presentation use visuals

Presentation Training Institute

A division of bold new directions training, what is the importance of using visuals when giving a presentation.

While preparation and delivery are critical components of a successful presentation, the visuals you use throughout your presentation are equally important. Science and research suggest that nearly 75% of learning occurs through sight, which is why visuals are a necessary tool for effective presentations. When used properly, visual aids can help your audience connect to the topic and understand it’s message. There are many types of visual aids including slideshows, videos, handouts, and props, all of which can help reinforce your main message. Here are a few reasons why visuals play such a significant role in presentations.

Enhance Your Presentation Listening to a speaker talk for a lengthy period of time is enough to put anyone to sleep. Visuals help to add that extra element of interest to the presentation. No matter the topic, you can always make it more interesting with visuals. Visual aids help to grab the audiences’ attention by enabling them to see colorful representations of your message.

Maintain Audience Attention In a world where just about everyone has a cell phone or tablet with them at all times, it can be extremely difficult to capture and maintain people’s attention. With the swipe of a finger they can be checking emails, browsing the web, or checking sports scores so it’s incredibly important to do everything you can to capture their attention. High quality visuals can significantly increase the chances of your audience paying attention to you rather than staring at their phone.

Images Help People Understand When you throw mountains of text at your audience, it can be nearly impossible for them to understand the material. Images are important because they help to clarify your points. Our brains process images much faster than text, meaning that the best way to help your audience understand the material is through visual aids.

Visuals Help with Long-Term Memory Visual images make a long-lasting impression on our minds, increasing the chances that your audience will remember the information. Research shows that the combination of visuals along with text increases one’s ability to remember the information for a longer period of time. If you want audiences to remember your material long after your presentation ends, it’s best to incorporate some good visuals.

Visuals Can Inspire The ultimate goal of any presentation is to inspire your audience. You want them to take something away from your presentation and actually do something with the information you give them. Visuals resonate with people in a way that text and words alone cannot. Great visuals have the power to move people and inspire them.

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Art of Presentation: A Guide to Captivate Your Audience with Visuals

Andrew Herkert

April 17th, 2023

Whiteboard Video

Presenting a complex topic often results in an audience with glazed -over expressions, or hours of agonizing preparation to avoid those blank stares. Preparation is essential and can be simplified when you know how to use visuals to engage, explain and boost retention.

There is no definitive answer to whether drawn images are better than photos, videos, charts, or graphs. The choice largely depends on the type of information being presented and the presentation objectives. Each type of visual has strengths and weaknesses.

Charts and Graphs

Charts and graphs often simplify presenting complex data sets in a concise manner that summarizes a state or condition. They are effective because visual representation transforms numbers and abstract concepts, revealing the most important aspects of the information. Charts and graphs, however, are limited in their ability to tell a story or convey the nuances behind the numbers.

Photos and Vide os

Photos and videos, on the other hand, can provide a more realistic and immersive audience experience. They are particularly effective for demonstrating real-life situations and processes,  conditions, procedures, or actions. Photos and videos can also convey emotion and social cues, making them suitable for presenting social science topics. The challenge is often finding or capturing the exact best image(s) to support the message. Searching or producing what’s required can involve considerable time and expense to capture quality images.

Drawn Images

Drawn images offer unique flexibility and broader application than any other single visual approach. The ability to create, re-create, conceptualize, and summarize with imagery checks a lot of application boxes. Ultimately drawn images allow the audience to focus immediately on the most important aspects of the information. When verbal delivery and images are synchronized, it enhances the clarity and understanding of the story. The images also provide visual cues and details that support the message, making it easier for the audience to follow along and recall. Images can also convey emotions that may be difficult to express through dialogue alone.

The choice between static drawn images or animation also depends on the presentation objectives and the type of information being presented. Animation can provide an interactive learning experience by demonstrating processes and procedures in real-time, illustrating cause-and-effect relationships or conveying emotions and social cues.

However, the detail and motion of animation can distract the viewer from important aspects of your message. It can also be more complex and time-consuming to create compared to drawn images. It requires additional resources, like software and premade stock images. Stock images aren’t custom made for your message so they may not fully connect with your audience. Custom animations require expertise in animation design to produce high-quality content. Regardless of quality, animation can lack authenticity, or a feeling of human connection. 

A compelling solution is hand-drawn whiteboard video where an artist’s hand is filmed as it creates the drawings. This form of drawing is particularly excellent in providing a framework for understanding complex topics. Moreover, the neuroscience behind it explains its power to engage audiences and boost retention.

Things to Consider When Planning Your Visuals

Ultimately, the choice of presentation visuals depends on the presentation objectives and the audience. Visuals make it easier to absorb information by enabling the brain to process information quickly and retain it for longer periods. Here are some considerations in planning presentation visuals:

To take your presentations to the next level, consider using hand-drawn whiteboard video. This powerful medium will illustrate complex ideas and engage your audience in a dynamic and interactive way. To learn more about how hand-drawn whiteboard video can enhance your presentation, contact us today . Let us help you deliver presentations that leave a lasting impression on your audience.

• Understand the purpose: Before creating visuals, understand the role they will play. What is the goal of using visuals? Are they meant to explain a concept, highlight important points, or provide a summary? Knowing the purpose will help you to create relevant and effective visuals.
• Choose appropriate visuals : The choice of visuals should be guided by the content being presented. Are you explaining a process? Are you presenting data or are you interpreting it? Choose visuals that are easy to understand and support the presentation objectives.
• Consider relationships: How do your visuals connect with your message points? How much space/time should a visual have in your presentation? It will help your audience understand better and remember longer if the visuals sync with what is being said. Present your visuals in manageable chunks that directly support your message.
• Keep it simple : Visuals should be simple and easy to understand. Avoid cluttering the visual with too much information or using complicated graphics. Use colors  sparingly and fonts that are easy to read. Create a visual hierarchy that guides the eye.
• Make it accessible : Ensure visuals are accessible to everyone in your audience, including those with visual impairments. Use alternative text, captions, and audio to make visual content accessible.

Incorporating visuals into your presentation is a powerful way to engage and communicate complex information. By understanding the purpose of your visuals, choosing appropriate visuals, organizing the information, keeping it simple, and making it accessible, you can create effective presentations that will stick with your audience long after your presentation is over.

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Presentation design guide: tips, examples, and templates

Get your team on prezi – watch this on demand video.

Anete Ezera January 09, 2023

Presentation design defines how your content will be received and remembered. It’s responsible for that crucial first impression and sets the tone for your presentation before you’ve even introduced the topic . It’s also what holds your presentation together and guides the viewer through it. That’s why visually appealing, easily understandable, and memorable presentation design is what you should be striving for. But how can you create a visually striking presentation without an eye for design? Creating a visually appealing presentation can be challenging without prior knowledge of design or helpful tools. 

