In this video,
you're going to learn the exact steps you need to take in order to make your
presentation slides look great without any .
These are the five exact steps I run people through whenever they asked me for
slide design help and they work regardless of what industry you're in or what
type of presentation you're building. They work,
whether you're using Microsoft PowerPoint, Google slides, or Apple's keynote.
The reason these steps are great is that you don't need to have any graphic
design experience or a good eye in order to apply them to your presentations.
For example,
you'll be able to build out slides that look like these in just a few minutes.
By the end of this video,
you'll also learn a secret trick for making everything on your slide look
perfectly positioned in under a minute. Hi, I'm Camille,
the co-founder of Nuts and Bolts Speed Training and I'm excited you're here.
Step one, pare down your content.
The very first step of great slide design is to pare down your content and
refine your message.
One of the biggest causes of death by PowerPoint is not only having too much on
one slide and even more than that, it's not having a clear,
concise and memorable point.
Presentation design experts like David Phillips say that if you focus on more
than one key message per slide your slide,
will increase the time that it takes for people to see and digest information by
500%.
So I urge you to spend some time thinking about the slide and what it needs to
tell the audience in a simple and easy to grasp way.
Think about what it is exactly that you want your slide to say and how can you
convey that in as few words as possible. If you can do that well,
your slide will be successful. A great place to start is with your title.
What do you want someone to know about your slide?
Instead of saying market overview, say huge market opportunity for luxury brand.
That's ultimately what you're trying to tell people.
Or instead of quarter four results,
say quarter four results are up 30% and notice how clarifying your message in
the title changes what you need to present to back it up.
Now once you have your point and you've written out the content for your slide,
what I recommend doing is trying to cull down your content even further,
and you can do that in a number of ways.
The first way is to simplify your sentences.
So instead of writing all your content out in full sentences,
turn it into short statements.
The second way is to just remove things from your slide and perhaps putting them
in your talking notes so you can still bring them up,
but don't need the audience to read them on the slide. On this slide for example,
there are way too many words,
I will need to cull them down significantly so that the slide is actually
readable and the best way to do that is to go through each paragraph and pull
out the key point and turn that into one sentence, at most. Now,
this may still be too much slot text and may still be too crowded,
but at least it's readable. If you stay with this slide,
you do however run the risk of having your audience read the slide.
And that's a big no, no,
because it lowers your credibility and puts the audience to sleep.
So I would recommend taking it a step further and culling the text even more to
just the key points like this.
Now you just have your highlights and you can elaborate more verbally.
That way you're demonstrating your knowledge and expertise and you're also
keeping the audience more engaged,
by having them listen to you rather than just read the slide.
Now sometimes we need to keep more text on the slide than we'd like,
maybe you can't just pare it down like this because the presentation needs to
stand on its own without you there talking over it.
So how do we work with content heavy presentations? Well,
the third way is to divide it up into multiple slides.
Oftentimes we feel like we have to put everything we want to say on one slide,
but in reality slides are free. So go ahead and use more than one.
In this example, we could simply break up the slide into two slides,
which gives us a lot more breathing room and as we'll see later in the video,
we'll also be able to add some visual elements to make the slide design better.
Step two, choose the framework. Once you have your content ready,
it's time to start thinking about how it can best be displayed in terms of the
layout, colors, fonts, et cetera.
These elements represent the skeleton of the slide and the're mission critical
for any good PowerPoint slide design.
The first thing I usually do here is to see if there's anything that's pre-built
that I can simply reuse or be inspired by. For example,
Microsoft Office provides a whole set of pre-built PowerPoint themes and
templates that are easy to use and that look pretty decent.
Scroll among the options to see if one is a good fit. If one of these fits,
then go ahead and use it as it is. Boom, you're done. If not,
then you have to start looking elsewhere.
I personally like to go to places like slideshare and Pinterest to get slide
design inspiration. There,
I look at how the content is laid out and what color and font combinations are
being used. For example,
I like the font combination of Saraf and San Serif and I like here how bold and
bright the colors are.
I also like how minimalist the style is with the use of blocks of colors,
so I'm going to use this as inspiration and the next step is to take the
elements that you like and apply them to your content. So for my example,
I'm going to find a similar font pairing and color Palette and end up bringing
it in like this or with this Pinterest example,
I might change the slide to look something more like this.
If you're building a presentation that's just a onetime thing,
then you could just edit your slide in the normal view as is.
But if you're building a presentation that will be reused and this represents
most of the presentations out there.
I highly recommend creating a theme and custom template.
If you want to learn how to build a custom PowerPoint theme or template,
check out my video here on screen. Step three,
make it visual. Now that you have the content framework,
fonts and all the colors ready, the next step is to make it visual.
We all know the PowerPoint is a visual medium,
but oftentimes it feels like we have to be a graphic designer in order to know
how to create great slides,
but the truth is you just need to be able to take your concepts and translate
them from words to visuals.
Whether that means replacing the words with visuals or simply adding them in.
You can do that by breaking up the text into chunks and by adding visual
elements. Those can be pictures, graphical elements, icons, or simply shapes.
For example, with my example from the previous step,
I've simply added colored and outline shapes around my text in a way that makes
the overall slide more visual.
I could go a step further and add icons to further enhance the message of each
text block,
or I could even find quality image to really make this visual like this.
Here's some other examples of how to take a slide that's text only and make it
more visual. Now,
one extra tip here is to use images that are as real as possible.
Clip art and graphics like these are outdated and ineffective.
