Creating PowerPoint documents is a resource used by teachers, students, and various professionals for presentations and the transmission of e-learning teachings. It is a simple and fast method, but it is often oversimplified, using any template to upload information regardless of whether the format is adequate.
If you want your PowerPoint presentations to impress on their own, stay until the end of this article.
You've probably thought about this on many occasions: the colour, motif or layout of the slides doesn't always suit what we want to present. One of the solutions we use is to add and remove information, move text and image boxes... in the end we saturate the slide with too much information and the viewer will focus more on deciphering what they see than on listening to you.
Powerpoint presentation templates don't convince me:
Make your own templates
It may seem complicated at first, but if you follow the steps you will see that it is much simpler and you will not return to bad habits; there is nothing like originality in PowerPoint presentations.
Research styles : imitation is the key to success. Look for magazines and newspapers that talk about the same thing you want to present, this way you will see the layouts that can work.
For example, if I'm talking about music I'll look for images from magazines like Rolling Stone
Build a grid – with text boxes and images (you can put your inspiration image below as a guide)
example of grid images for powerpoint presentations
Less is more : don't put long texts, just the essential information, this way you can make sure that the attention is focused on you.
Chromatic criterion : establishes a color relationship for squares, circles... they can be complementary or correlative shades
Typography : Choose a font that is legible and that adapts to the purpose of the text (expository, narrative, poetic, etc.). For long texts, you can choose serif fonts and for headlines, sans-serif.
example of typography for powerpoint presentations
Establish a hierarchy in the information : by font size, with numbering, lists, bold, or typography.
Leave some empty space : you need to leave some empty space on the slide so it can breathe. It doesn't necessarily have to be a blank space. It's simply a matter of finding an area that allows content to be released and harmonises the message. What you'll gain from this is a better understanding.
Apply Occam's razor : Occam's razor is a principle of economics. The simplest PowerPoint presentations are usually the most suitable. Applying this principle to the design of your presentations will make you ask yourself on each slide what you can remove from it, what elements are unnecessary, how you can simplify the information. Therefore, we recommend that you do not overuse:
Underlined texts.
Colors in typography (use only the grayscale to contrast with the background).
Font sizes and types (makes reading difficult).
Backgrounds (do not use backgrounds with images, complex textures or bright colors).
Information.
Maximize the signal and minimize the noise : What does this mean? It's very simple. telemarketing leadsusa telephone number data Never let the signal (information) give way to noise (superfluous elements). These superfluous elements must be eliminated using Occam's razor. You must minimize as much as possible everything that is not strictly information or has a relationship with it. Some examples of noise would be thick lines in a table of contents, images with a purely decorative purpose, symbols that are difficult to interpret, illegible letters due to their small size, etc.
What can we include in the presentations?
To create our presentation, we can use text from Word documents, tables made in Excel, images downloaded from the Internet, or even take a screenshot of an image on a website. It wouldn't hurt to know how to use Photoshop to create custom images.
We can also insert audio, music, songs, videos, diagrams, cliparts, sound effects, etc.
Person working with photoshop for powerpoint presentations
What to do with the presentations created?
After creating and checking that the presentation works properly, we can share it with our friends by copying it to a pen drive or disk, on the Internet, on social networks such as Facebook, Google+ and others, or uploading it to specialized sites such as SlideShare.
Another alternative is to convert it to video with the same program and upload the file to YouTube or other sites on the Internet.