The Golden Rules of Good Slide Design

Locked lesson.

Upgrade

About this lesson

In this lesson, we will discuss modern slide layouts and show examples of engaging, slick presentations. We will run-through presentation tips, things to consider when designing slide-decks and also things to avoid. This lesson will contain lots of examples of good and bad presentations.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

2.01 the-golden-rules-of-good-slide-design - Exercise.docx
40.4 KB 2.01 the-golden-rules-of-good-slide-design - Exercise solution.docx
45.7 KB

Quick reference

The Golden Rules of Good Slide Design

How many times have you caught your eyes closing watching yet another long, boring PowerPoint presentation? Probably too many to count. PowerPoint is a fantastic application but so often it is used incorrectly and the result is usually an uninspired deck, unneccessary content, and a lack of pizazz! Avoid 'Death by PowerPoint' by understanding the golden rules when designing modern, engaging and effective PowerPoint slide decks.

When to use

The Golden Rules should be considered whenever creating a PowerPoint presentation.

Instructions

Review the Golden Rules of Good Slide Design and think about how you might put them in to practice in your next presentation.

What is the goal?

Is it a pitch deck? Is it a deck to show sales data to stakeholders? Is it an internal presentation? Is it a personal presentation to your sports team in the evening? Establish a goal as this will dictate how you design the slides and what type of content your include.

Know your Audience!

Who will be watching your presentation? Will it be CEOs and stakeholders? Is it your own internal team? Maybe it's a client or mums and dads at a PTA meeting? Tailor your presentation towards the intended audience. What is important to them? What information do they need from this presentation?

Create an Outline

It's very tempting to jump into PowerPoint and start creating a presentation off the top of your head. Winging it may work in some circumstances, but most of the time you will find that you need a plan. Create an outline and map out your slide deck first. Outlines don't need to be fancy! A simple Word document with slides, headings, and bullets points to plan out the content in each section will suffice. Planning ahead of time ensures that you cover everything and will save you time in the long run.

Decide on Visuals

Think carefully about the visuals you need to include. Do you have access to a repository of company images? Are you restricted to using only certain images that fall wtihin branding guidelines? Or are you free as a bird to find your own resources? Do you want to display data in charts or tell a story with an infographic? What about icons and video? Have you thought about color themes or fonts?

It's good to have an idea of the visual elements in your presentation as they can have a huge effect on the overall look and feel and can sometimes influence how you design your slide deck.

Keep Text to a Minimum

One of the biggest crimes against PowerPoint is an overly wordy slide. Don't put everything that you want to say on the slide and read it out to your audience. Otherwise, there is no real point to you being there. Just hand out the slides and let them read!

It's also very difficult for most people to listen to a speaker AND read a lot of information on a slide at the same time. Instead, pick 5 key points. List them on the slide consicely and then use your voice to elaborate on each point. You could try employing the 5/5/5 rule:

  • No more than 5 words per line.
  • No more than 5 lines per slide.
  • No more than 5 text-based slides in a row.

Use Readable Fonts

Choose fonts that are easy to read and pleasant to look at. Large simple fonts generally work best. Think about the room where you will be presenting when choosing a font. If the room is large, you need to ensure that the back row can see the information on the slide clearly and the font is large enough. If you don't want to use the same font throughout the entire presentation, consider choosing an alternative from the same font family, i.e. Lato Black for headings, Lato for subheadings, and Lato Light for normal text.

And try to stay away from Comic Sans unless it's a personal project!

Be Mindful of Color

Always use high-contrast colors: dark font on a light background or light font on a dark background. Stay away from anything too bright as this has a tendency to be hard on the eyes. Avoid 'highlighter-neon' at all costs.

Design for Widescreen Formats

Most projector screens are optimized for widescreen 16:9 ratio so it's a good idea to stick to this. If you do design your presentation in a 4:3 ratio, your presentation will still work but you may find some parts of it are cut off. Not a good thing to realise 5 minutes before your presentation!

Be Consistent with Style Settings

Presentations should flow and have a consistent, cohesive look without getting stale or boring. You can make a presentation look tied together by using color, consistent fonts, consistent background images, and imagery and iconography of a similar style. A presentation should not look like individual, unrelated slides that have been thrown together.

Use Animation Sparingly

Animation can be great! It can also be really bad. It's worth bearing in mind when using animation that the purpose is to enhace the presentation, not distract away from it. Whilst it is fun to have shapes and text spinning in from all directions, it's not very professional and gives your presentation a chaotic and unorganised look.

Use animation sparingly. Ask yourself if the slide would be just as effective without the animation before applying it. Stick to subtle animation effects particularly for business presentations.

