presentation examples that we absolutely love. The story is engaging and the design is extremely appealing – a combination that keeps the viewers’ eyes on the screen from the beginning till the end.
16. Secrets to a Great Team by Elodie A.
Bright, fun, using lots of illustrations and cartoon characters – definitely our kind of PowerPoint presentation. Why do we love it so much? Well, cartoons are real ice-breakers between you and your audience. Moreover, cartoon characters are easier to relate to than a real human face. If you need to connect on a deeper level with your audience, this is your kind of presentation!
You’d probably like to learn 4 Invaluable Presentation Design Tips You Wish You Knew Earlier
17. How to Build a Dynamic Social Media Plan by Post Planner
A great presentation PowerPoint example with watercolor illustrations and backgrounds that look hand-drawn. We also see semi-transparent colorful overlays, high-quality conceptual photos, and great, useful content. What more would you want from a presentation, right?
We always love to hear your opinion about stuff. So, what do you think of these PowerPoint presentation examples? Do you think that you’ve created a presentation better than these? We’d love to see your own creations in the comments below if you want to share them with us.
You may also be interested to read these related articles:
- 7 Most Popular Software for Presentations
- 4 Invaluable Presentation Design Tips You Wish You Knew Earlier
- 70 Inspiring Presentation Slides with Cartoon Designs
- Need PowerPoint Backgrounds?The Best Places to Check Out [+ Freebies]
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Iveta Pavlova
Iveta is a passionate writer at GraphicMama who has been writing for the brand ever since the blog was launched. She keeps her focus on inspiring people and giving insight on topics like graphic design, illustrations, education, business, marketing, and more.
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Visual Aid Examples for Both In-Person and Virtual Presentations
Contrarily, if you are starting your presentation design here, well, you may want to organize your thoughts first. Then, come back.
In this session, I’m going to give you a few visual aid examples. The examples include those for both in-person meetings where everyone is in the same room and virtual delivery. These mediums are actually fairly different. So, if you are using the same types of visual aids for both, this session may help you connect better with your given audience.
Visual Aid Examples for In-Person Meetings and training Sessions.
Let’s start with a few visual aid examples for in-person meetings.
PowerPoint and Digital Visual Aids.
Often today, presenters think of PowerPoint as their only visual. It is still a very important part of the presentation, so I will spend more time on this medium in the next couple of weeks.
PowerPoint has been around since the 1990s. Until recently, though, the software hadn’t changed a whole lot in that 20+ years. Prior to laptop computers, presenters used to have an ancient visual medium called the “slide projector.” It was similar to an old-timey film projector. However, this version was filled with a series of tiny photographs printed on tiny clear squares called slides.
Years later, the “overhead projector” was invented. This allowed the presenter to place paper-sized transparency onto the projector to present. Now presenters could interchange photos and/or bullet-pointed text. In addition, the presenter could write on the transparency.
So when PowerPoint came around, it was a digital version of both the slide projector and overhead projector. Presenters would digitally create “slides” with bullet points and images as examples of visual aids.
All of that changed when Prezi came on the scene. For a few years, the online software Prezi began to exert itself into the visual aid market. The concept was simple. Make the visual aid… well… visual. It uses images and a Zoom function. So instead of slides and bullet points, Prezi used a canvas and images to create visuals for the presentation. Then the software Zoomed in on the image while the presenter provided the “text.”
PowerPoint finally caught on. It now has a Zoom function which is pretty cool. Below are a few examples of what this Zoom function can do.
DOWNLOAD THE EXAMPLE POWERPOINT SLIDESHOW
Boards and posters..
For example, I had a client who was preparing a sales presentation. They were competing to win a contract with a school district. In the past, they had worked with hundreds of other districts. So, they decided to create hundreds of posters mounted on boards. In fact, they made one for each district that they had previously worked for. When they started the presentation, they set up all of the boards in a U-shape around the walls of the presentation area.
As each presenter spoke, he or she would pull one of the boards from the stack that corresponded to the story. Throughout the speech, they told about six success stories about these former clients. Since there were hundreds of other posters that weren’t used, the audience naturally assumed (correctly) that there were hundreds of other success stories as well. It was a fantastic way to dramatize their experience.
Samples, Models, and Demonstrations as Visual Aid Examples.
If you are presenting about a product, then a sample can be a great visual aid. Models can be a great alternative if you are explaining a concept that hasn’t yet been made. And finally, if you are explaining a service, a demonstration might be more illustrative.
- A Sample : If you ever watch the TV show Shart Tank, you will see inventors use samples as visual aids quite often. If you are presenting something physical, then giving your audience something they can see, touch, and feel adds value.
- A Model : Architects, marketers, and software engineers use this visual aid a lot. If you are proposing a solution and that solution is costly to produce, a model might be a good alternative. This will help the audience create a visual image of what you are suggesting without incurring a huge expense.
