PowerPoint presentations: why DIY is NSFW
You’ve just launched a huge new campaign, and now you want to sell it to other regional markets. How are you going to convince them?
Or maybe you’re fighting to get a bigger slice of next year’s budget, and you’ve got the numbers to show you deserve it. How are you going to present them?
Or maybe you’ve got a meeting with regional leadership, and you’ve got to show them that your market has been more than pulling its weight. How are you going to prove it?
Of course, you’ll use the go-to program that marketers have been using for decades: PowerPoint.
But not all PowerPoint presentations are created equal. And your DIY presentation might be NSFW (Not Safe For Work). If you do it wrong, your supposedly killer presentation could just kill your chances at getting a bigger seat at the table or a bigger slice of the pie.
Over the years we’ve helped lots of marketers make sure, to paraphrase the Italian expression, their roast is as good as their smoke (i.e. build the best PowerPoint presentations they could get). Here are some of most important things to remember when building yours.
Find your purpose
There are many reasons to give a presentations, and you should be absolutely clear on what yours is. Are you there to pitch a new idea, sell a service, or plead for a bigger budget? Then you’d better be persuasive, with a PowerPoint to match. Are you there to report on your progress? Share the outcome of a project? Teach a skill? Whatever your purpose, it’s essential that the images, colors, and text be finely tuned to communicate that end.
Cut, cut, cut
Many, many PowerPoint presentations that come through our doors are Just. Too. Wordy. Your presentation is not a script. It’s not an ebook either. You’re there to talk, and PowerPoint is there to support your talking. If your audience has to read through your text-heavy slides it’s a guarantee they’re not listening to you.
Marketing guru Seth Godin famously advised “No more than six words on a slide. EVER.” It might not be a goal that every marketer can hit, but it’s sure something to aspire to.
Use hierarchy to organize your information
Ok, you may be running a bit over six words on your slides – which means you need some kind of visual hierarchy. That way your audience can recognize at a glance the difference between primary information and secondary or descriptive text. Give your audience a break and use font size, bullet points or other visual clues to help them understand your priorities.
Keep your infographics uncluttered
In addition to too much slide text, if you’re putting together graphs and charts you might be guilty of absolutely choking them with information. Cut it down, make it clear, and use two graphs instead of one if you must. Some slides by nature will be really data-rich, but it’s your job to make them easily digestible.
Oh, and make sure the data is represented accurately. There are entire sites like WTF data visualizations dedicated to showing the world just how many ways you can get infographics wrong.
Use icons
While there are a variety of visual clues you can use to help highlight important or recurring points, a few well-chosen icons can work as visual clues to help the audience understand the topic or keyword for the slide. Limit yourself to a few, clearly distinguishable icons that will help link various parts of your presentation together to reinforce your message.
Color and contrast
Black and white? Monochrome? That’s not going to cut it. Color plays an important part in our psychology, and it’s important to use it – in moderation. Choose one or two complementary colors and decide when and where you’re going to employ them consistently throughout the presentation.
And, if possible, know your projector. Different machines project color differently, and knowing the machine you’ll be working with might mean the difference between bright bold colors and a murky color soup.
When it comes to contrast, consider your venue. Too much viewed on a screen can be an eyesore, but if your slide deck is going to be projected on a wall in a half-lit room, higher contrast is safer – it’s more likely to project well.
Simple, readable fonts
Just like color, limit the number of fonts and choose one that’s appropriate and readable for your audience. Here are three things to consider:
1. Style
Arial and Calibri are good safe choices, but many others send the wrong message. Times New Roman? This isn’t a newspaper. Cursive? This isn’t the Declaration of Independence – or a letter to your grandmother. And remember that unusual or custom fonts may not render on other people’s PowerPoint if you share them.
2. Readability
There’s still a lot of debate about which fonts are most readable, but most recommend sans serif fonts (fonts without the little bits hanging off the ends).
3. Number
You’re a marketer, not a dj, so go easy on the mixing. Yes, you can combine fonts, but it takes a real eye for style and it’s often easier to use the range of styles – bold, italic or small caps – available to an individual font.
Embrace white space
One of the great tragic misconceptions of marketers and UX designers everywhere is that blank space is wasted space. Blank space around the slide, or white space, is essential for improving readability.
But maybe not too white: projecting white actually uses more energy from the projector than color, so if eco-sustainability is on your list of priorities, considering putting more gray in your white space.
Stay away from ugly stock photography
There’s stock photography and stock photography. If you’re going to use photography – and you should – use images from a professional service. Depending on your context, you might be able to get away with gifs, memes and other formats for ironic effect, but if you need a PowerPoint presentation that’s effectively supported by photography then be wary of Google Images, and steer clear of clip art.
Because cheap, lame and cliched images like weird plasticky neutered aliens and business people high-fiving can distract your audience from your message or threaten your credibility as a presenter.
Apply your corporate identity right
You’re representing your company, so you’ve got to use your logo and corporate identity right. Make sure your logo isn’t overlapping images, half-obscured, or spelled inconsistently between your slide text and the official branded logo you’ve slapped in the header.
And it’s not just your logo. Maintaining consistency with the colors, fonts, and styles of your own brand guidelines – and not PowerPoint’s standard templates – will give your presentation style and authority both inside and outside your company.
Imagine things from the perspective of your audience
The biggest crime of all – and the one underlying all the others mentioned above – is simply not putting yourself in the shoes of your audience and imagining the conditions under which they’ll be watching your presentation. You’re asking your audience to stare at, as typographer Matthew Butterick puts it, “GIANT WHITE RECTANGLES floating in the air for forty minutes.” So consider the effect that can have on your eyes, your brain, your attention.
There are other factors to consider, too. Will the room be hot? Well-lit or dim? Will they be one meter from you ― or 100? If you were in the audience, what would captivate you and keep you listening? All your decisions about presentation length, typography, images and content should flow from this.
Ask for professional help
If all of the above seems too tall an order to fill, don’t be afraid to ask for help from professionals who can create, edit or reimagine your presentation completely. And then execute it.
It may require using a slice of your budget, but then again, whether you get your next year’s budget might depend on the success of your PowerPoint presentations.
At Moskito Design we know that sometimes it’s only GIANT WHITE RECTANGLES that stand between you and career success. We’ll help you make ’em big, make ’em beautiful, and make ’em count. Get in touch.