With this presentation design guide accompanied by Prezi presentation examples , templates , and AI functionalities , you’ll have no problem creating stunning and impactful presentations that’ll wow your audience.

In this guide, we’ll start by looking at the basics of presentation design. We’ll provide a simple guide on creating a presentation from scratch and offer helpful tips for different presentation types . In addition, you’ll discover how to organize information into a logical order and present it in a way that resonates with listeners. Finally, we’ll share tips and tricks to create an eye-catching presentation, and showcase some great presentation examples and templates you can get inspired by!

With our comprehensive guide to the best presentation design techniques, you’ll be able to develop an engaging and professional presentation that gets results!

What is presentation design?

Presentation design encompasses a variety of elements that make up the overall feel and look of the presentation. It’s a combination of certain elements, like text, font, color, background, imagery, and animations. 

Presentation design focuses on finding ways to make the presentation more visually appealing and easy to process, as it is often an important tool for communicating a message. It involves using design principles like color, hierarchy, white space, contrast, and visual flow to create an effective communication piece.

Creating an effective presentation design is important for delivering your message efficiently and leaving a memorable impact on your audience. Most of all, you want your presentation design to support your topic and make it easier to understand and digest. A great presentation design guides the viewer through your presentation and highlights its essential aspects. 

If you’re interested in learning more about presentation design and its best practices , watch the following video and get practical insights on designing your next presentation:

Types of presentations

When creating a presentation design, you have to keep in mind several types of presentations that shape the initial design you want to have. Depending on your presentation type, you’ll want to match it with a fitting presentation design.

1. Informative

An informative presentation provides the audience with facts and data to educate them on a certain subject matter. This could be done through visual aids such as graphs, diagrams, and charts. In an informative presentation, you want to highlight data visualizations and make them more engaging with interactive features or animations. On Prezi Design, you can create different engaging data visualizations from line charts to interactive maps to showcase your data.

2. Instructive

Instructive presentations teach the audience something new. Whether it’s about science, business strategies, or culture, this type of presentation is meant to help people gain knowledge and understand a topic better. 

With a focus on transmitting knowledge, your presentation design should incorporate a variety of visuals and easy-to-understand data visualizations. Most people are visual learners, so you’ll benefit from swapping text-based slides for more visually rich content.

3. Motivational

Motivational presentations try to inspire the audience by giving examples of successful projects, stories, or experiences. This type of presentation is often used in marketing or promotional events because it seeks to get the audience inspired and engaged with a product or service. That’s why the presentation design needs to capture and hold the attention of your audience using a variety of animations and visuals. Go beyond plain images – include videos for a more immersive experience.

4. Persuasive

Persuasive presentations are designed to sway an audience with arguments that lead to an actionable decision (i.e., buy the product). Audiences learn facts and figures relevant to the point being made and explore possible solutions based on evidence provided during the speech or presentation.

In a persuasive presentation design, you need to capture your audience’s attention right away with compelling statistics wrapped up in interactive and engaging data visualizations. Also, the design needs to look and feel dynamic with smooth transitions and fitting visuals, like images, stickers, and GIFs.

To learn more about different types of presentations and how to structure them accordingly, read our article on presentation types .

How to design a presentation

When you first open a blank presentation page, you might need some inspiration to start creating your design. For this reason, we created a simple guide that’ll help you make your own presentation from scratch without headaches.

1. Opt for a motion-based presentation

You can make an outstanding presentation using Prezi Present, a software program that lets you create interactive presentations that capture your viewer’s attention. Prezi’s zooming feature allows you to add movement to your presentation and create smooth transitions. Prezi’s non-linear format allows you to jump between topics instead of flipping through slides, so your presentation feels more like a conversation than a speech. A motion-based presentation will elevate your content and ideas, and make it a much more engaging viewing experience for your audience.

Watch this video to learn how to make a Prezi presentation:

2. Create a structure & start writing content

Confidence is key in presenting. You can feel more confident going into your presentation if you structure your thoughts and plan what you will say. To do that, first, choose the purpose of your presentation before you structure it. There are four main types of presentations: informative, instructive, motivational, and persuasive. Think about the end goal of your presentation – what do you want your audience to do when you finish your presentation – and structure it accordingly.

Next, start writing the content of your presentation (script). We recommend using a storytelling framework, which will enable you to present a conflict and show what could be possible. In addition to creating compelling narratives for persuasive presentations, this framework is also effective for other types of presentations.

Tip: Keep your audience in mind. If you’re presenting a data-driven report to someone new to the field or from a different department, don’t use a lot of technical jargon if you don’t know their knowledge base and/or point of view.

3. Research & analyze 

Knowing your topic inside and out will make you feel more confident going into your presentation. That’s why it’s important to take the time to understand your topic fully. In return, you’ll be able to answer questions on the fly and get yourself back on track even if you forget what you were going to say when presenting. In case you have extra time at the end of your presentation, you can also provide more information for your audience and really showcase your expertise. For comprehensive research, turn to the internet, and library, and reach out to experts if possible.

4. Get to design

Keeping your audience engaged and interested in your topic depends on the design of your presentation.

Now that you’ve done your research and have a proper presentation structure in place, it’s time to visualize it.

4.1. Presentation design layout

What you want to do is use your presentation structure as a presentation design layout. Apply the structure to how you want to tell your story and think about how each point will lead to the next one. Now you can either choose to use one of Prezi’s pre-designed templates that resemble your presentation structure the most or start to add topics on your canvas as you go. 

Tip: When adding content, visualize the relation between topics by using visual hierarchy – hide smaller topics within larger themes or use the zooming feature to zoom in and out of supplementary topics or details that connect to the larger story you’re telling.

4.2. Color scheme

Now it’s time to choose your color scheme to give a certain look and feel to your presentation. Make sure to use contrasting colors to clearly separate text from the background, and use a maximum of 2 to 3 dominating colors to avoid an overwhelming presentation design.

4.2. Content (visuals + text)

Add content that you want to highlight in your presentation. Select from a wide range of images, stickers, GIFs, videos, data visualizations, and more from the content library, or upload your own. To provide more context, add short-format text, like bullet points or headlines that spotlight the major themes, topics, and ideas in your presentation. 

Also, here you’ll want to make a final decision on your font choice. Select a font that’s easy to read and goes well with your brand and topic.

Tip: Be careful not to turn your presentation into a script. Only display text that holds significant value – expand on the ideas when presenting. 

