Five Rules for Power-Point Design

In today’s society, we are PowerPoint-ed to death!  This commonplace presentation aid is incredibly easy to use and has been around so long that most of us can build one in our sleep.  We can also sniff out a bad one right away.  Follow these simple rules for your next presentation and you will rule the boardroom!

Rule One: The only appropriate background colors are white, black, or tan. 

PowerPoint comes pre-loaded with many beautiful templates.  The problem is, most of these templates only look beautiful from the soft glow of your backlit screen.  If you want to create slides that can be viewed by everyone in the room, no matter what projector or screen you use, stick to the basics.  This goes for font color too… white background gets black text and vice versa. 

Rule Two:  Pictures speak louder than words.

Need to display some data?  Throw it on the screen in a clearly visible chart or graph.  Nobody wants to read an entire slide of data, when a simple chart could display it much easier.  This ensures that your audience is listening to what you have to say and not reading the slides behind your back.

Rule Three: Boring fonts are the best fonts.

If you are speaking to a large room with diverse participants, you want to make sure that your slides are as easy to read as possible.  You never know what challenges there may be to disrupt your slides.  Times New Roman or Arial only please.

Rule Four: Ask yourself, Is this for me, or my audience?

Do NOT put your notes up on the screen.  If you need notes to get through your presentation, type them up and put them in a tidy three ring binder.  Only show the audience the information that they really need, you want them to get the rest of the information from you.

Rule Five: If you don’t need a slide, don’t use one.

There is nothing more powerful than clicking to a blacked out slide.  You will instantly have the eyes of everyone in the room.  It triggers them subconsciously to re-focus on you.  When you need to drive home a really important point, black out the screen.