Make Your Slides Look Good With Our Expert Tips

Ready to craft another presentation?

You might be a seasoned presenter or an amateur, but there are a few things that always require some brain prodding. One of them is finding new ways to keep your slides aesthetically pleasing.

You don’t want a slide deck that undermines your efforts and professionalism. Because no matter how efficient you are as an orator, the screen that runs behind works as a supplement to your words and needs to be equally effective for it to be called a successful presentation. 

This article covers some pro tips to create immaculate slide designs, hone your skill set, and give you everything you need to make an overall compelling presentation, irrespective of the format.

How to Make Your Presentation Slides Look Good?

Here are some ways to make your PowerPoint and Google Slides presentations look good.

Google Slides Presentation 

The following Google Slides tips and tricks will help you create slide decks that keep your audience in awe. 

1. Make Efficient Use of the Slide Layout 

• The layout that you follow should be consistent throughout. Choose from the Layout and Theme options to customize the slides and make them yours.
• Avoid making slides information-heavy with plain text and background. It can disengage your audience. Incorporate basic decent colors (mild) or transparent backgrounds to support your slides.
• You can also try a dark-colored background (matte finish) and use lightly colored text to go with it.
• Keep your slides minimalistic and simple. Over-accessorizing can make your slides look cluttered and unprofessional. 
• Take the help of the Master Slides to change backgrounds, placeholders, and themes and customize the entire presentation. 

2. Use Images and Shapes to Your Benefit

By adding relevant shapes and pictures, you can make your presentations more meaningful.

• Standard shapes like squares and rectangles can become a little monotonous. Use shape masks to give different shapes to your images and add more interest to them.
• You can directly download relevant and catchy images from Google without leaving the tab. Resize and rotate as required. 
• Try adding transparency to your image rather than going for a plain image. You can also add relevant text to the image to make it catchy.
• A few things to avoid are blurry or irrelevant pictures, overstretching or compressing the picture more than required, watermarked and low-resolution images, not adding citations, overuse of features like reflections and transparency in images, etc. 

3. Go Interactive

• Q&A sessions are critical to add interactivity to the presentations. You can improve the look of your presentation by adding a web link to the slides using the Q&A tool. People can submit their questions by clicking on the link (whenever they want), which you can answer at the end of the presentation.
• Take the help of timeline templates to present the progress or process of any project. 

4. Color Your Way

• Customize the color scheme according to your theme and preference. For instance, you can try two different colors on the same slide. Go for complementing colors like blue and yellow. Also, choose colors for the typeface that are in sync with the background.
• Color overlay is another technique that can make your slides look appealing. It will enable transparent shapes to appear on images or texts, which can be done partially or on the entire slide.
• Things to avoid are multiple colors on a single slide, not going for brand colors, similar color family for background and texts, overuse of color gradients, using bold and bright colors for reflection, etc.

5. Tips for Typeface

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• Use font attributes (bold, underlines, italics) to highlight text and emphasize information, as people can’t read everything on the slides. 
• The most preferred Google Slides text fonts are Open Sans, Cabin, Montserrat Ubuntu, and Lato.
• Random text hanging on the slides might make it look unorganized and thus distract people. You can arrange words neatly in a text box to give them a clean and professional look. It will also enable you to use the negative space appropriately and arrange text and images to complement each other.
• Use drop shadow effects on text to make your slides look more interesting.
• Add technical jargon, which is specific to your topic and might appear in red on slides, in your dictionary to avoid that from happening. 
• Things to avoid are too large or small texts, not proofreading, bad spacing between lines and texts, wrong alignment of texts, etc.

6. Infographics and Animation

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• In case of a lot of data, take the help of visually attractive elements like infographics, graphs, charts, etc. It will add credibility and aesthetics to your slides. Also, add labels and arrows to highlight your graph in such a way that it’s self-explanatory. 
• You can use animation to display data in a flow. It will enable you to control the flow of information and not overload people.
• Animated GIFs are another way to make your slides look good.
• Incorporate videos to boost retention and incorporate inclusivity in your slides.
• Transition effects like dissolve, fade in, etc., can help make your slides look appealing and keep the audience hooked.

PowerPoint Presentation 

1. Layout is Critical

• An effective layout will help you control the flow and visual hierarchy of the data and information in your slides. Therefore, align your texts in an order that’s readable for people.
• Adjust colors and font size according to the texts. For instance, body texts and titles should be different to enable differentiation.
• Structure your slide in a way that enables easy comprehension of the information. For instance, the title should be on top, and the body text should be below, not vice versa.

2. Sentences are a No-Go

• Use bullet points for text. You can also try using interesting and catchy graphics instead of regular bullet points to display your texts.

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• The texts should include keywords of your core message and not entire sentences. 
• Keep your words targeted and succinct in a way that complements your message and lets people listen to you to understand the words on the screen.

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3. Use Colors to Your Advantage

• Go for simple light and dark colors (dark text colors on a light background and vice versa) and a defined color scheme to maintain visual consistency.
• Don’t use intense gradients that can make it difficult to read texts.
• Bright colors in texts can cause eye fatigue, so use subtle color combinations that complement each other.
• Take the help of the brand’s guidelines to incorporate colors that align with the brand’s identity and style.

4. Stick to Efficient Typeface 

• Use Serif fonts, like Bookman and Times New Roman, for printed pages and Sans Serif fonts, like Helvetica, for content on screen.
• The typeface should match the tone, feel, and personality of your message and presentation.
• Stick to one or at most two font types for your presentation. Also, make sure your font is legible for everyone in the room.
• Go for a font size of 30 pt or larger. It will enable readability and keep your slides clean and crisp (without unnecessary information).
• Overstyling your slides by excessive use of font attributes (bold, italics) can make it look busy and distracting. So, use it wisely and only where you want to highlight important information.

5. Take Help of PowerPoint Rules

• Don’t overstuff your slides with too much information or ideas on one slide, as it can look messy and affect retention. Try to leave as much space as possible (white space) to make it easy on people’s eyes.
• Follow the rules like 5/5/5 or similar ones. It means your slide must not have more than 5 lines per slide and 5 words in each line. Also, the number of consecutive slides should not be more than 5.
• Orphan words (the last words of a line or phrase) make the slide look cluttered. So, if the last word of your sentence spills over to the next line, try to either fit it into the first line or add another word to the second line.
• Use mock-up diagrams and screenshots.
• Use fewer transitions and not more than one idea per slide.
• Refrain from using PowerPoint’s action sounds.
• Adjust your slide sizes according to the display screen.
• Try the Format Object option to make otherwise impossible fine adjustments to your designs.

6. Visuals

• Ensure your visual content (images, videos, illustrations) is relatable, authentic, and inspirational. 
• Resize, crop, and edit images according to the slide. Also, images should be of high quality and resolution. 

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• You can also use images as your backdrop. 

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• Embed cropped videos wherever needed to make your content look good and more interesting.

Final Thoughts

Clean and efficient slides are as important as the speech of the presenter for it to be called a successful presentation. Unprofessional slides can undermine the authority and effectiveness of a presenter and make them look incompetent. 

The above tips will help you polish your slides and improve their aesthetics.If design still doesn’t feel like your forte and it seems laborious to craft such presentations, take the help of ready-made PowerPoint templates and Google Slides themes to reduce your workload.