- A Demonstration : As a trainer, I use this one a lot. For example, if I am teaching a class on how to design presentations, I will often demonstrate the process myself. Or, if I’m teaching how to answer hostile questions, I may have the group ask me tough questions to demonstrate.
Your Handouts Are Also a Valuable Visual Aid for Your Audience.
Canva is one of my favorite tools for creating images and handouts. You can import your corporate colors and logos. Then, you can skim through hundreds of design templates to make your handouts look really professional. Don’t worry about finding a design that matches your colors. You can alter the colors of even a fully-completed document in seconds.
If you like PowerPoint, you can also create some pretty nice handouts there as well. The advantage is that you can more easily match the style of your slideshow if you are using one.
The point is, though, that if you have a bunch of content and a short time to present, don’t try to cram all the data into your presentation. Go through your speech strategically and determine what is most critical for the audience. Then use a handout as a mechanism to deliver the additional content to the audience members. This way, if the listener wants to know more, then he or she has access. If they don’t, then they will like the presentation better.
For additional reading on this subject, Take a look at How to Create the Perfect Presentation Handout. This post has additional ways to organize and create great handouts.
A Good Story or Example Is Often the Best Type of Visual Aid.
Sometimes, a visual aid isn’t visual at all. It can also be auditory. Just like when I mentioned that a demonstration of a service is a “visual aid,” sometimes a vivid description works better than an actual image. For example, a good story engages a different part of the brain than a photograph. Stories can also add emotion to your presentation delivery.
The truth is that stories are very powerful visual aids. The audience has to pay attention to create the vision in their own head. Watch how Will Smith captivates the audience with this simple story and creates an emotional impact at the same time.
Often, speakers will think things like, “Well my experiences just aren’t that interesting.” Will Smith just spent two minutes telling us how he built a brick wall. That is not a very interesting thing to talk about. However, he makes it interesting because he paints a picture for us about what he was feeling. We are experiencing the event as if we were there ourselves. You can do the same thing in your presentations.
For additional reading on this subject, Take a look at 5 Steps to Great Storytelling. This post has additional ways to creat and deliver great stories.
Visual Aid Examples for Virtual Meetings.
Your powerpoint slides should have more images and action than a typical slideshow..
People tend to have a shorter attention span on virtual meetings. Because of this, I tend to use more images and change them more frequently. This causes the audience to be engaged more.
For instance, when I am presenting in person, my slide might have three key bullet points and a single image. However, if I deliver a similar presentation through a Zoom meeting or webinar, I will likely use three images — one for each piece of text. In addition, I will often hide my bullets or text until the image appears.
Some of you may be wondering, “Why not use multiple images in the in-person meeting as well?” Well, you could do that. However, when you are in the same room with your audience, you can use your voice, gestures, and movement to keep the audience engaged. These tools are way more powerful than the visual aids, so if you are in the same room, use your gestures and voice.
No need to overdo it, by the way. The key is to add some movement every one or two minutes. If you watch a good YouTube video, the producer will use slight zooms in and out and change video angles. They do this to keep the viewer engaged.
If you are using a single webcam for your online meetings, though, you lose a lot of your tools. So adding additional images and visual aids can make up for some of this loss.
Videos or Animations without Sound Can Make Very Interactive Visual Aids.
PowerPoint and Prezi both have great animations that you can use as one of these “eye-catching” movements. So, instead of changing or adding images, you can make the images bigger as you reference them. Or, you can move them slightly or “shake” them up as you reference them. Prezi’s original “zoom” function is great for this.
However, recently, Prezi has created an entirely new platform called Prezi Video that is pretty cool. Basically, the slideshow or visuals are integrated into the speaker’s screen. So instead of sharing your screen and showing a slideshow, the visual aids appear to the side of the speaker.
In addition to Prezi, there are a number of video animation apps that either draw your images or animate them. The one that I use is Video Scribe . I use it because it was the first one that I found years ago. However, there are a number of these apps such as Doodley and Powtoon. There are a lot of these apps, though.
The way that you can use these is to add the image to your cartoon creator. Then, have the creator draw or animate the image. You can make the drawing process last as long as you want. However, five to 10 seconds usually works fine. So instead of adding a bunch of additional images, you can make the images more interesting using some of these apps.
Live Website Visits.
Don’t forget that since you are meeting online, you can always access additional information online as well. For example, when I’m meeting with a potential client, I will often answer questions for them by going https://www.fearlesspresentations.com . Instead of just quoting an expert who agrees with me, I might go to that expert’s website.
By the way, when I do this, I will have the websites open in my browser already. This way, I can just share my screen. A little trick for doing this is to click the browser tab and open it in a new window. That way, when you look at Share My Screen, that single webpage is available to share. (This makes the sharing a little cleaner and professional looking.)
