Creating better PowerPoint presentations

We wanted to tell you about our latest Insider’s Insight - Ta dah! - An Insider’s Insight into creating better slide presentations. We are very proud of this issue. At some point everyone of us has undergone ‘death by PowerPoint’. Such experiences have given presentations a bad rap. And yet, they can be a powerful means of communication. So what differentiates a good presentation from a poor one? 

When preparing a slide deck you need to view it as a multi-dimensional project, where each dimension must work in harmony to the benefit of the whole presentation. We can’t help you with the subject matter or make you a better presenter but we can make sure that your slides are first-class and best serve your presentation. There are six disciplines to master when you want to design excellent slides: text, typography, bullets, colour, images and themes. We provide suggestions on how you should use each of these to create a killer presentation (and how to avoid some of the more obvious mistakes).

We thought long and hard before we started writing this Insider’s Insight. Originally, we thought that the obvious thing to do was ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’. However, we eventually concluded that perhaps the best way to be different from other ‘guides’ was adopt an alternative approach. There are plenty of examples of guides on how to develop great presentations - and they all provide examples - and yet people still create and give poor presentations. It beggars the question as to whether that approach is working? What we have tried to do is put together a brief document where every sentence has something useful to convey – we hope thereby providing useful insight rather than pages and pages of flashy examples prepared by experienced designers.

While you are downloading our current guide please check out our other Insider's Insights. We welcome any suggestions on how our Insider’s Insights might be improved and requests for future topics you would like us to cover. You can also register to receive regular updates.