4.3. Transitions

Last but not least, bring your presentation design to life by adding smooth, attractive, and engaging transitions that take the viewer from one topic to another without disrupting the narrative. 

On Prezi, you can choose from a range of transitions that take you into the story world and provide an immersive presentation experience for your audience.

5. Practice your delivery 

Even with a great presentation design, how you deliver it is crucial in leaving an impression. Practice your presentation’s timing to become familiar with the rhythm and pace. It might help to record yourself to pinpoint areas for enhancement. Practicing in front of a friend or family member can also offer insights. Keep in mind the more you rehearse, the more self-assured and at ease you’ll be when giving the presentation.

6. Engage your audience 

Engaging with your audience can enhance the impact of your presentation. You could prompt discussions, invite participation, or incorporate features such as surveys or puzzles. For instance, when introducing a marketing plan you could kick off with a survey to assess how well the audience grasps the subject. This boosts interactivity in your presentation and also fosters a connection with your listeners and sustains their interest throughout.

7. Use storytelling techniques

Using stories can be a way to captivate your audience and ensure that your message sticks with them. When creating a presentation, consider incorporating a narrative structure that incorporates a beginning, middle, and end. For example, when outlining a business strategy, kick off with a story that highlights a challenge in need of resolution. Then delve into your proposed solution before illustrating the results that can be achieved. This storytelling approach can foster a connection with your audience and enhance their grasp of the main ideas you’re conveying.

8. Prepare for technical difficulties

It’s common to encounter glitches, so being ready is key. Make sure you have a strategy in place if things go south during your presentation. For instance, store your presentation on devices like a USB drive and online storage, and keep hard copies of important slides handy. Also, get acquainted with the equipment and software you’ll use for the presentation. Planning ahead for any issues can help you navigate them smoothly and maintain the flow of your presentation.

9. Include high-quality visuals

Good visuals play a role in the success of your presentation. Incorporate top-notch pictures, graphics,3 and videos to ensure your slides are visually captivating and interesting. Steer clear of using low-quality images that may come off as pixelated and amateurish. When presenting data, think about using charts or infographics to present the information clearly. Prezi provides access to a selection of high-quality visuals that can elevate the design impact of your presentation.

10. Be unique

It’s crucial to make sure your design is original to set yourself apart from the crowd. If you’re a student, aim to craft a presentation that showcases your flair and avoid imitating others. This approach helps you differentiate yourself and ensures that your work is more memorable. In the business field, make sure that your design elements, such as colors, fonts, and overall aesthetics are different from those used by similar companies. Steer clear of templates that might give your presentation a generic feel. By developing a unique design, you establish your identity and leave a lasting impact on your audience.

For more practical tips read our article on how to make a presentation . 

Presentation design tips

When it comes to presentations, design is key. A well-designed presentation can communicate your ideas clearly and engage your audience, while a poorly designed one can do the opposite.

To ensure your presentation is designed for success, note the following presentation design tips that’ll help you design better presentations that wow your audience.

1. Keep it simple

Too many elements on a slide can be overwhelming and distract from your message. While you want your content to be visually compelling, don’t let the design of the presentation get in the way of communicating your ideas. Presentation design elements need to elevate your message instead of overshadowing it. 

2. Use contrasting text colors

Draw attention to important points with contrasted text colors. Instead of using bold or italics, use a contrasting color in your chosen palette to emphasize the text.

3. Be clear and concise

Avoid writing long paragraphs that are difficult to read. Limit paragraphs and sections of text for optimum readability.

4. Make sure your slide deck is visually appealing

Use high-quality images and graphics, and limit the use of text to only the most important information. For engaging and diverse visuals, go to Prezi’s content library and discover a wide range of stock images, GIFs, stickers, and more.

5. Pay attention to detail

Small details like font choice and alignments can make a big difference in how professional and polished your presentation looks. Make sure to pay attention to image and text size, image alignment with text, font choice, background color, and more details that create the overall look of your presentation.

6. Use templates sparingly

While templates can help create a consistent look for your slides, overusing them can make your presentation look generic and boring. Use them for inspiration but don’t be afraid to mix things up with some custom designs as well. 

7. Design for clarity

Create a presentation layout that is easy to use and navigate, with clear labels and instructions. This is important for ensuring people can find the information they need quickly and easily if you end up sharing your presentation with others.

8. Opt for a conversational presentation design

Conversational presenting allows you to adjust your presentation on the fly to make it more relevant and engaging. Create a map-like arrangement that’ll encourage you to move through your presentation at your own pace. With a map-like design, each presentation will be customized to match different audiences’ needs. This can be helpful for people who have different levels of expertise or knowledge about the subject matter.

9. Be consistent 

Design consistency holds your presentation together and makes it easy to read and navigate. Create consistency by repeating colors, fonts, and design elements that clearly distinguish your presentation from others.

10. Have context in mind

A great presentation design is always dependent on the context. Your audience and objective influence everything from color scheme to fonts and use of imagery. Make sure to always have your audience in mind when designing your presentations.

11. Use white space effectively

In slide design, whitespace, also known as negative space, refers to the areas surrounding elements. It plays a role in decluttering your slides, enhancing readability, and directing focus towards content. Utilizing whitespace results in a sophisticated appearance for your slides. Remember, simplicity is key – avoid overwhelming your audience with information on each slide.

12. Incorporate visual hierarchy

When it comes to visuals, the key is to organize elements in a manner that naturally directs the viewer’s attention towards the crucial parts of the presentation. Utilize variations in size, color, and positioning to establish a flow for the viewer to navigate through. For instance, opt for fonts to highlight headings, colors for significant points, and position essential elements at the top of the slide. These tactics aid in ensuring that your audience grasps the ideas promptly and effortlessly.

For more presentation tips, read the Q&A with presentation design experts and get valuable insights on visual storytelling.

Make the presentation design process easier by pairing up with Prezi AI 

Presentation design may not come naturally to everyone, and time constraints often limit our ability to dedicate hours to perfecting our designs. Enter Prezi AI , a tool that streamlines the presentation design process enabling users to prioritize content over appeal. Let’s explore some ways in which Prezi AI can elevate your presentation design.

• Template suggestions: Prezi AI provides a range of crafted templates that are customized to match your presentation’s theme, guaranteeing that your slides have a unified appearance with minimal hassle.
• Smart formatting: When using Prezi AI , your text and images will be formatted automatically, eliminating the need for layout adjustments. This results in a professional appearance without the hassle.
• Design consistency: Prezi AI ensures that your presentation maintains a design by keeping color schemes and fonts consistent, eliminating the need to fret over discrepancies.
• Image and media integration: Enhance the appeal and engagement of your slides by adding relevant images, videos, and graphics with the help of Prezi AI smart media recommendations.
• Customizable animations: Enhance your slides with custom animations using Prezi AI to create transitions and captivate your audience. These dynamic animations can emphasize points and ensure a smooth flow throughout your presentation.