Another tip here is to share videos with additional information or sometimes funny videos during session breaks. When I teach virtual or remote presentation classes, I will give the class a 10-minute break every hour or so. Sometimes, I will open up old Saturday Night Live clips that correspond to the previous or next lesson. For instance, if I am teaching about enthusiasm, I will show the old Chris Farley clip where he is pretending to be a motivational speaker.
Collaborative Shared Documents Such as Google Docs.
Spontaneity is a nice surprise in a virtual meeting. Sometimes, it is better to move away from the pre-created visual aids and use something more instant. For instance, when my team is meeting to assign instructors for upcoming sessions, we use Google Calendar. The corporate calendar is a combination of all of the instructors’ individual calendars. So, when I share my screen showing this collaborative calendar, it is unique every time.
It shows the whole group which of them are free during the time we are filling. If there are multiple instructors available, we can discuss the assignments to make the distribution more fair.
We also have reports that are created on multiple spreadsheets. As the team members insert their individual numbers, the data appears on the cumulative spreadsheet.
While this type of visual aid isn’t as fun and exciting as some of the others, it can add to collaboration very effectively.
Breakout Room Discussions Are Examples of Verbal Visual Aids.
Just as with stories and examples in the in-person meetings, discussions among the participants can replace the need for some visuals. Zoom has the ability to break the participants into breakout rooms. Participants are more likely to communicate in smaller groups. So, if you break your meeting into smaller teams and assign each new team to tackle a problem, you will get better results. Then, after a few minutes, close down the breakout rooms. Finally, have a spokesperson from each group give a summary.
This little technique fulfills the same need as I mentioned when I suggested you add more images. Instead of the entire group listening to one person for the entire meeting, they change their focus more quickly. Having multiple people present makes meetings more interactive.
If You Want More Visual Aid Examples, Let Us Know.
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17 fun presentation ideas (with video!) to wow your audience
- 30 Mar 2023
So you want to be the next Steve Jobs. Or Martin Luther King. Or any other dazzling orator you look up to. But you need a little something to add to your presentation ideas – you don’t want to bore people to death with Powerpoint.
Whether you’re creating a sales presentation, an event presentation, or just showing your travel video to Uncle Ron, we’ve compiled some of the best ways to get your audience seriously hyped up about your message.
Biteable offers online video presentation software, so we know a thing or two about making engaging presentation videos. In this guide, we share some of our favorite video presentation inspiration and show you some of the different types of presentations you might consider.
When you’re ready to make your own video presentation, head over to Biteable for hundreds of brandable templates, video scenes, and workplace-ready animations. With Biteable, making a video presentation is as easy as making a PowerPoint – only a whole lot more fun.
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Types of video presentations
If you’re looking to win over your audience with a presentation, videos are the best way to do it. According to Insivia, viewers retain 95% of a message when they see it in a video, but only 10% if they have to read on-screen text.
When you’re making your presentation, you could either make your video the whole presentation, or just a part of the whole. Did you know, for example, that you can embed a video in a Powerpoint document? Either is possible with our video templates and it can be interesting to mix things up once in a while.
There are four main types of presentations:
- Informative
- Demonstrative
- Inspirational
Picking the right one will ensure you’re onto a winner with your video presentation. For example, if you’re onboarding some new employees, you might choose a video template that’s an informative presentation like this one:
Or, if you want to show off how something works, a demonstration presentation might be what you want to create:
A persuasive presentation would involve creating a video more like this charity infographic example:
And if you want something a little more inspirational, try something like this positive quote video template.
But that’s not all, folks! If you’d like to check out more awesome Biteable video templates, visit our templates page here .
Creative (and fun!) video presentation ideas
You’ve now picked the type of presentation you need. But how do you get creative with your video?
First of all, it’s important your video is top-notch. Without high-quality graphics and production value, your message may fall by the wayside. Choose online video presentation software that’s easy to use and makes great-looking videos. That’s where Biteable comes in.
Whatever the topic of your presentation, your video format and design need to match the overall tone and message.
Delivering a corporate presentation on climate change? A fast-paced, wildly colorful template with upbeat music is going to feel a little off-message.
To identify how to design your presentation, think about the feelings you want to evoke in your audience. Want them to be crying with laughter? Moved to tears? Motivated into taking action? Pinpointing the emotions behind your presentation will help you choose the right template and make the best video possible.
17 great video presentation ideas
Now you’ve nailed down the type of video presentation you want to make, it’s time to master the finer details. Here’s just some of the ways you can make your message sing.
1. Start with a bold statement
A bold statement can capture your audience’s attention right from the get-go. Your statement should offer something slightly unusual and maybe even a little controversial. Something to make people sit up and take notice.
2. Tell a story
One of the best ways to get your audience’s attention is to tell a story – it’ll hit them right in the feels.
A personal, human story works because it the audience can relate to it on a personal level. Think about some stand-out examples of human stories that relate to your business or idea, and tell that story so people will connect with the central character. The bigger the emotion the better: love, longing, overcoming obstacles, things we’ve all had to deal with at some point in our lives.
