Key takeaways:
- Start with the story. Make sure you know what you want to say and the key messages you want to communicate - before you open PowerPoint.
- Follow best practices for presentation design - less is best, contrast is your friend and text size is important.
- Ask for help. Partnering with a provider who specializes in PowerPoint can alleviate the pain points around the deck production process.
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Everyone knows this story – the one that starts with a 70-slide deck (packed with dense content, confusing charts and a firestorm of colors and fonts), and ends with a headache. It’s easy to blame PowerPoint, but the real problem isn’t the tool, it’s the way we use it.
Slide-first thinking: Starting off on the wrong foot
If you open PowerPoint before you know what you want to say, you’re starting off on the wrong foot. Building slides before the story is a sure-fire way to end up with a disjointed, bloated presentation without a clear message. It’s like designing a book cover before writing the plot.
Story-first thinking: A better way to build
The best presentations don’t start with slides, they start with structure. Outline your story first and think about the key messages you want to communicate. Using a storytelling guide like the McKinsey SCR (situation, complication, resolution) framework can help you identify and organize the most important information. Once you have your story defined, then you can think about how it should look.
The anatomy of a great presentation
In his TEDx talk “How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint”, David Phillips, an expert in the art of making presentations and author of a book by the same name, outlines 6 key principles for building impactful presentations. (His talk is 20 minutes, and I highly recommend watching the entire presentation).
6 principles for great presentations:
- Keep it simple. Make it easier for your audience to digest by sticking to one message per slide.
- Contrast is your friend. Use saturation and opacity to highlight where you want your audience to focus.
- Size matters. Make the most important information the largest.
PowerPoint is not a word processor. Avoid long sentences and keep text short and sweet. - Dark is better. White backgrounds can overpower, especially if you are presenting in-person. Remember, you are the presentation, the PowerPoint is the visual aid.
- The rule of 6. The number of slides in your deck doesn’t matter – it’s the number of objects per slide you should keep an eye on. A max of 6 objects (lines of text, images, etc.) per slide ensures that your audience can quickly understand the content.
When outside help can help
The truth is, it takes a lot of time to storyboard, write, design and polish every single deck. And most likely, you (or your team) don’t have the luxury of time, especially when you’re producing lots of slides every week, often on a tight timeline.
That’s when bringing in an outside partner can be a strategic advantage – not just to save time, but to protect the quality of the message. When you hand off the production of your presentations to an experienced team that lives and breathes PowerPoint, you and your internal team can stay focused on what matters most – building the story.
