Julie's Ocean Writing Consultancy

You can find a lot of advice online about how to make good slide presentations, or how to turn good slide presentations into great ones. Delivering a presentation can be stressful, but putting a presentation together can also generate some sleepless nights!

Great slide presentations let you focus on delivery

If you don’t make slide presentations often, your presentation can detract from your message. Here are a few tips for creating a strong presentation that supports your delivery and enhances your message.

Color and contrast

The right colors and contrasts can make your slide presentations easy to look at. The wrong ones can literally exhaust your audience! A lower contrast ratio between your background and text will require the audience to work harder to read your presentation. To combat this, choose colors that offer a high contrast ratio between your background and text colors.

Text

Text can either make or break slide presentations. Among these natural-born killers, your content may not stand a chance! The rogue’s gallery includes:

• Too much text on a slide
• Fonts that are hard to read
• Fonts that are too small
• Attributes (shadows, bold text, underlines) that are misused, overused, or not used when needed

Generally, sans serif fonts are easiest to read. You will certainly want to avoid a font carnival, but the right serif font or the right combination of sans serif and serif fonts can really work well on a slide. A good resource for finding free fonts is Font Squirrel. (Yes – free.)

One other note: if you are going to run your presentation on a computer other than the one you used to create it, you may need to bring your fonts along for the ride – especially if you used special fonts. Fonts don’t get embedded into the presentation, so another computer will use whatever fonts are handy instead of the one(s) you designed into your presentation. (Whenever possible, bring your own computer!)

Graphics

Use ’em if you’ve got ’em, but make sure your graphics are completely understandable and interesting to look at. If you make tables, charts, graphics and other visuals too small, too complicated or too drab, you’ll lose your audience.

Creating great slide presentations isn’t everyone’s forte. If you’d like help putting together effective slide presentations, please contact me at eileen@juliesocean.com or (734) 961-0408.

Photo Credit: Gary Tamin, via FreeImages.com