Think about the ‘story arc’ – how will you frame your message so the audience immediately empathizes?
If you’re selling trainers, perhaps you’ll talk about someone who’s training for a marathon. If you’re lobbying for women’s rights, perhaps you’ll tell a story of when a passing comment affected you deeply. Maybe you should think back to the decision that started your business, and start your presentation with that.
Here’s a great example of storytelling from one of the world’s top brands:
3. Use music
Music has great power to support and enhance the emotion in a video presentation, and has been proven to sustain an audience’s attention and aid in information retention. Music is used in movies to suggest an emotional state to the viewer, so why not in a video presentation?
Modern, up-tempo music will snap people to attention at the right moment, while slow, minor-key sounds relax the brain, which is useful for reviewing content so it can slip more easily into long-term memory.
It can be a struggle to find good quality royalty free music , but here at Biteable we have a selection of great royalty free tracks (or you can upload your own if you’re that way inclined).
Music is one of the most critical (and often overlooked) aspects of any presentation. Here’s a good example of a Biteable template where the music does a great job of supporting the message.
4. Visual metaphor
Research has shown that combining pictures and text is one of the best ways to help people engage with and retain information. There’s something about how our brain works that makes text by itself far less memorable, so if you can combine something visual with your message, you’ll keep people’s attention longer and they’ll remember more of your presentation.
Talking to a group of people about taking action on something that scares them? A picture of someone diving or bungee jumping could work. Telling your boss how important that company retreat is next year? Show them an image of happy, relaxed people with their toes in the sand.
It doesn’t have to be obvious and clichéd, either. Closed doors, wide open roads, and lighting a candle all have subconscious messages that you don’t really need to explain. (Whatever you do, just don’t use the ultimate cliche: the overused ‘water ripple’ .)
5. Use questions
Questions can be a great way to open a presentation, because they encourage the audience to think for themselves. It opens them up to a realm of critical thinking, which is perfect when you’re gonna sock it to them with your impactful message.
‘Did you know 15 billion trees are cut down each year?’
‘Have you ever considered what life would be like if you didn’t have to save money?’
The art of asking questions in a presentation means you can incorporate them into your video as a great lead-in. Combined with some appropriate music, it can really get your audience thinking about the issue, and then you’ll go on to explain exactly what your solution is.
Having a laugh can really do a lot to win over an audience. There’s no need to be too serious, and even if you’re dealing with a heavy topic, lightening the mood can work wonders.
Whether you’re looking to create a funny sales video, an event presentation, or a presentation for an interview — one thing’s for sure, you can’t go wrong by including humor.
7. Repetition
Simple. Effective. Powerful.
Repetition can be used in several ways: by offering several one-word sentences in a row (the repetition is in the rhythm), or by repeating a word or a key phrase several time throughout your presentation.
In his famous Stanford speech in 2005, for example, Steve Jobs concluded by saying “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
Repetition is powerful. It drives home your key message and strengthens your position.
8. Motion Graphics
Motion graphics are basically animation with text as a major component, and is a staple of what we do at Biteable.
When you use moving graphics in a presentation, it instantly captures attention. If your audience is just taking their seats, or are halfway through hearing your story, there’s no doubt they’ll sit up and take notice if you introduce some cool motion graphics, like this Meeting Tips example.
Although they can sometimes feel clichéd, quotes are a great way to impart a message in a presentation. Want your audience to understand something complex? A quote from Einstein should do it. Or would you like to say something meaningful and poetic? A couple of lines of Shakespeare should convey some wisdom.
10. Audio narration
Narration can give a different mood to your presentation, especially if the voice is powerful and the words are heartfelt. Use it to change the tone or pace of your presentation and it will certainly keep your audience hooked if there’s a danger of them losing interest.
11. Go bright with color
Color can have a huge effect on how your video comes across. Don’t be afraid to experiment. The contrasts of black and white can be extremely effective, but you can also grab people’s attention with some carefully-chosen primary and secondary colors, like in our Motion Graphics template.
12. Use illustrations
Illustrations are a great way to communicate information, especially if you’ve got lots to say. Whether you want to create a crowd of people or a cool depiction of some new fancy gadget, illustrations can draw the eye and make your presentation more interesting.
13. Infographics
When you utilize infographics, you can pack in a huge amount of data and information without confusing your audience. Think pie charts, digital numbers, and ascending animated graphs. These can show your audience boring data in an exciting way.
14. Create interesting transitions
The one advantage of video over a standard presentation is that you can do all types of funky things with transitions, like a whip pan transition, when the camera quickly pans between scenes. It’s a bit like a wipe, but much faster. Check out our full article on transitions here .
15. Make it look cinematic
Adding a cinematic touch can help your audience feel receptive to your message because subconsciously, they will associate these elements with being at the cinema, eating popcorn, and generally having a good time.
