9 principles for better powerpoint design

November 24, 2022

Table of Contents

Give Photos a Treatment

Everyone is using images to enhance your PowerPoint design, it’s not just a case of dropping nice images on the slide. You need to understand how to lay them out well and use the crop, colour, and artistic effects tools in PowerPoint to treat the images appropriately and give your presentation a professional look.

Incorporating white space

Other than images, facts, figures, or charts This is where the use of white space in presentation design becomes crucial. White space is not about purely adding ‘white space’ onto your slide, It’s about creating areas of contrast, with clear focal points to draw your attention to the important parts, and even creating a flow and hierarchy across your slide.

Use of grids

You’ll likely be familiar with grids from magazines and newspapers – these mainly use column grids. You can use a grid to create distinct sections, such as telling the start, middle, and end of a story. It’s much easier for your audience to follow, as everything is better organized. It gives a consistent feel across all your slides for overall presentation design cohesion.

Use Color with Purpose

Setting the right colour palette is essential, as it gives everything a consistent feel, allows you to adhere to your brand, and can give you the ability to assign meaning to specific colours to help your audience understand things. In complex data sets, using contrast colours can help to highlight primary datasets.

Use Animation with the Intention

it’s a good idea to keep presentations visually interesting. Like colour, you want to use animations with intention instead of just decoration.

The text should be minimized.

Breaking out the text with decent paragraph spacing helps your audience parse the content more efficiently. the more you can pare down the text on your slides to put your audience’s focus on your words.

Visual storytelling

We can use images, icons, or infographics to convey meaning, as well as provide aesthetic appeal. For instance, you could use a skyscraper being constructed to show elements that are taking you higher, with labels up the building showing the key metrics.