School comes along with its fair share of presentations, but that doesn't mean they have to be boring! And especially now that we can't be there in person to add vocal pizzazz, adding a few key design choices can make your presentations stand out from the crowd and may even earn you a few extra credit points, if your teacher is in a giving mood. So instead of throwing a bunch of words at a generic Slides or PowerPoint template, try these tips!
Actually good templates: Slidesgo is the holy grail of google slides and PowerPoint templates. They have thousands of templates for every presentation style that are fully customizable. Plus you can download up to 10 a month for free! Or you can just use another google account and get 20, or 30, or however many you need in a month. (Hopefully not that many)
Easy graphics: Instead of just grabbing images off of google, try using Canva! Again, it’s free, so it’s already great. But it has a super simple interface where you can make anything from thumbnails to logos, to posters, to graphs. Canva has loads of free images, fonts, and design templates that almost always ensure a nice design, so give it a shot.
Canva has got you covered for easy graphics.
Visuals: On that note, please use images, and preferably images that look nice. This is pretty much the whole point of presentations and what differentiates them from essays. Adding in relevant images and gifs can help keep your audience engaged! Also, transparent background PNGs are nice for adding images and clipart without the annoying white squares behind them.
Again, I got these from Canva.
Color Palletes: People like color, make it count. Keeping colors limited will make your presentation congruent and less confusing. I use coolors.co to easily generate color palettes (although you might have to cycle through a few before landing on one that fits your vibe)
For example, (although I would recommend sticking to about 4 colors)
Text: Try to break up the text as much as possible and keep it limited, especially if you are presenting in person (bullet points and shapes are your friends). Just like colors, limiting text fonts will make your presentation look more cohesive and overall just better. Google fonts and the Microsoft font library offer different and unique fonts that aren’t the basic aerial and san-serifs that come with the software.
Hierarchy: Wow, a principle of design, we’re getting fancy. This is basically just when the important parts of a design are separated or somehow made to stand out from the less important elements. You can do this in a ton of different ways. You can change the color or place a shape behind it or make it bigger or change the font or slant it or underline it. Basically, there are lots of ways to make the important stuff look important and improve visual flow.
In this, I just changed the color.
Grammar: Just use Grammarly before you submit your presentation. It sucks having points docked for grammar mistakes.
Structure that makes sense: Great, now you have a nice-looking presentation, but remember to keep in mind the structure of your presentation and break up slides with lots of text with slides with very limited text and an image. Introducing sub-topics with limited words and big text can really help the audience differentiate between topics.
Templates (again): Look, if you take one thing away from this, just use a template, it will really help.
That's all.
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