16. Go retro
A cool, retro look for your presentation will make it hard to ignore. By going retro, you add a little bit of cheeky style to your message. You don’t need to go quite as retro as the template below, but taking a step back in time is a sure way to add a little bit of zing to things.
17. End on a meaningful note
Your presentation will only give your audience a lasting impression if you end it right.
It’s important to let the audience know what you want them to do next: to visit a website for more information, to ponder an idea or new direction, or to take action toward a particular goal.
An attention-grabbing visual will work really well here, along with a meaningful end to the music – a change of pace, volume, or pitch.
What’s the takeaway message? A strong CTA (call to action) will ensure your presentation is memorable and much more likely to be talked about.
Video brings your presentation alive
Of course, we’re a little biased here at Biteable, but we’ve also sat through enough mind-numbingly dull presentations to know that video offers a delightful treat for your audience. It brings your message to life in a way no other medium can.
Ready to start crafting your presentation? Check out our range of templates here .
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Home Blog Presentation Ideas 150+ Free PowerPoint Slides to Make Great Visually Appealing Presentations
150+ Free PowerPoint Slides to Make Great Visually Appealing Presentations
As our content catalog has grown, we have started to publish free PowerPoint slides every new week. Our free slides have had a very good adoption and we could also notice the number of free downloads is increasing over time. Reusing our 100% editable PowerPoint diagrams and slides can help to save many hours of work per week while you can produce visually appealing presentations.
As if this were not enough, recently we have published a Mega Bundle containing more than 150+ PowerPoint slides (for FREE download) . Here is a compilation of some of our top free PowerPoint slide designs that you can use the next time you need to make a business presentation.
If you prefer to download individual free slides, you can check out our free PowerPoint templates section where we publish a new slide every week.
1. Free Circular Concept Diagram Design
Free circular diagram concept is a three-component diagram design with editable text and icons that were created with PowerPoint shapes. This circular diagram can be used to describe a simple circular process or cycle flow. Given that it was created with PowerPoint shapes. You can easily change the shape properties such as colors or resize without losing image quality.
2. Free SWOT PowerPoint Slides
SWOT diagrams are always useful to carry out a SWOT analysis. This free SWOT slide can help you to make visually appealing marketing presentations that delight your audience. The SWOT Analysis template includes four text components to complete including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You can download free SWOT templates for PowerPoint or editable versions of SWOT slides.
3. Free Funnel Diagram Design for PowerPoint
Funnel diagrams are very useful on any business and sales presentation. Using funnel diagrams, you can easily explain the steps toward generating sales in your company. The visual funnel representation can include several steps from the customer acquisition to the conversion or final purchase.
4. Free Business Model Canvas PowerPoint Slides
The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool developed by Alex Osterwalder. By using the Business Model Canvas slide you can easily describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot your business model. You can visually describe a business model by completing the nine business model canvas blocks.
If you are an entrepreneur launching a new product or business, you can use this free slide as a Lean Canvas template by Ash Maurya or combine it with other advanced canvas and PowerPoint layouts like the Value Proposition Canvas template or even the Lean Canvas template .
5. Free Creative Meter Slide Shapes
PowerPoint dashboards can be used to show key performance indicators within your organization, project or startup. You can monitor and review KPI’s to ensure profitability. Using visual indicators like the creative meter shape for PowerPoint you can easily show the level of a KPI in a dashboard presentation. Alternatively, you can use other nice meter charts like thermometers for PowerPoint or our speedometer shapes.
6. Speedometer Dashboard
Speedometer metaphors are great visual aids that could help your audience to understand the performance numbers at a glance. Using the editable speedometer shapes for PowerPoint you can easily make business performance PowerPoint presentations and adjust the needle to any desired position very easy in PowerPoint. Use the shape group and ungroup features in PowerPoint to isolate the speedometer from the needle and then rotate the needle to the desired direction.
7. Free Traffic Lights & Shapes for PowerPoint
Traffic light metaphors can be used in virtually any presentations related to decision-making, innovation, leadership presentations but also coaching or creativity presentations. This free traffic lights PowerPoint template includes traffic light shapes with the three possible colors (green, yellow and red). In decision-making presentations, a red color could be “stop”, while the yellow color could be associated with taking a decision with caution while the green color means “go ahead”.
8. Simple Chevron Diagram Slides for PowerPoint
A chevron diagram illustrates the progression of sequential steps in a process, workflow or task helping to emphasize the desired direction (i.e.: from the left to the right). PowerPoint let you create Chevron diagrams very easy using SmartArt graphics but if you need to decorate your slides with visual appealing chevron diagrams for presentations you can download this free Chevron Diagram slide for Microsoft PowerPoint.
9. Free Multi-level Organizational Chart Template
Org charts diagrams help to illustration the structure of an organization and the relationship of its parts and positions. This free organizational chart design for PowerPoint contains four levels and include avatars representing the job positions. Alternatively, you can download other org chart templates for presentations with 100% editable slides.
