Presentations 101: What do you start with when creating your presentation deck?

The banner theme is about baking. This looks irrelevant, isn't it? Today, I would like to talk to you about baking. Just kidding! I don't know the least about baking, but baking is a metaphor for how you can create something from scratch and work with basic and simple ingredients. It teaches you how to work your way up from salt and flour to the most decedent Parisian croissant.

In this article, I will walk you through the main elements of the presentation that you need to focus on. My goal is to provide more hands-on guidance so you can learn how to use every single ingredient in your favour. Excited?! Let's do this!

In the words of "A Non-Designer's Guide to Creating Visually Captivating Presentations" by Visme, if you want to tell a good story in your presentation, you need to think of it in three elements: (i) Content, (ii) Visual Design, and (iii) Delivery. This article is a creative mishmash of the first two that will hopefully help you with the third one.

Before we even start talking about the craft of designing good presentations, you need to think CONTEXT. Without context, nobody can tell you if your design is good or bad; not even a professional designer. I am hoping that these guidelines will help you with presenting your ideas within the intended context..

(1) Lay-it-Out

It's important to identify the main layout of each slide so you can create clear borders between the different elements so they don't bleed into each other. The elements that I use mostly in my presentations are: title, short text and visuals. Allowing these elements to be clearly separated makes your slide clean and easily scannable. In the example below, I used three basic elements: title, short content and image. The title is well-defined and the elements have distinct borders in-between. You don't have to use all three in your presentation but make sure you create borders (especially when using both text and image).

Remember that your slides need to read left-to-right (if you're using a language that reads in that direction). Your audience eyes start to scan the slide from the top-right and this is where you should start your content when building your presentation. This concept slightly changes when we talk about charts, which we'll discuss in other articles.

(2) Minimalism

When you create your slides, I want you to be frugal. Do not put all of your content in one slide; that leaves no room for your audience to pay attention to you when you deliver it. Talk about one topic at a time. If you have a lot of content that you need to present, summarize it and talk about it during the delivery stage. If it's not possible, don't be afraid to split it up and add more slides. They are free, I promise you! Spend some time prioritizing and refining your content and make sure your presentation doesn't go overboard with 45 slides and remember: less is more.

(3) White space

If there is one advice that I can give to you, it is that you need to be generous with your white space. Use white space whenever you can. It actually makes your presentation more readable and scannable. Having limited white space indicates that you need to create more slides to allow your audience to breath.

(4) Say it visually

Whatever you want to say, it's better said visually. I am addicted to visual cues and props; you will see that throughout my examples. I think it is the best way to create a vibrant slide content without taking too much away from it. However, Be careful not to over-use them that it become an overkill.

• Be consistent in your use of visual cues. Use visual cues that are from the same family; brother, sisters and cousins.
• Use other props instead of bullet points for subtitles or keywords.
• Avoid using anything 3D. It doesn't translate well in a presentation deck. No matter how beautiful it may look, the main purposes of the presentation are to inform, interact and communicate.

Take a look at the sample I created below (P.S.: the content of the slide is used only for demonstration purposes).

Before: I summarized the content in four bullet points. It will take your audience time to read those bullet points and the visual cue serves no purpose other than using white space. The absence of colour makes this slide less interactive and dull. If you don't wish to use colour, you can use contrast by painting the text in dark grey while emphasizing certain key works with colours like blue or green.

After: I've introduced keywords and visual cues instead of listing my ideas in bullet points. This makes the slide much more scannable and much cleaner and your audience focused. Additionally, I used the right amount of leading by creating enough space between the points and very little space within each point.

(5) Data Visualization

• I can spend days here. In fact, I've dedicated most of my free time learning how to visualize data. Presenting your data can be overwhelming, for both you and your audience. You have to really understand what you're trying to achieve by the visualization before you build it. I will give you some quick tips, but I will dive deep into this topic in a separate article.
• Understand the context and what problem you're trying to solve or highlight
• Think about the best way to represent your data. For example, a line chart can be used to represent progress and a bar chart can be used for comparison
• Replace tables with charts and/or visual cues
• Use a light shade of grey with another colour to highlight important parts of the chart
• Avoid using 3D charts (or any 3D visuals in general)

++ Bottom Line ++

If there is any takeaway from this article, it's these two key advices: (1) Be frugal with your content and generous with white space, and (2) Think context. Everything else will follow!