How do you design a big screen presentation that doesn't just engage, but captivates your audience? Here are a few tips.
Your meeting is quickly approaching and you’ve been tasked to design and deliver an engaging, effective presentation on behalf of your company or organization. You want to avoid a yawn-inducing, generic PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow and aim to truly captivate your audience and move them to action. So how can you enhance your slides and deliver a professional, polished presentation that gets your audience not just engaged, but inspired?
To get you started, here is a (non-comprehensive) list of 11 tips to enhance your PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow. Try them out and let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Your font needs to be big enough for your audience to read, but “big enough” varies greatly by venue. The size of your type will depend on the size of the screen and its distance from the furthest seats in your audience. Keep these factors in mind, and remember — just because you can read it well on your laptop, does not mean an audience member at the back of the room can.
Don't read the slides verbatim, but use them as a point of departure. Include a photo or a quick sentence or two to introduce your points, then expand upon the ideas while communicating with your audience directly. Let the AV crew take you to camera so your facial expressions and other nuances are seen, even by folks in the back row. It doesn’t take long to get the gist of a slide, so move on from it sooner rather than later.
Many people give the well-intended advice to avoid clutter in your presentation by reducing your number of images and sticking to a maximum of one per slide. Go ahead and break this rule. Sets of images can leave a strong impact on your audience and help you communicate your story. You can incorporate numerous images in a photo montage, for example, to great effect. Just keep the size and placement of your images in mind when working out your design.
Animations, when used properly, can be a very positive addition to a slide. This is especially true for charts and graphs, which are eye-killers when static.
Previously, standard slideshow dimensions were 4:3, now the 16:9 format is what your venue should have. With 16x9 format, you can potentially see 25% more of the picture. Not only do you see more of the screen with a 16x9 picture, but the wider format is more pleasing to the eye, as it approximates natural field of vision. If you create your presentation in 4:3, there will be dark borders on each side when it’s projected on the widescreen. Design in 16:9 widescreen format to avoid this issue.
Projectors can often overshoot a screen, cutting off your information. Make sure to leave plenty of space around the edges of the slide to ensure that your text and images are given the uninterrupted spotlight they deserve.
Remove those ugly and useless page numbers, your name, and references to the title of the deck from the bottom of your slides. No one can read them, anyway, and leaving them out will not decrease the impact of your overall message.
An all-white background is hard on the eyes in a darkened environment, and adds a bright light source (the screens), which lessens the impact of your theatrical stage lighting.
If the screens will be switching from slideshow to camera during your presentation, consider inserting black slides for the spots in your presentation when you want to tell the crew that it’s time to go back to camera. See my earlier Meetingsnet blog post for more details on how that’s done.
Ditch the standard powerpoint templates; they're boring and overused. Develop your own format, and if you're representing your company, association or organization, keep color and fonts consistent with your branding.
Got data? Visualize it in charts and graphs to tell a story that’s easy for the audience to understand at a quick glance. And as we mentioned in Tip #3, don’t leave them static on the screen. It’s also worth noting that charts and graphs are classic locations for fonts that are way too small. Tiny dates or data points along the X and Y axes of a chart can be utterly impossible to read by the audience, so be careful.
To quickly summarize — while not a comprehensive list, this set of 11 tips will get you well on your way to creating an impactful, engaging presentation for your audience.