10. All-in-One 150+ Slide Designs Mega Bundle for PowerPoint
Finally, here is the mega bundle for free download. This collection of some of the best PowerPoint slides is a very powerful resource that you can use to make presentations by reusing catchy and visually appealing business slides for PowerPoint.
The collection of PowerPoint slides inside this bundle contains creative business layouts in widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, data-driven diagrams and PPT presentation shapes with scalable vectorial graphics that can be easily edited in Microsoft PowerPoint, but also compatible with Google Slides & Keynote. In order to download, just need to create your free account at SlideModel.com or sign in if you already have an account.
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Business Model Canvas, Dashboard, Design, Ideas, Lean Canvas, Mega Bundle, Org Chart, Slides, Speedometer, SWOT Filed under Presentation Ideas
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3 Responses to “150+ Free PowerPoint Slides to Make Great Visually Appealing Presentations”
Very good compilation of designs. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for sharing. I love your designs and templates.
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Visual Presentation Example on Topic of Social Media
Home > Presentation Examples > Visual Presentation Example 1
A practical example of converting a text based slide on impact of social media into a visual presentation using a simple powerful diagram. In this series, we will take up text based slides and covert them into visual diagrams. From the before and after examples, you can see the power and impact of using visual diagrams in business presentations.
The text-based slide on impact of social media we will convert today is this:
Please do read through it, as we will be using the information presented here through the rest of this article.
Issues with the format used in this presentation:
- There are too many words on the slide which may put off the audience. The audience can read the words themselves and don’t need to listen to the presenter.
- There is no visual representation of the idea, which makes it difficult for the audience to understand and retain the message.
- Though the icons used in the slide are appropriate, they don’t add any value to the audience because of the way they are used.
Let us proceed with the makeover.
Step 1: Isolate the core words
The core words that need to be represented on the slide are highlighted above. The rest can go into the speaker notes.
Step 2: Plan the aspects to be visualized
The three aspects to be visualized are:
- The difference in reach of the two media
- The difference in speed of the two media
- The impact of the second level spread.
Step 3: Visualize using an animated diagram
Let us convey the concept using a simple diagram and represent the relationship better using custom animation.
This is how the presentation looks when made visual:
Please click the play button below to view the animated visual presentation slide.
Click to play
Here is the transcript of the animated slide with voice over above:
There are two types of information transfer. They are Word of mouth , which is about people talking to each other to spread information and Word of Mouse , which is about using Social Media network on the internet to spread the message. First let’s talk about Word of Mouth.
Word of mouth is a slow medium for information transfer. The reason is – (CL) the speed and reach of information is limited by physical distances for most times.
On the other hand, Word of Mouse is a SUPER FAST way to transfer information.
It’s because– people use social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Blogs and Group Mail to spread the message. There are no limitations in terms of physical distances. So, the spread and reach is more.
The momentum grows even further when the recipients spread the message to their networks in turn.
So, when you want to market your product, focus on Word of Mouse as much as you focus on Word of Mouth.
End of slide.
As you can see, the same information is presented with utmost clarity when it is presented visually. We showed the difference in speed of the two media using custom animation. See the difference in the look and feel here.
Related Resources:
Visual presentations ebook:.
The process of visualization is quite easy to learn. If you want to learn our proprietary process and convert your text based slides into simple and powerful diagrams, you can look at the Visual Presentations eBook here.
Article : Visual Presentations using diagrams vs images
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Top 10 Best Visual Presentation Examples to Help Inspire Your Next Project
By combining the verbal with the graphics, visual presentations like graphs, statistics, charts, and diagrams give the information a new dimension and bring up completely fresh options for learning.
Those who are interested in the subject, but they are also interested in the person speaking. Keep your slides simple while delivering a presentation to an audience due to this fact.
A strong PowerPoint presentation animations and transitions to retain the audience's attention on your topic. Learning about visual presentation example s helps you to make your work more eye caching.
However, you are not required to get rid of them altogether. They can be carefully and effectively used to draw attention to a certain aspect of an image or highlight a message. In this blog post we are discussing about ten 10 best visual presentation example s .
1. Fresh Pink Presentation for Cosmetics
Fresh pink presentation is the visual presentation example you can use this template to promote your brand and tell people about your products it is more attractive template..
2. Promotion Marketing Presentation
Presentation pays a vital role in marketing and promoting a brand. If your presentation looks beautiful and attractive it effects viewers to pay attention and listen about your work. For that purpose, promoting marketing presentation is perfect for you.
3. Healthy Green Food Presentation
Leading a healthy life and to tell your audience about good food you can use healthy green food presentation which is the visual presentation examples you can add much more data and pictures of food this template carry’s good visual effects which pays a important role in your presentation..
4. Light Yellow Sports Presentation
With attractive colors and decent look this template is good for visual presentation example you can add your title. You can add topic of argument and tell your audience about your point of view.