Using Prezi AI allows you to simplify the design process and craft appealing presentations, even if you lack time or design skills.

Presentation templates

Creating a presentation from scratch isn’t easy. Sometimes, it’s better to start with a template and dedicate your time to the presentation’s content. To make your life easier, here are 10 useful and stunning presentation templates that score in design and engagement. If you want to start creating with any of the following templates, simply go to our Prezi presentation template gallery , select your template, and start creating! Also, you can get inspired by the top Prezi presentations , curated by our editors. There you can discover presentation examples for a wide range of topics, and get motivated to create your own. 

Business meeting presentation

The work desk presentation templates have a simple and clean design, perfectly made for a team or business meeting. With all the topics visible from the start, everyone will be on the same page about what you’re going to cover in the presentation. If you want, you can add or remove topics as well as edit the visuals and color scheme to match your needs.

Small business presentation

This template is great for an introductory meeting or pitch, where you have to summarize what you or your business does in a few, highly engaging slides. The interactive layout allows you to choose what topic bubble you’re going to select next, so instead of a one-way interaction, you can have a conversation and ask your audience what exactly they’re interested in knowing about your company.

Mindfulness at work presentation

How can you capture employees’ attention to explain important company values or practices? This engaging presentation template will help you do just that. With a wide range of impactful visuals, this presentation design helps you communicate your ideas more effectively. 

Business review template

Make your next quarterly business review memorable with this vibrant business presentation template. With eye-capturing visuals and an engaging layout, you’ll communicate important stats and hold everyone’s attention until the end.

History timeline template

With black-and-white sketches of the Colosseum in the background, this timeline template makes history come alive. The displayed time periods provide an overview that’ll help your audience to grasp the bigger picture. After, you can go into detail about each time frame and event.

Storytelling presentation template

Share stories about your business that make a lasting impact with this stunning, customizable presentation template. To showcase each story, use the zooming feature and choose to tell your stories in whatever order you want.

Design concept exploration template

Not all meetings happen in person nowadays. To keep that face-to-face interaction even when presenting online, choose from a variety of Prezi Video templates or simply import your already-existing Prezi template into Prezi Video for remote meetings. This professional-looking Prezi Video template helps you set the tone for your meeting, making your designs stand out. 

Employee perks and benefits video template

You can use the employee benefits video template to pitch potential job candidates the perks of working in your company. The Prezi Video template allows you to keep a face-to-face connection with potential job candidates while interviewing them remotely.

Sales plan presentation template

Using a clear metaphor that everyone can relate to, this football-inspired sales plan presentation template communicates a sense of team unity and strategy. You can customize this Prezi business presentation template with your brand colors and content.

Flashcard template

How can you engage students in an online classroom? This and many other Prezi Video templates will help you create interactive and highly engaging lessons. Using the flashcard template, you can quiz your students, review vocabulary, and gamify learning.

Great presentation design examples

If you’re still looking for presentation design ideas, check out the following Prezi presentations made by our creative users.

Social media presentation

This presentation is a great example of visual storytelling. The use of visual hierarchy and spatial relationships creates a unique viewing experience and makes it easier to understand how one topic or point is related to another. Also, images provide an engaging and visually appealing experience.

Leadership books presentation

Do you want to share your learnings? This interactive presentation offers great insights in an entertaining and visually compelling way. Instead of compiling leadership books in a slide-based presentation, the creator has illustrated each book and added a zooming feature that allows you to peek inside of each book’s content.

Remote workforce presentation

This is a visually rich and engaging presentation example that offers an interactive experience for the viewer. A noteworthy aspect of this presentation design is its color consistency and matching visual elements.

A presentation about the teenage brain 

Another great presentation design example that stands out is an engaging viewing experience. The zooming feature allows the user to dive into each topic and choose what subject to view first. It’s a great example of an educational presentation that holds the students’ attention with impactful visuals and compelling transitions.

Remote work policy presentation

This presentation design stands out with its visually rich content. It depicts exactly what the presentation is about and uses the illustrated window frames in the background image as topic placements. This type of presentation design simplifies complex concepts and makes it easier for the viewer to understand and digest the information.

Everyone can create visually appealing presentations with the right tools and knowledge. With the presentation design tips, templates, and examples, you’re equipped to make your next presentation a success. If you’re new to Prezi, we encourage you to discover everything it has to offer. With this presentation design guide and Prezi, we hope you’ll get inspired to create meaningful, engaging, and memorable content for your audience!

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Blog Data Visualization 18 Presentation Design Tips For Success

18 Presentation Design Tips For Success

Written by: Midori Nediger May 15, 2023

Bad presentations. We’ve all had to sit through them.  Heck, we’ve probably all given one or two. I know I have.

You know the type: twice as long as they need to be, slides chock-full of text, no visuals in sight. 

How can you ensure you don’t fall victim to these presentation faux-pas when designing your next presentation for your team, class, or clients?

In this blog, I’ll walk you through tips on how to design an impactful presentation along with presentation templates that can help you deliver it with style to leave a lasting impression.

Tips for designing and delivering an impactful presentation

What makes a presentation memorable?

It usually comes down to three things:

• The main idea.
• The presenter.
• The visuals.

All three elements work together to create a successful presentation. Just like how different presentation styles serve different purposes, having a good presentation idea will give the audience a purpose for listening.

Here are some top tips to consider to help you design and deliver an impactful presentation:

• Include less text and more visuals in your presentation design
• Identify one core message to center your presentation design around
• Eliminate any information that doesn’t immediately support the core message
• Create a strong presentation outline to keep you focused
• Use text to reinforce, not repeat, what you’re saying
• Design your presentation with one major takeaway per slide
• Use visuals to highlight the key message on each slide
• Use scaffolding slides to orient your audience and keep them engaged
• Use text size, weight, and color for emphasis
• Apply design choices consistently to avoid distraction
• Split a group presentation by topic
• Use a variety of page layouts to maintain your audience’s interest
• Use presentation templates to help you get started
• Include examples of inspiring people
• Dedicate slides to poignant questions
• Find quotes that will inspire your audience
• Emphasize key points with text and images
• Label your slides to prompt your memory

1. Include less text and more visuals in your presentation design

According to David Paradi’s annual presentation survey , the 3 things that annoy audiences most about presentations are:

• Speakers reading their slides
• Slides that include full sentences of text
• Text that is too small to read

The common thread that ties all of these presentation annoyances is text. Audiences are very picky about the text found in presentation slide decks .

