I'm often asked how to make presentations more effervescent. How they tin can have more fizz. Or, worst of all, "Can you make my presentation pop?" Well, the respond is yes. By applying some cardinal principles of presentation design, you tin can make your PowerPoint design actually standout and deliver both a more 'popping' – but also more effective – presentation.

I've split this out into a couple of topics, beyond two broad categories. I is presentation pattern, which is really the cadre graphic pattern principles that work across whatsoever form of visual communication. The other I've classed as PowerPoint pattern, which is a lilliputian more specific to using PowerPoint equally a tool to create or deliver content. All the ideas accept practical applications in PowerPoint, but I thought this breakdown was potentially useful.

Watch the video for a summary of all the tips and tricks I cover in my tutorial:

Presentation design with images

What if I told you that your presentations could await similar these examples?

They're all using images to enhance your PowerPoint pattern, both by looking expert, but also contributing to the story and helping your audition empathise your messages. We'll get more into the visual storytelling aspect of this later on, then for now, just think about the quality of your images. All of these come from one of my favourite gratuitous stock photo sites, Unsplash, which gives yous royalty complimentary images for commercial use, and they're all beautiful.

Just even beautiful images can't save a slide like this:

Then, information technology's not merely a instance of dropping squeamish images on the slide. Y'all need to understand how to lay them out well, and use the crop, colour, and creative furnishings tools in PowerPoint to treat the images appropriately, and give your presentation a professional look.

To see how we've created these kinds of slides, check out the image crop, and crop to zoom and total bleed footstep-by-step guides. Simple, simply considered use of the crop tool can piece of work wonders with your PowerPoint presentation design.

Presentation design incorporating white infinite

Big, assuming, flood make full images are great, and an easy way to make your slides stand out. But information technology'due south not all virtually pictures and Presentation Zen; inevitably you'll need to identify other content onto your slides, whether that's facts, figures, charts, or fifty-fifty dare I say information technology… bullet points. This is where the use of white infinite in presentation design becomes crucial.

White space is not about purely adding 'white space' onto your slide. This ane has enough of information technology, but it still looks terrible:

It'southward nigh creating areas of contrast, with articulate focal points to draw your attention to the important parts, and even create a flow and hierarchy across your slide.

This example gives you that luxurious feel of the full bleed image, but crops it so that the focal point – the spotter – is off to one side, leaving enough of white, or 'negative' space around the arm for your content. The ii sections work nicely together, and we've anchored the text in a content placeholder and given it some structure too, past actually reducing the size of the text to requite it more room. Again, we've got a full tutorial on how to incorporate white space like this here.

Presentation design using grids

Grids are pretty much blueprint 101, and to be honest, I'm surprised that nosotros've got this far into presentation blueprint without me having brought them up. You'll likely be familiar with grids from magazines and newspapers – these mainly utilise column grids. The page is divided into columns and and so content is designed to sit beyond these columns in whatever combination, which balances the content.

Well, the same thing applies to PowerPoint presentation design: a filigree system helps to lay out your content in articulate, easy to follow areas.

You lot can use a grid to create singled-out sections, such equally telling the get-go, middle, and end of a story. It's much easier for your audience to follow, every bit everything is improve organized.

And, it helps bring text into line – if you take whatever – which is important as it minimizes distractions for your audience when trying to read.

Using a grid too helps you decide where to position content, as at that place are only so many places that you can put things. Here, for example, 1 tertiary of the slide has been taken up with the supporting paradigm, so we've created a grid within a grid to lay out the three pie charts, which helps to create a feeling of harmony and sophistication:

And don't think that your divisions take to be straight along the gridlines. Here's an example that doesn't employ the rule exactly, simply still works really well.

Also, by using a grid, you accomplish a consistent feel across all your slides for overall presentation design cohesion.

What does all of that mean? Well, you tin transform a slide like this:

Into this!

It'south actually quick and easy to do in PowerPoint also, and yous can encounter our tutorial on using grids and the guide tools in PowerPoint to bring your presentation blueprint upwards a level.