Consider Using a Template

Templates are great if you need a foundation from which to start. Maybe you have company templates you can use or maybe you want to use one of the many in-built templates in PowerPoint. Either way, using a template can save you a lot of time and also inspire you when you are lacking inspiration.

10/20/30 Rule

Most people have a short attention span. Death by PowerPoint normally occurs around slide 32, 47 minutes into a presentation. To avoid this, use the 10/20/30 rule when designing presentations.

  • No more than 10 slides.
  • No more than 20 minutes.
  • Use 30pt font.

Sticking to this rule should encourage you to streamline your presentation, make more concise points, and get to the key takeways quicker.

Research!

Not everyone has a natural flair for design. And that's ok! It's perfectly acceptable to research, look at what other people are doing, and see what's out there as a source of inspiration.

Call to Action

It's good to round out a presentation with a call to action. Maybe you want your audience to send you feedback. Maybe you want to direct them to your website. Or maybe you want them to follow you on social media. Whatever it is, it's a nice bookend to a great presentaion.

Hints & tips

Login to download
  • 00:04 We've all heard of the phrase, death by PowerPoint, and like me,
  • 00:07 you've probably had to sit through a very long and
  • 00:10 very boring PowerPoint presentation at some point in your life.
  • 00:14 Even if you're really interested in the subject matter and the speaker is good,
  • 00:19 if the slide deck is dull, then it's very easy to zone out and
  • 00:23 completely lose focus.
  • 00:25 And I often see people making the same mistakes repeatedly when trying to put
  • 00:29 together an interesting but engaging PowerPoint presentation.
  • 00:34 So what I want to start out with in this video is just running you through 15 of my
  • 00:39 top tips, things you need to consider prior to putting together a slide deck.
  • 00:48 It's really important to work out what the goal of your presentation is.
  • 00:53 So, is this a deck that's going to pitch an idea to a client?
  • 00:57 Is it a sales report?
  • 01:00 Or is it something that's more for
  • 01:01 personal use, maybe something you're doing for a club that you attend in the evening?
  • 01:06 Figuring out the objective is really important as that's going to dictate many
  • 01:10 different aspects of how you put your PowerPoint presentation together.
  • 01:17 It is so important to know your audience.
  • 01:20 So who are you presenting to?
  • 01:23 Because the way that you construct a presentation for one group of people might
  • 01:27 be completely different to the way that you do it for another group of people.
  • 01:31 So before you begin, you want to ask yourselves these three questions,
  • 01:35 who's going to be watching the presentation?
  • 01:39 What's important to those people?
  • 01:42 And finally, what environment will you be presenting in?
  • 01:48 This next tip is often overlooked, but also important.
  • 01:53 Instead of just diving into a PowerPoint presentation,
  • 01:55 it's always best to create an outline at the beginning.
  • 01:58 That might be something like a storyboard or it could be something as simple
  • 02:03 as just writing up what you want to appear on each slide in a Word document.
  • 02:08 So for me, I tend to just put my slide headings, and then sometimes some bullet
  • 02:12 points as to the content I want to have on those slides.
  • 02:16 It seems like a lot of work at the beginning, but trust me,
  • 02:18 you will be thankful a bit further down the track.
  • 02:24 Decide on the visuals that you want to include in your presentation.
  • 02:28 Do you want pictures, charts, infographics?
  • 02:31 What about icons or videos?
  • 02:34 All of these elements go a long way to determining the overall look and
  • 02:37 feel of your presentation.
  • 02:39 Have you considered the color scheme that you're going to use, or
  • 02:43 the fonts that you want to include?
  • 02:44 Visuals are so important because as everyone knows, a picture says 1000 words,
  • 02:50 and people, in general, tend to remember pictures as opposed to a wall of words.
  • 02:55 So think about the types of visual elements that you want to include in your
  • 02:59 presentation and where you might possibly get those from ahead of time.
  • 03:07 This is one of my biggest bugbears, and that is when people put on the slide
  • 03:11 absolutely everything that they want to say.
  • 03:14 It kind of renders the speaker unnecessary as people could just
  • 03:18 sit in the audience and read off of the slide.
  • 03:21 Instead, think about employing the 5/5/5 rule.
  • 03:25 And that is no more than 5 words per line, no more than 5 lines per slide,
  • 03:31 and no more than 5 text heavy slides in a row.
  • 03:36 Ensure that you're always using readable fonts.
  • 03:40 Now, these are some of my favorites that I like to use.
  • 03:43 And the reason why I use them is because they're clear, they're available in all
  • 03:47 versions of PowerPoint and they're part of a font family.
  • 03:51 So, if I want to switch things up a little bit and
  • 03:53 not use the same font throughout the entire presentation,
