Volumes and volumes have been written about how to make a great PowerPoint presentation and it’d take a lifetime to read all of it, let alone implement them all! So let’s first understand what is a great presentation from a design angle?
1. Aids retention of information: Think of a presentation which didn’t have a PowerPoint but had just the talker instead. What would that person have to do to help you remember? Similarly, think of another presentation which had the presenter using a PPT, but you came back dissatisfied and feeling left out because you couldn’t get much value out of it.
2. Can be viewed comfortably by the audience: It is extremely distracting if you’re sitting at a presentation and aren’t able to make out what is on the projector screen. Instead of paying attention to the speaker, you focus on craning your neck and in the bargain all the conversation is lost on you. So it’s very important that a presentation can be viewed easily by the audience, whether at the front row or the last.
3. Complements the content: What’s a good presentation without some images and graphs and charts? But then again, all good content loses its edge if the images used are distracting the audience instead of helping them grasp the data and its relevance.
4. Supports the pitch: The pace at which the presentation is being conducted too is very important. This is especially true of people who are “rookie” presenters. They’re either too excited or too nervous to realize that their audience might not be processing their speech at the rate at which it is being belted out!
In the next few days, we will attempt at giving you a condensed version of all the “How to make a presentation awesome, great…” articles out there.
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