3 Tips for Designing Presentations That Don’t Suck.
- Use Quality Photography. Photography is one of the single best ways to make your presentation look awesome. It’s also one of the single best ways to make it lame. The “business people on white background” look is nice, but it’s overdone and tends to look a bit stock art-ish or flat out cliche. Finding Free Photos Where are these amazing photos you say? For starters, check out Stock XCHNG, a free stock photography website with tons of content (good and bad). Also, did you know you can run a Flickr Search using only creative commons licensed content?
- Solid Colors Rock. The key here is to be very cautious about your color choice. Something too bright bright and fun will blow the audience’s eyes out. Also make sure to use plenty of contrast in your secondary color. A crash course in color theory will go a long way. If you need help building color palettes, check out the free tools below.
Kuler. Kuler is the quintessential online color tool. Choose from thousands of awesome pre-built color schemes or generate your own with advanced but user-friendly tools.
0to255. 0to255 is another one of my favorites and is an amazing tool for finding variations of a color. This makes it perfect for hovers and borders in web design but it can also be great for finding an accent color for typography or other elements in a presentation. - Typography Speaks Volumes. Non-designers frequently stress out about finding the proper typeface for a presentation, and for good reason. The right font can me make or break your presentation. Typography is a major art form in the design world and it can really set the stage for what you want to say. The biggest mistake that people make with fonts in presentations is assuming that the first three font styles listed above are boring. This causes them to jump to something like the font on the bottom because it feels more unique and interesting.