Presentation design with colour themes

Another key presentation design principle is color. Setting the correct colour palette is essential, equally it gives everything a consistent feel, allows you to adhere to your brand, and can requite you the ability to assign significant to specific colours to help your audition understand things. The best way to handle colours in PowerPoint is to ready your template correctly and use a colour theme. You lot tin find out how to alter your PowerPoint colour theme hither. Information technology'due south really quick and easy to exercise. In one case you've done it, the theme will save with the file (or template), and so yous don't demand to worry about it again.

Once gear up, you lot tin employ color in interesting ways to convey meaning.

For example, a heat map is a nifty mode to bear witness data ranges, like metrics, using a scale, rather than merely plain numbers. That'south more than helpful to your audience, as it allows them to immediately run across both the absolute and relative values, rather than having to spend time deciphering it.

You lot can also use colour to focus attention.

In complex data sets, using contrast colours tin can help to highlight main datasets. Here, for instance, you can clearly come across the main information series, compared to the 'everything else' data serial.

Again, once yous've ready your colour theme, using these techniques equally function of your presentation design is pretty easy, and you can find more specific guidance on how to dispense colours in PowerPoint here.

PowerPoint blueprint with text formatting

With your grids, colours, and white infinite considered from a loftier-level presentation design perspective, y'all now get into the specifics of creating slides in PowerPoint. As much every bit you, I, and your audiences, beloved presentations that make use of constructive visuals, we know in that location are always going to be slides that are stuffed to the gills with tedious text and even boring-er bullet points.

But, by applying the presentation design techniques already mentioned, yous tin can fairly easily transform your text-heavy slide into something that's far easier on the heart:

By using grids, appropriate colour, and white space, your PowerPoint slide pattern could look similar this. Breaking out the text with decent paragraph spacing helps your audition parse the content more than efficiently. Everything is easier to follow with consistent fonts and the use of colour highlighting. And the white space around the content actually gives the slide greater bear on – particularly the utilize of the big margins around the text, created by the contrasting placeholder. There are a cracking many more options, and for ten in-depth typography techniques, check out this mail. But if you lot're just looking for prissy fonts to use, this rundown of ten of our favourite fonts for presentations is a must-read.

As yous've probably come to expect by at present, this is something you can exercise using simply PowerPoint, and you lot tin can run across how in this tutorial on text formatting.

PowerPoint pattern to manipulate images

While information technology's not Photoshop, PowerPoint has some neat tools to manipulate images.

What if I were to tell you the picture yous see here had been constructed out of this…

PowerPoint pattern tools for images are all establish on the Format tab on the ribbon. In that location are plenty of options to choose from, just only some actually heighten your pattern. For PowerPoint design tools, you should actually focus on the left-hand side of the ribbon. The good features include the Remove Background tool, which does what its proper noun suggests. The Color section allows you to put a colour launder over everything, but also, at the bottom of the menu, you can cull Prepare Transparent Color, which will remove a single colour from any image, which is how I've cutting out the phone image in this instance. Artistic Effects are mostly terrible, except blur (which is dandy for changing focus on an paradigm) and the Transparency tool – newly bachelor in Office 365 – which makes pictures transparent. For a full tutorial on making the above example image, watch this short video.

PowerPoint design with visual storytelling

And finally, my favourite matter is to use these design techniques as role of visual storytelling, which helps dramatically amend your presentation.

Recollect well-nigh how you can use an image to convey meaning, also as provide aesthetic appeal. For instance, y'all could use a skyscraper existence synthetic to show elements that are taking you higher, with labels upwardly the building showing the key metrics:

Or use a common sight from underground stations – the advertising boards on escalators – to show a data serial increasing. The epitome also gives the figures room to breathe:

Information technology doesn't demand to be complicated, and this instance has been constructed from an paradigm, some text, and an arrow, to show the 20% of business organization highlighted on the role photo:

And of form, we accept a short video tutorial to show you exactly how to do it. Sometimes, just finding the right image can exist a real help coming up with the right PowerPoint design ideas, but yous may also desire to look to other design resource for inspiration.

The main thing to recollect nigh effective presentation design is that you probably don't have the fourth dimension to create a totally new concept each time, or a mood board for your piece of work. These ideas, especially the PowerPoint design ideas, are all virtually helping you create beautiful and effective presentations chop-chop, with minimal effort. A solid basis in design principles – coupled with a few PowerPoint tricks -volition set you on your way. So, hopefully next time someone asks you to make a presentation 'pop' you can uncork the champagne and tell them you already take.

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