5 top tips for designing your presentation

It’s a high five!

Eyyyy! For Monkay Monday!

Monkay Monday. High five for two reasons. Because it’s Monkay Monday, and because we’re doing five top tips for designing your presentation.

And we’re talking about Keynote, Powerpoint or Google Slides, or whatever you choose.

Yeah, so that’s number one here really. You know, look at your software. You don’t have to use Powerpoint, guys, there’s other stuff out there that might suit your needs better. Might be easily more transportable. And also understand your hardware, so where are you doing this presentation? We do quite a lot of presentation work internally, where we would use Keynote (for us) and we’d put a presentation together, I would voice over it, or Chris would voice over it, and it helps us sort of explain maybe our design process, or give some feedback to the customer, or do something like that. And in that situation, we’re happy to make sure that it’s normal full HD dimensions on that. But perhaps you’re doing a presentation at some sort of hall somewhere and they’re using an old 4x3 projector or something. So understanding what hardware you’re plugging into – can you take your iPad, do you wanna do it from your laptop, what connectors do you need, do you need a VGA cable, HDMI, what are they running through? So understanding all of this before you start is really important.

Yep. Moving on to number two, the second top tip, is don’t overuse your logo. This is Matt’s pet peeve.

Ah, we see it everywhere when people do presentations, they put their logo on every single slide, it’s kind of not really necessary. Present it once if you need to, but most people are gonna know who you are and what you’re talking about. It’s kind of distracting, you don’t need it on every single slide.

No. And the next one, stick to your guidelines. Obviously, you should have some guidelines in your company of how to design anything that comes out so that will fit in with your brand. Just make sure your presentations fit in with that, rather than being something weird with that Clipart man with the question mark above his head. Don’t use that, because that’s not going to be in your brand guidelines. Hopefully, anyway.

So yeah, make sure you’re using the correct font, the correct colours, the correct formatting, everything you can to make it look consistent and have that single voice. You can also use some pro templates as well, so they’re quite a handy thing to download – but again, if you do use pro templates, make sure you adjust them so they’re using the correct font or anything like that.

Yep, we’ll put a link down below of a place where we’ve sometimes bought some templates in the past. I mean, you can spend maybe $10-15 – maybe even less – on a template, which will save you hours of work and will look quite nice straight out of the box.

I’m gonna have a lovely sip of my coffee. Mmm. Finally, let’s keep it simple and keep it short. So text. Don’t go mad. You don’t wanna be writing loads and loads of text per slide and reading that out. The text should either support what you’re saying or should be a little note for yourself. Really understand your own content so you can talk about it and have the slides to just reinforce what you’re saying. So keep that sort of text short and keep things simple. Transitions, Chris.

Yep, transitions. You need to make sure you don’t use fiery transitions or any crazy animation things. Just keep things nice and straightforward. If you have a look at what Apple do in their presentations, each slide will probably have five or six bullet points at max, and they might just have three or four words, and the guys can riff around that. And I think that’s the best way to go rather than filling your page with entire reams of information that you just sit and read.

There we go, five top tips. Let’s end on a high five.

Eyyyy! High five!