In my experiences speaking at conferences and in webinars over the past few years, audiences respond much more positively to presentations that use visuals in place of text.

Audiences are more engaged, ask more questions, and find my talks more memorable when I include lots of visual examples in my slide decks. 

I’m not the only one who has found this. We recently surveyed nearly 400 conference speakers about their presentation designs and found that 84.3% create presentations that are highly visual.

A great example of a high visual presentation is the iconic AirBnB pitch deck design , which includes no more than 40 words per slide. Instead of repeating the speaker’s script on the slides, it makes an impact with keywords, large numbers, and icons:

Learn how to customize this presentation template:

To help you take your presentations to the next level, I’d like to share my process for creating a visually-focused presentation like the one above. I’ll give you my top presentation design tips that I’ve learned over years of presenting:

• Class presentations
• Online courses

You can then apply this process to our professional presentation templates  or pitch decks , creating unique presentation decks with ease! Our user-friendly editor tools make customizing these templates a breeze.

To leave a lasting impression on your audience, consider transforming your slides into an interactive presentation. Here are 15 interactive presentation ideas to enhance interactivity and engagement.

We’ll cover the most important steps for summarizing lengthy text into a presentation-friendly format. Then we’ll touch on some presentation design tips to help you get visual with your slide decks. Read on for the best creative presentation ideas .

2. Identify one core message to center your presentation design around

We know from David Paradi’s survey that audiences are easily overwhelmed with lots of text and data, especially when presentations are long.

(You when you see a presentation with lots of text and data and it’s long)

So unlike in a white paper , report , or essay , you can’t expect to tackle many complex ideas within a single presentation.

That would be a recipe for disaster.

Instead, identify a single central message that you would like to communicate to your audience. Then build your presentation around that core message.

By identifying that core message, you can ensure that everything you include in your presentation supports the goal of the presentation .

As seen below, a great presentation tells you exactly what you’re going to learn (the core message), then gets right to the facts (the supporting information).

To ensure you create an asset that’s clear, concise, impactful, and easy to follow, design your presentation around a single core message.

3. Create a strong presentation outline to keep you focused

Think of your outline as a roadmap for your presentation. The outline will shape the  presentation structure  and guide you through your content. Creating a strong presentation outline straight away helps make sure that you’re hitting all of the key points you need to cover to convey a persuasive presentation .

Take this presentation outline example:

• Introduction and hellos
• Vision and value proposition
• Financial profit
• Your investment
• Thanks and questions

These are all things that we know we need to talk about within the presentation.

Creating a presentation outline makes it much easier to know what to say when it comes to creating the actual presentation slides.

You could even include your presentation outline as a separate slide so that your audience knows what to expect:

The opening moments of your presentation hold immense power – check out these 15 ways to start a presentation to set the stage and captivate your audience.

4. Eliminate any information that doesn’t support the core message

Next, use that core message to identify everything that doesn’t belong in the presentation.

Aim to eliminate everything that isn’t immediately relevant to the topic at hand, and anything remotely redundant. Cut any information that isn’t absolutely essential to understanding the core message.

By cutting these extra details, you can transform forgettable text-heavy slides:

Into memorable slides with minimal text:

Here’s a quick checklist to help you cut out any extra detail:

Get rid of:

• Detailed descriptions
• Background information
• Redundant statements
• Explanations of common knowledge
• Persuasive facts and figures
• Illustrative examples
• Impactful quotes

This step may seem obvious, but when you’re presenting on a topic that you’re passionate about, it’s easy to get carried away with extraneous detail. Use the recommendations above to keep your text in check.

Clarity is key, especially if you’re presenting virtually rather than in-person. However, Lisa Schneider (Chief Growth Officer at Merriam-Webster) has had plenty of experience making that adjustment. She recently shared her tips for adapting in-person presentations into virtual presentations on Venngage that you can check out. 

Watch: How to design a presentation [10 ESSENTIAL TIPS]

5. Use text to reinforce, not repeat, what you’re saying

According to presentation guru  Nancy Duarte , your audience should be able to discern the meaning of your slides in 6 seconds or less.

Since your audience will tend to read every word you place on each slide, you must keep your text to an absolute minimum. The text on your slides should provide support for what you’re saying without being distracting.

Never write out, word for word, what you’re going to be saying out loud. If you’re relying on text to remember certain points, resist the urge to cram them into your slides. Instead, use a tool like Venngage’s speaker notes to highlight particular talking points. These can be imported into PowerPoint — along with the rest of your presentation — and will only be viewable to you, not your audience.

For the actual slides, text should only be used to reinforce what you’re saying. Like in the presentation design below, paraphrase long paragraphs into short bulleted lists or statements by eliminating adjectives and articles (like “the” and “a”).

Pull out quotes and important numbers, and make them a focus of each slide.

6. Design your presentation with one major takeaway per slide

As I mentioned above, audiences struggle when too much information is presented on a single slide.

To make sure you don’t overwhelm your audiences with too much information, spread out your content to cover one major takeaway per slide.

By limiting each slide to a single simple statement, you focus your audience’s attention on the topic at hand.

My favorite way to do this is to pick out the core message of whatever I’m talking about and express it in a few keywords, as seen in this presentation slide below.

This helps ensure that the visuals remain the focus of the slide.

Using the text in this way, to simply state a single fact per slide, is a sure-fire way to make an impact in your presentation.

Alternatively, pull out a significant statistic that you want to stick in your audience’s minds and make it a visual focus of the slide, as seen in this popular presentation by Officevibe .

This might mean you end up with a slide deck with a ton of slides. But that’s totally ok!

I’ve talked to many professionals who are pressured by their management teams to create presentations with a specific number of slides (usually as few as 10 or 15 slides for a 30-minute presentation).

If you ask me, this approach is completely flawed. In my mind, the longer I spend sitting on a single slide, the more likely I am to lose the interest of my audience.

How many slides should I use for a 10 minute presentation?

A good rule of thumb is to have at least as many slides as minutes in your presentation. So for a 10 minute presentation you should have at least 10 slides .

Use as many slides as you need, as long as you are presenting a single message on each slide, (as seen in the lengthy presentation template below). This is especially important if you’re presenting your business, or delivering a product presentation. You want to wow your audience, not bore them.

7. Use visuals to highlight the key message on each slide

As important as having one major takeaway per slide is having visuals that highlight the major takeaway on each slide.

Unique visuals will help make your message memorable.

Visuals are a great way to eliminate extra text, too.

You can add visuals by creating a timeline infographic to group and integrate information into visual frameworks like this:

Or create a flowchart  and funnels:

Or by representing simple concepts with icons, as seen in the modern presentation design below. Using the same color for every icon helps create a polished look.

