Presentations are stories, not lists, and stories have a structure. They build towards an impact moment and unleash a wave of momentum that changes people’s perceptions and preconceived notions. Good stories aren’t boring and neither are good presentations.

Presentations exist to…

• Inform. Presentations impart knowledge to an audience.
• Instruct. Provide a practical method for using the knowledge that is shared — sometimes this is “hire us, because we are the experts.”
• Entertain. Your presentation should be able to captivate an audience and lead them to consider the worth of what they’re learning.
• Inspire. Influence an audience’s behavior and help them realize their own aspirations.
• Activate. Helping people act on their feelings and internal analysis.
• Persuade. Ultimately, presentations make an appeal to an audience’s logic, emotions, or both in an attempt to convince the audience to act on the opportunity you are presenting.

Slide design is an important part of presentation design, and effective slides are rooted in visual simplicity. Simplicity is best achieved by grasping the complex and being able to interrupt it in bite-size information that the audience can grasp quickly.

My presentations are primarily built in PowerPoint and I’ve definitely grown as a presentation designer after spending the time to really learn all the capabilities that PowerPoint can do when it comes to building a deck.

Above, I made this short deck just to show off my favorite PowerPoint features and convert coworkers to use it for their presentations.

Once you have a proper understanding of a presentation’s narrative, you can then take the key design elements — hierarchy, typography, image selection, and color schemes — and build a focused and impactful presentation.