Creating a PowerPoint presentation is something that every single person can do. Talking about the creation alone should not require too much effort and time because even the software alone provides default templates.
However, creating an impactful PowerPoint presentation design is not a job that everyone can do. Even experts can find it challenging to develop an impactful PowerPoint presentation design because there are many things that they should pay attention to.
Some of those things are minor details and miscellaneous items that you need to perfect, while others are the mistakes you need to avoid. Yes, we are not talking about big things, but little details that can bring massive change.
There are ten most common things that you need to pay attention to, but many presenters ignore them. And to assist you in learning about the ten dos and don’ts of impactful PowerPoint presentation design, we will help you here.
Here are the ten dos and don’ts of impactful PowerPoint presentation design, consisting of five dos and five don’ts.
What to do
Talking about dos and don’ts of impactful PowerPoint presentation design, we think it is better to start with what you should do first. Here are five on the list:
Start with pen and paper
How often do you directly open Microsoft PowerPoint after you get the instruction to create a PowerPoint presentation? Many people do this, even though that’s not the correct order in creating an impactful PowerPoint presentation design. We took this advice from Ravishankar Iyer’s LinkedIn post.
“So, what’s so wrong about that? Should I go out and eat first?” Well, if you are starving, we suggest you do that. But seriously, you should not go to Microsoft PowerPoint directly after you get the instruction or order to create a PowerPoint presentation if you want to make an impactful PowerPoint presentation design.
Instead, take some paper and pen, then draw or write the outline of the presentation first. No need to make it a detailed outline, but you should brainstorm your PowerPoint presentation design on that sheet of paper.
This way, you can easily recognize the points that need to stand out and things that you can eliminate from your PowerPoint presentation to make it more compact.
Show the audience visual proofs
Make sure always to put visual support in your presentation. We will always include this suggestion in every single article we make. Yes, even though the slide contains the title, make sure to put visual support in it so your audience will always find every slide you create interesting.
And, if you ever question why we should put visual support to help us explain our presentation, the answer is to make it less boring. Your audience’s attention is the thing that you want to maintain harvesting throughout the presentation!
Using visual support such as icons, illustrations, pictures, graphs, etc., is an excellent way to harvest your audience’s attention. There is a reason why our eyes are placed in front we use our visual sense the most to measure everything.
And it includes the measurement to ‘see’ whether your presentation is worth their attention or not. Once they think it is not worth their presence, they will switch their attention to their smartphone.
Change the color
Imagine doing a PowerPoint presentation in front of Republican Party members, and your slides are as blue as the sky. Wouldn’t it be awkward? Oh yes, changing the color to fit your audience’s preferences is as important as having them pay attention to it.
Of course, you don’t want them to pay attention to your slides because they aim to throw some tomatoes at them. That’s the kind of impact you don’t want to get for your impactful PowerPoint presentation design.
But don’t you know that many presenters ignore it? A lot of presenters still pay little to no attention to the color palette of their PowerPoint presentations. One of the main reasons is that many people still think changing the whole color of their presentation design is hard work.
No, the fact that you can easily do it without changing the colors one by one. What you need to do is to click the Design tab and click the Variants group. Go to Colors and choose Customize Colors. You will then be directed to a dialog box to select between 12 current color themes.
“But I don’t like any of those colors.” Easy, edit the color themes, click the drop-down arrow and enter any color combination you like.
Consider slide transition
You may be able to arrest your audience’s attention while explaining things with your impactful PowerPoint presentation design. But as soon as you move to your next slide, you feel like your audience forgets about what you presented on the last slide, and thus make your presentation not as impactful as you thought.
That little gap in between slides is the main reason for this weirdness. When that area is left blank, your audience will see it as a reset point.
But how to prevent their attention from wandering around in between slides? The thing you need is called ‘transition.’ Yes, it is just as easy as adding a slide transition from the animation toolbar. But the thing you need is more than just fading in-fading out slides.
You can also add a simple transition even without putting animations to your slides. In this case, the weapon you can use is called a ‘question.’ A good question, such as “how to solve this problem?” or “what kind of answer we can expect?” will work wonders to ferry your audience’s thoughts into the next slide.