Use images that are more realistic like these. Step four, lay it out.
This step is not just about making sure your slide is laid out in a pleasing way,
but it's also about giving the audience's brains a break. That's right.
As a presentation designer, whether you're a pro or not,
your job is to give the viewer the path of least resistance for grasping your
content and that means making their lives easier.
And one of the super simple yet effective ways to do this is to include lots of
white space on your slide. And what do I mean?
We'll take a look at these two slides. Does one seem easier to look at to you?
The difference is all in the amount of empty space that is left around the
content. And the same is true for this example.
Now to create white space,
all you have to do is chunk up your content into blocks and bring them closer.
If this is too hard with the amount of content you have,
I would consider going through step number one again in order to pare it down
and split the slide in two so that you can have more space to work with.
You may have to also shrink down the size of the text and the images on your
slide. Step five alignment position.
The final step you should take to make sure your PowerPoint slide design is
polished and professional looking is to align and position everything well.
Nothing screams amateur more than jumping titles,
a shifting logos and mismatched layout, and look at these slides for example.
If we go between these two slides, we notice that the layout moves the title,
the content, the chart moves. If I go to the next slide, it's shifting again.
The next slide,
it looks like the main content has moved and in the next slide it looks like
things aren't really aligned here, it's uneven,
it's not exactly perfect.
Now this is all fixable and there are several ways to make sure that everything
is aligned and positioned properly on your slide.
And the first one is to hit the reset button so that PowerPoint can
automatically move everything that's in a place holder back into place.
And let me show you how that works.
Select all the slides and hit the reset button.
You'll notice that things have shifted in here.
So the title content where reset into the correct position and formatting,
they're no longer bolded and they're in the right place.
The chart has also been adjusted correctly. However,
the logo here has actually not moved at all.
So we're going to need to fix that in a different way.
And the rest of this looks like this has not moved either.
We're going to need to fix that. And for this slide, nothing has changed either.
So let's go and address the first part, which is the jumping logo.
If I actually select the logo,
you'll notice this actually here on the normal view.
So the logo is in each one of these slides,
which is why they're not always in the exact same position because they're not a
placeholder.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to control c to copy this and I'm going to go
into the slide master view and I'm actually going to paste the logo here on the
parent slide so that it appears everywhere in the correct position.
Now you'll notice this one is slightly different because it is on a title slide
and we have hide background graphics selected,
which is why everything on this slide is a little bit different.
But if you notice all the rest of them, uh, and other than the divider slide,
they are all here positioned correctly.
And this means that when we close out of the slide master view,
we can jump around and notice that they're there.
Now we're going to have to delete all of these. Go down to the next slide, delete,
delete, delete, delete,
delete. And this one is all set.
So now if we go from side to side,
you'll notice that the placeholders of the logos are all in the correct place.
Now the next step we have to do is to fix this second slide of the four parts,
four part sequence and you'll notice that we're jumping around here and the way
to do this in the normal view,
if you're not using anything that's affected in the slide master,
because you'll notice here there is no place holders.
It's only a placeholder for a title.
So these are all elements that were added in the normal view.
We're going to need to use the alignment tool. Now first,
let me make sure that we actually group everything first because we are going to
want to make sure that all of these elements together are aligned to the center
of the slide.
So I'm going to hit control g to group this element and then I'm going to go to
the drawing tools format tab and then I'm going to select align,
align center so that the content jumps exactly to the middle of the side and
you'll notice now they are matching perfectly.
I'm going to Ungroup this control shift G to un group that they're back to their
individual shapes.
Now alignment doesn't just allow you to align things to a slide,
you can also align things within or amongst each other. So for example,
here we're going to align to this, to the center of this shape.
So we select both together, align, align center. Now the shoe,
which is the smaller object jumps to the middle of the center of the bigger
object.
We want to actually make sure that these are all aligned to the center as well
because it looks like they're not exactly even.
So I'm going to select all of these by using the shift key and selecting all the
items align and align to center as well.
Now the last step we have to do is to make sure that the space between each of
these elements is even.
So what we're gonna do is we're going to group each one of these control g,
control g, control g,
and now these elements are their own individual pieces.
And what we can do is select all three. You'll notice the space here is not,
it's not even.
We're going to go to the align tool and this time we're going to select,
distribute horizontally.
What this is going to do is it's going to place all the elements evenly between
the furthest right point in the furthest left point on a horizontal axis.
So if I select distribute horizontally,
you notice the middle one jumps into the middle and now they are all even.
Now it does seem like the entire graphic is not centered on the slide.
So if we group this again,
alt center Aligned Center control shift g to un group control,
shift to un group and now this is spread evenly across the slide.
Now the last thing we have here, it appears that these two,
these three are not aligned.
So I'm going to select them all three aligned top to align them to the top.
Using the alignment tool is critical because it not only takes out the guesswork
and makes things 100% perfect, but it also saves you a ton of time.
If you want to learn more about how to use the alignment tool like a master and
save even more time,
check out our video on fast tracking object alignments on screen now,
and those were the five easy steps for great PowerPoint slide design for
beginners. If you found this video helpful,
then make sure to subscribe to our channel to get the latest presentation and
PowerPoint tips.
You can also learn more about how to become a true PowerPoint master by visiting
our website nutsandboltsofspeedtraining.com now I want to turn it over to you.
Which of the steps from this video do you typically overlook or avoid?
Let me know by leaving a quick comment right below this video.
Thanks for watching and good luck with your presentation.