Using visuals in this way is perfect for when you have to convey messages quickly to audiences that you aren’t familiar with – such as at conferences. This would also make the ideal interview presentation template.

You can alternatively use icons in different colors, like in the presentation templates below. Just make sure the colors are complimentary, and style is consistent throughout the presentation (i.e. don’t use sleek, modern icons on one slide and whimsically illustrated icons on another). In this example, presentation clipart style icons have been used.

Any time you have important stats or trends you want your audience to remember, consider using a chart or data visualization to drive your point home. Confident public speaking combined with strong visualizations can really make an impact, encouraging your audience to act upon your message.

One of my personal favorite presentations (created by a professional designer) takes this “key message plus a visual” concept to the extreme, resulting in a slide deck that’s downright irresistible.

When applying this concept, don’t fall into the trap of using bad stock photos . Irrelevant or poorly chosen visuals can hurt you as much as they help you.

Below is an example of how to use stock photos effectively. They are more thematic than literal and are customized with fun, bright icons that set a playful tone.

The content and visual design of a presentation should be seamless.

It should never seem like your text and visuals are plopped onto a template. The format and design of the slides should contribute to and support the audience’s understanding of the content.

8. Use scaffolding slides to orient your audience and keep them engaged

It’s easy for audiences to get lost during long presentations, especially if you have lots of slides. And audiences zone out when they get lost.

To help reorient your audience every once in a while, you can use something I like to call scaffolding slides. Scaffolding slides appear throughout a presentation to denote the start and end of major sections.

The core scaffolding slide is the agenda slide, which should appear right after the introduction or title slide. It outlines the major sections of the presentation.

At the beginning of each section, you should show that agenda again but highlight the relevant section title, as seen below.

This gives audiences the sense that you’re making progress through the presentation and helps keep them anchored and engaged.

Alternatively, you can achieve a similar effect by numbering your sections and showing that number on every slide. Or use a progress bar at the bottom of each slide to indicate how far along you are in your presentation. Just make sure it doesn’t distract from the main content of the slides.

You can imagine using this “progress bar” idea for a research presentation, or any presentation where you have a lot of information to get through.

Leila Janah, founder of Sama Group, is great at this. Her  Innovation and Inspire  talk about Sama Group is an example of a presentation that is well organized and very easy to follow.

Her presentation follows a logical, steady stream of ideas. She seems comfortable talking in front of a crowd but doesn’t make any attempts to engage directly with them.

9. Use text size, weight and color for emphasis

Every slide should have a visual focal point. Something that immediately draws the eye at first glance.

That focal point should be whatever is most important on that slide, be it an important number, a keyword, or simply the slide title.

We can create visual focal points by varying the size, weight, and color of each element on the slide. Larger, brighter, bolder elements will command our audience’s attention, while smaller, lighter elements will tend to fade into the background.

As seen in the presentation template above, this technique can be especially useful for drawing attention to important words within a long passage of text. Consider using this technique whenever you have more than 5 words on a slide.

And if you really want your audience to pay attention, pick a high-contrast color scheme like the one below.

When picking fonts for your presentation, keep this technique in mind. Pick a font that has a noticeable difference between the “bold” font face and the “regular” font face. Source Sans Pro, Times New Roman, Montserrat, Arvo, Roboto, and Open Sans are all good options.

The last thing to remember when using size, weight, and color to create emphasis on a slide: don’t try to emphasize too many things on one slide.

If everything is highlighted, nothing is highlighted.

10. Apply design choices consistently to avoid distraction

Audiences are quick to pick out, and focus on, any inconsistencies in your presentation design. As a result, messy, inconsistent slide decks lead to distracted, disengaged audiences.

Design choices (fonts and colors, especially), must be applied consistently across a slide deck. The last thing you want is for your audience to pay attention to your design choices before your content.

To keep your design in check, it can be helpful to create a color palette and type hierarchy before you start creating your deck, and outline it in a basic style guide like this one:

I know it can sometimes be tempting to fiddle around with text sizes to fit longer bits of text on a slide, but don’t do it! If the text is too long to fit on a slide, it should be split up onto multiple slides anyway.

And remember, a consistent design isn’t necessarily a boring one. This social media marketing presentation applies a bright color scheme to a variety of 3-column and 2-column layouts, remaining consistent but still using creative presentation ideas.

11. Split a group presentation by topic

When giving a group presentation it’s always difficult to find the right balance of who should present which part.

Splitting a group presentation by topic is the most natural way to give everybody the chance to attempt without it seeming disjointed.

When presenting this slide deck to investors or potential clients, the team can easily take one topic each. One person can discuss the business model slide, and somebody else can talk about the marketing strategy.

Top tips for group presentations:

• Split your group presentation by topic
• Introduce the next speaker at the end of your slide
• Become an ‘expert’ in the slide that you are presenting
• Rehearse your presentation in advance so that everybody knows their cue to start speaking

12. Use a variety of page layouts to maintain your audience’s interest

Page after page of the same layout can become repetitive and boring. Mix up the layout of your slides to keep your audience interested.

In this example, the designer has used a variety of combinations of images, text, and icons to create an interesting and varied style.

There are hundreds of different combinations of presentation layers and presentation styles that you can use to help create an engaging presentation . This style is great for when you need to present a variety of information and statistics, like if you were presenting to financial investors, or you were giving a research presentation.

Using a variety of layouts to keep an audience engaged is something that Elon Musk is an expert in. An engaged audience is a hyped audience. Check out this Elon Musk presentation revealing a new model Tesla for a masterclass on how to vary your slides in an interesting way:

13. Use presentation templates to help you get started

It can be overwhelming to build your own presentation from scratch. Fortunately, my team at Venngage has created hundreds of professional presentation templates , which make it easy to implement these design principles and ensure your audience isn’t deterred by text-heavy slides.

Using a presentation template is a quick and easy way to create professional-looking presentation skills, without any design experience. You can edit all of the text easily, as well as change the colors, fonts, or photos. Plus you can download your work in a PowerPoint or PDF Presentation format.

After your presentation, consider summarizing your presentation in an engaging manner to r each a wider audience through a LinkedIn presentation .

14. Include examples of inspiring people

People like having role models to look up to. If you want to motivate your audience, include examples of people who demonstrate the traits or achievements, or who have found success through the topic you are presenting.

15. Dedicate slides to poignant questions

While you might be tempted to fill your slides with decorative visuals and splashes of color, consider that sometimes simplicity is more effective than complexity. The simpler your slide is, the more you can focus on one thought-provoking idea.