Make sure to put relevant questions before transitioning to the next slide to guide the audience moving from one slide to another.
Review with slide sorter views
And one of the most important yet most ignored dos, in this case, is to review the whole presentation slides. We know that checking is not the favorite part of creating an impactful PowerPoint presentation design, but this sure will give a massive boost to your final product.
There is an easy way to review your slides to view them using a sorter view. This option will give you a birds-eye idea of the whole presentation, so you can see the full preview of what you worked on. Better, you can also rearrange the slides to smoothen the flows.
Those things we said above, my buddies, are how you create impactful PowerPoint presentation design.
What not to do
While we have talked about what to do, we should also talk about what NOT to do to create an impactful PowerPoint presentation design. Like the dos, most of them are simple details that most people often ignore, but they will affect the impact of your presentation later.
After reading 10 Dos and Don’ts of Impactful PowerPoint Presentation Design, here are the things that you should double-check if you want to create an impactful PowerPoint presentation design.
Lonely graphs
This is one of the most common mistakes that presenters make. Putting a single graph without a clear explanation about what it is or what kind of information it can give us and stretching it to the whole slide is an amateur mistake.
We guarantee you, the time your audience sees a lonely graph in your presentation and they act as if they care about it, that’s the time you need to accept that your audience has lost their interest in your presentation since the beginning.
Nobody, and nobody, will clap on a single enormous graph in one slide without any explanation. If you want to keep things simple, at least explain what the bars are talking about.
Unreadable fonts & putting a novel inside your slides
Come on, even though the focus of the presentation is you, don’t torture your audience with unreadable fonts in the slides. Worse is when you put the whole novel in every single slide of your presentation.
Impactful PowerPoint presentation design is not about how fancy your fonts are or how many words you can put into your slides. Sometimes (or most of the time, maybe), simplicity is the gold.
We have the example of some simple PowerPoint presentation templates that still look classy and impactful without using too fancy fonts and putting novels in them.
Poor-quality images
This factor, this very factor, is how you can differentiate between a classy presenter and a ‘just a meh’ presenter. Quality speaks for itself, and in an impactful PowerPoint presentation design, of course, you have to put quality first.
The quality of your presentation and the quality of the supporting contents you use in it, whether it is images or videos. It is like, come on, getting free high-quality photos and videos is not that hard nowadays. It would be best if you had a little more effort to show your quality here.
Eye-burning contrast
While the three don’ts above might require you to learn about what’s good and what’s not, this one is challenging to be discovered. Instead, this factor is more about taste.
We are talking about choosing the right combination of colors in your slides, so your audience can see them more comfortably. It sounds simple, but not all presenters can do that.
10-seconds title transition
And the final thing that you need to avoid is putting an incredibly long transition effect between slides. We have talked above about the importance of keeping the attention of your audience intact.
Putting a too-long transition will break their focus, and we don’t want that. Keep things simple but beautiful, and you already have the most impactful PowerPoint presentation design you have ever made.
See also: 24 Common Mistakes in PowerPoint Presentations Design: Being Too Artistic
Additional tips for impactful PowerPoint presentation design
Another piece of information is to create the most impactful PowerPoint presentation design that you might not want to miss. The advice is by working together with us RRGraph Design. We are professional PowerPoint ‘artists’ with years of experience that you can see from our portfolio.
Not only have we worked together with many huge companies, but we have also dealt with thousands of PowerPoint slides per month. That’s why creating impactful PowerPoint presentation designs is our staple food in this company.
We can also help you design or redesign a PowerPoint presentation and make it as impactful as you desire. Just contact us and tell us what kind of help you need us to do, and we will embrace it with open hands.
Another “do” is contacting us, and another “don’t” is hesitating about it. Good luck! Thank you for reading the “10 Dos and Don’ts of Impactful PowerPoint Presentation Design” write-up.
Let’s visit RRSlide to download free PowerPoint templates. But wait, don’t go anywhere and stay here with our RRGraph Design Blog to keep up-to-date on the best pitch deck template collections and design advice from our PowerPoint experts.
