Presentation Design Tips

Presentation Zen
Making Better PowerPoint Presentations (Vanderbilt)

Overview

Have you been asked to create a presentation, but you're not sure about how to design your slides? We've compiled some tips and resources to help you with creating slides that will engage your audience and provide clear communication to audiences watching your presentation in either a live webinar or as a recorded video.

Top 5 Tips

Keep your audience in mind. Think about who you're creating this presentation for. Who will be the primary person or group of people watching your presentation? What do they know about or expect from presentation visuals? Use what you know about who you're speaking to in order to inform the decisions you make.
Keep it simple; avoid making your slides look like your notes. It's very common for slides to include long lists of bullet-pointed lists and for it to resemble the notes for your talking points. However, your talking points likely have more detail than what your audience really needs to see and you'll want to focus your audience's attention on what you're saying above all. Try and simplify the key claims that you want to make, using your visuals to anchor the main claims.
Pick backgrounds for slides that are uncluttered and simple. As a viewer, it can be hard to discern the main or most important points of a presentation if the slide backgrounds have a busy and/or detailed pattern. Further, it can be hard to distinguish the text on slides if the background color of the slide does not have enough color contrast from the text on the slide. Therefore, consider picking backgrounds in neutral colors or shades to help make the core information from the presentation stand out.
Make sure font sizes for text are large enough to be readable during a live presentation or in a recording. Before giving your presentation, test out your slides in "presentation view" so that you can see if the font looks large and readable. Typically, for a slide deck, this would mean a font size that is at least 18 points. If you are not able to fit all of the text on your slide with 18-point font, you might want to consider reducing the amount of text on your slide.
Use a consistent color scheme to unify ideas throughout your presentation. You'll want to decide what colors to use in your presentation to give your presentation consistency in meaning. For example, the headers or "main points" for each slide should all be the same color to give your audience a clear understanding of the main points. Sub-points or "body" sections of your slides might be a different color to signify the difference in meaning. You might use another color (or a bolded typeface) to highlight certain words or phrases that might be especially important with text.

Sac State Resources

Looking for some local resources? Here's what you can find here at Sac State:

Sac State's Microsoft 365 Support Page
Get Support with a Presentation with the Peer and Academic Resource Center (PARC)

Need More Help?

Request support from the IRT Service Desk: https://csus.service-now.com/service/

E-mail the IRT Service Desk: servicedesk@csus.edu