16. Find quotes that will inspire your audience

A really good quote can stick in a person’s mind for weeks after your presentation. Ending your presentation with a quote can be a nice way to either begin or finish your presentation.

A great example of this is Tim Ferriss’ TED talk:

Check out the full talk below.

17. Emphasize key points with text and images

When you pair concise text with an image, you’re presenting the information to your audience in two simultaneous ways. This can make the information easier to remember, and more memorable.

Use your images and text on slides to reinforce what you’re saying out loud.

Doing this achieves two things:

• When the audience hears a point and simultaneously read it on the screen, it’s easier to retain.
• Audience members can photograph/ screencap the slide and share it with their networks.

Don’t believe us? See this tip in action with a presentation our Chief Marketing Officer Nadya gave recently at Unbounce’s CTA Conference . The combination of text and images on screen leads to a memorable presentation.

18. Label your slides to prompt your memory

Often, presenters will write out an entire script for their presentation and read it off a teleprompter. The problem is, that can often make your presentation seem  too  rehearsed and wooden.

But even if you don’t write a complete script, you can still put key phrases on your slides to prompt jog your memory. The one thing you have to be wary of is looking back at your slides too much.

A good presentation gets things moving! Check out the top qualities of awesome presentations and learn all about how to make a good presentation to help you nail that captivating delivery.

Audiences don’t want to watch presentations with slide decks jam-packed with text. Too much text only hurts audience engagement and understanding. Your presentation design is as important as your presentation style. 

By summarizing our text and creating slides with a visual focus, we can give more exciting, memorable and impactful presentations.

Give it a try with one of our popular presentation templates:

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.css-1qrtm5m{display:block;margin-bottom:8px;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:14px;line-height:1.5714285714285714;-webkit-letter-spacing:-0.35px;-moz-letter-spacing:-0.35px;-ms-letter-spacing:-0.35px;letter-spacing:-0.35px;font-weight:300;color:#606F7B;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1qrtm5m{font-size:16px;line-height:1.625;-webkit-letter-spacing:-0.5px;-moz-letter-spacing:-0.5px;-ms-letter-spacing:-0.5px;letter-spacing:-0.5px;}} Best Practices 5 essential preparation steps for a successful presentation

by Tom Rielly • June 15, 2020

Keeping your presentation visuals minimalistic, simple, and clear is just one important step to remember when designing a hit presentation. Leaving nothing to chance, great presenters prove quite methodical as they prepare. Here’s a checklist for everything you need to keep in mind before your next presentation:

1. Choose the right software for your needs

The easiest way to select the right presentation software for you is to simply find the one that is native to your device. For example, if you have a Mac, use Apple Keynote, if you work on Windows, use PowerPoint. Google Slides is recommended if you’re working with someone, as it makes collaboration very easy. Another software option is Prezi: a specialty tool called Prezi that creates a presentation using motion, zoom, and panning across one giant visual space.

2. Organize your files

As you develop your script and visuals, you will need to start assembling all the assets for your slides. Create a unique folder on your computer to hold these items. Keep the folder organized by media type (presentation drafts, photos, videos, scripts) and back them up frequently to the Cloud or external disk. Label each file with a specific descriptive name, e.g. “Susan Johnson singing magpie 2020”, as opposed to “IMG_4043.jpg”, which can make it confusing to find your assets. The more organized you are up front, the easier preparing for your presentation will be.

3. Prepare your presentation materials

Make sure your presentation materials (script, graphics, actual slides) are saved in at least two safe spots (for example, your computer and an external USB drive) and are backed-up frequently. If you are using an online presentation software, such as Google Slides, be sure to also download a copy of your presentation in case the internet connection is unreliable. Having all the individual assets on hand in addition to your presentation slides can be helpful if you experience tech issues before presenting, or if you need to make any last minute changes. Make sure to label your final presentation with the title and your name so it’s easy to find.

4. Practice, practice, practice!

Remember, practice makes perfect. People often run out of time making their presentations and have no time to practice. Most TED speakers practice at least ten times. Neuroscientist Jill-Bolte Taylor gave one of the most successful Talks in TED history with nearly 27 million views. How did she do it? She practiced her Talk over 40 times! By rehearsing multiple times you will naturally memorize your Talk, which means you won’t need note cards when you give your final presentation.

5. Do a final test run

Before presenting, make sure the equipment you need is working properly. It’s generally good practice to rehearse standing on the exact stage with the exact lighting using the exact computer that you will be using in your final presentation.

Here’s a quick checklist of what to look for when testing your equipment:

• If you're not using your own computer, the one provided might be slower and have trouble playing media. If you have videos or other media, make sure they play correctly
• Test the projector to make sure it’s HD
• Make sure images are clear
• Test the sound of any clips you use, as this is what goes wrong most frequently
• If you’re using a mic, test the volume

Don’t let technical issues or other blunders overshadow your presentation. By following these guidelines, and with a little preparation, you can engineer out the problems BEFORE they happen.

Ready to learn more about how to make your presentation even better? Get TED Masterclass and develop your ideas into TED-style talks

© 2024 TED Conferences, LLC. All rights reserved. Please note that the TED Talks Usage policy does not apply to this content and is not subject to our creative commons license.

how to give the perfect presentation

Using visuals in your presentation, how to design memorable presentations.

Visuals can impact your presentation dramatically.These images, photos, objects, charts, diagrams, tables, graphs or illustrations have the potential to make or break your presentation. Used sloppily, they can damage your credibility and reputation. Designed wisely, they can strengthen your verbal message and enable you to achieve your objective. Why? Because a picture really is worth a thousand words.

According to research done by Professor Albert Mehrabian, a leading communications expert, we take in about 55% of visual information, versus only 7% of textual information. This means that whenever possible, you should use visuals such as photos, charts, graphs, and tables in your presentation. Also, eliminate sentences unless you are showing a quotation. Reduce the number of words or bullet points you use on your slides.They only distract your audience members and encourage them to read the slides, instead of listening to your words.

Hi-Tech or Low-Tech?

Today’s rapidly evolving technology enables us to add strong state-of-the-art audio-visual elements to our presentations. When planning a presentation before a huge audience, consult with your technical team (or, at least, your teenagers!) to come up with the best options. Yet, hi-tech technological components are not always the answer. In meeting rooms around the world, millions of people give presentations every day with or without the aid of laptops and powerpoint software. Remember the purpose of the visuals is to add interest and enhance your message. Yet, you are still the star, the primary focus. No amount of technology can cover up a poor performance.