5. Fresh Presentation for Medical Beauty
In medical field presentation is important sometimes you have to tell people about something that is why this visual presentation examples is perfect for you., 6. creative memphis presentation, a unique template with light colors and good view you can use this template in class room and presenting your work in front of the audience of school., 7. computer courseware presentation, v i sually good and eye-caching presentation for lecture you can use this template in classrooms and computer course lectures, 8. simple hand-painted presentation, it might be challenging to construct a strong presentation from start. especially if you don't have a lot of free time but yet want to stand out and appear professional. visual presentation examples templates for creating your work simple and iconic., 9. modern business report, this structure is ideal for you. numerous icons, strong typefaces, and data widgets are included to keep your audience engaged. this template's neat and elegant style shows the professionalism of your business. to make this presentation template consistent with your brand recognition, add your logo and other graphic components., 10. cute education presentation for children, by modifying the content and layout in the presentation editor of early beginnings, any department or company may utilize it. this template's neat and opulent style conveys the professionalism of your organization. visually good for classrooms lectures and presentation..
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Creating video from text.
Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.
We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.
Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.
Today, Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks. We are also granting access to a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals.
We’re sharing our research progress early to start working with and getting feedback from people outside of OpenAI and to give the public a sense of what AI capabilities are on the horizon.
Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world.
The model has a deep understanding of language, enabling it to accurately interpret prompts and generate compelling characters that express vibrant emotions. Sora can also create multiple shots within a single generated video that accurately persist characters and visual style.
The current model has weaknesses. It may struggle with accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene, and may not understand specific instances of cause and effect. For example, a person might take a bite out of a cookie, but afterward, the cookie may not have a bite mark.
The model may also confuse spatial details of a prompt, for example, mixing up left and right, and may struggle with precise descriptions of events that take place over time, like following a specific camera trajectory.
We’ll be taking several important safety steps ahead of making Sora available in OpenAI’s products. We are working with red teamers — domain experts in areas like misinformation, hateful content, and bias — who will be adversarially testing the model.
We’re also building tools to help detect misleading content such as a detection classifier that can tell when a video was generated by Sora. We plan to include C2PA metadata in the future if we deploy the model in an OpenAI product.
In addition to us developing new techniques to prepare for deployment, we’re leveraging the existing safety methods that we built for our products that use DALL·E 3, which are applicable to Sora as well.
For example, once in an OpenAI product, our text classifier will check and reject text input prompts that are in violation of our usage policies, like those that request extreme violence, sexual content, hateful imagery, celebrity likeness, or the IP of others. We’ve also developed robust image classifiers that are used to review the frames of every video generated to help ensure that it adheres to our usage policies, before it’s shown to the user.
We’ll be engaging policymakers, educators and artists around the world to understand their concerns and to identify positive use cases for this new technology. Despite extensive research and testing, we cannot predict all of the beneficial ways people will use our technology, nor all the ways people will abuse it. That’s why we believe that learning from real-world use is a critical component of creating and releasing increasingly safe AI systems over time.
Research techniques
Sora is a diffusion model, which generates a video by starting off with one that looks like static noise and gradually transforms it by removing the noise over many steps.
Sora is capable of generating entire videos all at once or extending generated videos to make them longer. By giving the model foresight of many frames at a time, we’ve solved a challenging problem of making sure a subject stays the same even when it goes out of view temporarily.
Similar to GPT models, Sora uses a transformer architecture, unlocking superior scaling performance.
We represent videos and images as collections of smaller units of data called patches, each of which is akin to a token in GPT. By unifying how we represent data, we can train diffusion transformers on a wider range of visual data than was possible before, spanning different durations, resolutions and aspect ratios.
Sora builds on past research in DALL·E and GPT models. It uses the recaptioning technique from DALL·E 3, which involves generating highly descriptive captions for the visual training data. As a result, the model is able to follow the user’s text instructions in the generated video more faithfully.
In addition to being able to generate a video solely from text instructions, the model is able to take an existing still image and generate a video from it, animating the image’s contents with accuracy and attention to small detail. The model can also take an existing video and extend it or fill in missing frames. Learn more in our technical report .
Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand and simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an important milestone for achieving AGI.
All videos on this page were generated directly by Sora without modification.
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Learn how to craft visual presentations that captivate, inform and impress your audience with 15 effective tips and examples. From using the rule of thirds to storytelling through data, discover how to make your slides more engaging with Venngage's presentation templates and tools.
Learn how to make your presentations more visual and engaging with different types of visual aids, such as infographics, charts, diagrams, posters, and videos. Find out the best practices and tips to create a successful visual presentation with AhaSlides, a presentation tool that supports interactivity and engagement.
20 Great Examples of PowerPoint Presentation Design [+ Templates] Download Now: 10 Free PowerPoint Templates Carly Williams Published: January 17, 2024 When it comes to PowerPoint presentation design, there's no shortage of avenues you can take.