  • 03:56 I could pick a font from the same family so it still has a cohesive look.
  • 04:00 And I will say don't be scared from time to time to mix and
  • 04:03 match your fonts because it can give a really effective look.
  • 04:09 Color is such an important element when you're thinking about your
  • 04:12 PowerPoint slides.
  • 04:13 You want to make sure that your slides are easy to read and
  • 04:16 really aren't going to give people a headache.
  • 04:18 These are some examples of some really bad color combinations that you probably want
  • 04:22 to steer clear of.
  • 04:23 Instead, use high contrast colors, so
  • 04:26 light text on a dark background and dark text on a light background.
  • 04:31 It doesn't necessarily always have to be black and white,
  • 04:34 you can experiment with colors, but just make sure everything is clear.
  • 04:41 When you're designing your PowerPoint presentation,
  • 04:44 you'll notice that you have two different sizes that you can design in,
  • 04:48 widescreen format or four to three ratio.
  • 04:51 Now, my advice is to always design in widescreen format.
  • 04:55 Most modern projectors that you'll come across accommodate that format and
  • 04:59 if you've designed in the four to three ratio,
  • 05:01 you may find that some of your slide ends up getting cut off.
  • 05:07 Be consistent with your style throughout your presentation.
  • 05:10 One way that I like to achieve consistency in my slide deck is I like to use
  • 05:14 the eyedropper utility to pick specific colors out of images that i already have
  • 05:19 in my PowerPoint slides and reuse those colors throughout the presentation.
  • 05:24 Another way I achieve consistency is to have some kind of background picture that
  • 05:28 runs throughout the whole presentation.
  • 05:30 And I'm also very mindful that I'm using the same family of fonts.
  • 05:38 Animation is a big one, because animation can look really good, but
  • 05:42 it can also look really terrible.
  • 05:45 And I normally find that when people first learn animation, they
  • 05:48 tend to go a little bit crazy and start applying effects to all different objects.
  • 05:53 And what you end up with is a presentation that looks a little bit messy,
  • 05:56 a bit chaotic and very unprofessional.
  • 05:58 Animations should be used to accentuate your presentation and
  • 06:02 not detract away from the content.
  • 06:04 So use subtle effects like fades and also utilize some features like dimming so
  • 06:09 that people can really focus in on the point you're talking
  • 06:12 about at that particular moment.
  • 06:17 Templates are a great option if you're not really sure where to start.
  • 06:22 And PowerPoint has a number of inbuilt templates free for you to use, and
  • 06:26 some of them are really eye catching and effective.
  • 06:30 There's also a whole host of templates that you
  • 06:32 can download from online sources and use those.
  • 06:35 They, in general, can all be customized and tailored to your needs.
  • 06:38 So you can change the images and the color, and
  • 06:41 they give you a really nice place to start instead of just sitting there for
  • 06:44 half an hour staring at a blank slide.
  • 06:48 I touched on this previously, don't read from the slides.
  • 06:51 If you have a lot of information to convey, then try and
  • 06:54 condense it down to roughly five bullet points highlighting the key issues.
  • 06:59 It's your job as the speaker to elaborate on those points.
  • 07:03 And it means that the audience is going to be paying attention to you,
  • 07:06 as opposed to trying to read what's written on the slide behind you.
  • 07:12 If you can, employ the 10/20/30 rule, 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font.
  • 07:19 And if you adhere to this rule, what you would generally end up with is a nicely
  • 07:23 paced, nicely timed presentation that really gets to those key points quickly
  • 07:28 without a lot of unnecessary content.
  • 07:32 And finally, research slide design.
  • 07:35 If you're not the best at coming up with ideas for layouts and design elements,
  • 07:40 then jump online and take a look and see what's out there.
  • 07:44 I know that when I'm about to do something that's a little bit different, I like
  • 07:47 to see what other people are doing, what's out there, what's new in slide design.
  • 07:52 And there's lots of different resources that I'm going to show you
  • 07:55 in the next lesson that can help you with this.
  • 07:58 And my final point would be leave your audience with a call to action.
  • 08:02 So maybe you want them to email you with feedback or maybe you want them to click
  • 08:07 on a specific link to read up more about a topic, or it might be something as simple
  • 08:11 as just getting them to connect with you across your social media platforms.
  • 08:16 Whichever one of these you choose,
  • 08:17 it's just a really nice way to round off the presentation.
  • 08:20 So those are my top 15 tips.
  • 08:23 And if you take all of those into consideration, then you are well on your
  • 08:28 way to create a really modern, slick looking PowerPoint presentation.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Gift this course