Presentation Example #1: Colorful Slides Draw your audience in by including a lot of bright colorful slides within your presentation. This colorful presentation example was created to showcase how fun and playful Adidas's boring presentation deck could actually be. Image Source
Lead generation. In this blog, you'll find 120+ presentation ideas, design tips and examples to help you create an awesome slide deck for your next presentation. To start off, here's a video on the 10 essential presentation design tips to make sure that your presentations don't fall under the YAWN category. 1.
Use clear and legible fonts, and maintain a consistent design throughout the presentation. 2. Visual appeal: Incorporate visually appealing elements such as relevant images, charts, graphs, or diagrams. Use high-quality visuals that enhance understanding and make the content more engaging.
Learn from 23 of the best business presentation examples out there, from animated characters to Pixar, and get inspired by video presentation templates from Biteable. Whether you need to present on PowerPoint, Google Slides, Prezi, or sales, find tips and tricks to make an impact on your audience.
Learn how to keep slides simple and effective with the #1 rule for improving your presentation slides: less is more. See examples of how to use one image per slide, short titles, and minimal text to convey your message. Get tips and tricks from TED experts on how to perfect your visual presentations.
An inspiring visual presentation is a great way to engage an audience. In this article, we include practical tips and creative tools to support your workshop design. ... examples of visual data from Canva. Even when we analyze word-driven data, a visual representation is easier to see straight away. When I've worked with community groups in ...
Learn how to design effective visual presentations with tips on color, photography, video and more. See examples of how to use different tools and techniques to engage your audience and tell your story.
Hopefully this presentation examples will inspire you when you have to do your next PowerPoint. Presentation design takes time and effort, but practice makes perfect. Do not expect a PowerPoint that looks from a professional designer's portfolio at first try. Design is not something you can learn overnight.
1. The Sketchnote Mini-Workshop by Mike Rohde An eye-catchy PowerPoint presentation example whose content is fully hand-written. What we love about this design, is the high personalization level that is achieved via handwriting. It almost feels like the author is drawing and writing in front of the viewers' eyes.
To make your text stand out, you need to use contrasting colors. For example, you can make the background black and your text a bright shade of green to make it stand out, or vice versa. Just be sure that your text is easily readable for your audience. 22. Proofread and polish your presentation.
Here's an example: Say you're at a sales meeting with a potential client. Your goal is to sell them on the merits of going remote, so you lead in with a shocking statistic: "Over the last 10 years, the remote workforce has grown by 91%." This sets the stage for the importance of remote work. Characters
Presenters would digitally create "slides" with bullet points and images as examples of visual aids. All of that changed when Prezi came on the scene. For a few years, the online software Prezi began to exert itself into the visual aid market. The concept was simple. Make the visual aid… well… visual. It uses images and a Zoom function.
OK Using Great Visuals for your Presentation is one of the easiest and most effective ways to design more engaging presentations. Click here to learn more from Presentation Expert Dr Echo Rivera!
Make it simple and hassle-free with a collection of well-designed and easy-to-use presentation templates from Canva. To captivate your target audience, you need the proper presentation template design that suits your subject. After all, a pleasing visual, coupled with helpful and relevant content, can go a long way in creating a solid presentation.
For example, if you're onboarding some new employees, you might choose a video template that's an informative presentation like this one: Employee Onboarding Video Template (Editable) Watch on Edit this video Or, if you want to show off how something works, a demonstration presentation might be what you want to create:
1. Free Circular Concept Diagram Design Free circular diagram concept is a three-component diagram design with editable text and icons that were created with PowerPoint shapes. This circular diagram can be used to describe a simple circular process or cycle flow. Given that it was created with PowerPoint shapes.
A practical example of converting a text based slide on impact of social media into a visual presentation using a simple powerful diagram. In this series, we will take up text based slides and covert them into visual diagrams. From the before and after examples, you can see the power and impact of using visual diagrams in business presentations.
Fresh pink presentation is the visual presentation example you can use this template to promote your brand and tell people about your products it is more attractive template. 2. Promotion Marketing Presentation Presentation pays a vital role in marketing and promoting a brand.
Oct 29, 2021 Looking for a way to make your presentation stand out from the crowd? When it comes to presentations, your ultimate goal is to communicate clearly and effectively with your audience. By adding visual aids to your presentations, your audience will more easily understand and connect with your ideas.
The Visual Presentation Examples template is a four-noded slide. It holds a creative arrow design to display your ideas. This multicolor template comes with beautiful color schemes and shapes to impress your audiences. Use this template to create a professional-looking presentation in a minute. Download arrow design slides at an affordable ...
Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user's prompt. 1 of 9. ... For example, a person might take a bite out of a cookie, but afterward, the cookie may not have a bite mark. The model may also confuse spatial details of a prompt, for example, mixing up left and right, and may ...