Handling Equipment & Visuals

When you handle the equipment and visuals, you are still performing for your audience. Make sure you remain calm when using unfamiliar equipment or solving technical glitches. Remember the audience is watching and listening to the way you treat technicians and assistants. Speak respectfully to all who come up to help you. Practice, to ensure you can move confidently and seamlessly between your speech and your visuals, without fuss or delay. Rehearse the visual part of your presentation, just like other parts of your speech.

Benefits of Visuals

A study at the Wharton Research Centre also revealed that participants remembered 50% of the visual information, but only 5% of the bulleted points. Visuals can help you clarify points, reinforce your message, and create greater interest and enthusiasm for your subject. What’s more, visuals encourage audience interaction and provide a change from just hearing, to seeing and hearing.

As a presenter, you can be more relaxed and active when you show a slide. You may walk around, gesture, or point out key relationships in the information you are presenting graphically. Visuals take some of the attention off you and allow people to focus on your information. In this way, they are beneficial to you and your audience. According to research, audiences retain 10% of what was presented orally, 35% of what was presented visually alone, and 65% of what was presented visually and orally. The bottom line is that incorporating visuals can add to your bottom line.

Developing Visuals

Visuals include a variety of communication tools such as flip charts, overhead transparencies, slides, and videos. Powerpoint slide presentations are often the most popular, though not always what’s necessary. What you use depends on the size of your audience. If you are presenting for up to 50 people, you could use boards, flipcharts, overhead transparencies, handouts, and slides. If you are presenting for about 125 people, it is best to stick to overhead transparencies and slides. If you are presenting for 125 people or more, use slides alone.

When considering which type of visuals to use, take into account time and cost factors. Determine the number of times the slides can be used. Decide if professional development is necessary.

Plan a maximum of one transparency for every five minutes of your presentation. Don’t run after your visuals by trying to pack in too many in a short period of time. Let your visuals support your message and not the other way around.

If you are planning to develop your own visuals, keep the following points in mind:

• Emphasize only one thought or comparison on each slide. If you include more than one message, it may confuse your audience.
• Number your slides in case they get mixed up.
• Keep visuals brief and simple.
• Create visual material that is bold and easily seen from a distance.

Remember that research has shown that people remember most when there is only narration and graphics. In other words, they learn less when there is narration alone and they learn less when there is narration, graphics, and text. Check the effectiveness of your visuals by seeing if they can tell the story without added written information.

Environmental Influences

Lastly, remember that many of us are sleep-deprived. Try to keep some lights on during the presentation or it will be too easy for even the most well-intentioned audience members to doze off comfortably and miss all your hard work!

I put a lot of information on my slides. I need it so I won’t forget what to say, even though I’ve spoken English all my life. What can I do about that?

Start by reducing the number of words on the slides slowly. Soon, you will discover that it’s easier to speak when you don’t have to read every single word. Since you’re an English speaker, you only need a few key words to help you elaborate on the subject. Don’t get caught up in thinking you have to deliver the information only in a certain way. Accept the fact that each time you speak the words may be different but the message will come across just the same. I’m sure you can do it.

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About Presentation Prep

Being able to speak in public can change your life! Presentation Prep is your complete, free guide to delivering speeches, lectures, and presentations more successfully and confidently. Whether you're a native English-speaker who suffers from public speaking anxiety, or a non-native speaker who needs guidelines for presenting to international audiences, this site will give you everything you need. Presentation Prep is written by Rebecca Ezekiel, an experienced corporate trainer who specializes in the areas of communications, presentations, and cross-cultural skills. Her online English language training videos are watched by millions of students worldwide.

What you need to know about human perception to be great at presentations

One of the most important factors that contribute to a team’s efficiency is communicating your ideas in the right way. Visual presentations (which can be easily created in Miro) are probably the most widespread way to share your ideas, so we decided to dig deeper and find some studies of human perception that can educate you on how to give an effective presentation.

• Think of how people digest information

How does human visual perception work and how can you make presentations that are easily digestible for the viewers? These are the questions that Stephen M. Kosslyn, the Dean of Social Science and John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, poses in his book, Clear and to the Point . Together with a number of colleagues, he came to the conclusion that there are three steps to digesting information: it needs to be acquired, processed and then connected to existing knowledge. Without any of these phases, people don’t process the presentation’s content.

To complete the first step, the scientists recommend setting a clear structure, using easily distinguishable colors and fonts and visually highlighting the most important concepts, ideas or terms. To help people process the information, you should avoid unnecessary visual elements that can distract the viewer and make everything easily understandable (imagining you’re explaining something to a child or a novice in your field often helps). The third step, connection to the viewer’s knowledge, is related to the second step; you need to avoid jargon, think about how the information is relevant to your audience’s life and explain the difficult concepts.

• Help the majority in the room

According to a 2004 Social Science Research Network study, 65% of the world’s population are visual learners (the research also shows that around 30% of people are verbal learners, “who benefit from class lectures and from discussion of class materials in study groups or in oral presentations,” and 5% of people are experiential learners who learn by doing and touching). This research explains why visuals are so important in a presentation. Also, the study states that “variations in learning styles have been linked to gender: women tend to be more visually oriented than men, who are generally more kinesthetic.”

William C. Bradford, the author of the study, points out that these results can be used to enhance the teaching style at US law schools (the paper was originally published in The Law Teacher), but you can easily implement this learning in your work life. If you bet on visuals, the majority of people in the meeting room will be likely to appreciate it.

• Be more persuasive

According to the often-cited study Persuasion and the Role of Visual Presentation Support by Douglas R. Vogel, Gary W. Dickson and John A. Lehman from the University of Arizona and University of Minnesota, presentations that provide some visual aid are 43% more persuasive than unaided presentations. This study is falsely cited by multiple companies and blogs that claim that visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text. But both the scientists behind it and commentators are sure that this is wrong.

After conducting the research, the authors created guidelines that can help people create better visual presentations. They claim that adding visuals can improve the perception of the presenter, audience attention, comprehension and agreement, and influence audience action. They also recommend using different colors instead of just black and white and using illustrations if you want to increase the density of visual information, display multiple dimensions, organize complex issues, support abstract concepts or illustrate trends.

• Choose your colors wisely

There multiple studies on color psychology that can help us with creative visual presentation ideas. They show how how different colors can affect our mood, perception and overall mental state. For example, in 2011, psychologists from the University of Rochester found out that color red increases the speed and strength of reactions. Other colors are often associated with specific emotions and reactions — a lot of us probably noticed that many companies, and especially tech startups, often choose blue because it’s often read as a symbol of trustworthiness and reliability.

However, other studies point out that one should be very careful when choosing color accents. Researchers from the University of Toronto realized that people who used Adobe Kuler , a web-based tool that helps to create color schemes or browse color combinations, usually stick to their 2-3 favorite colors, and there is a reason for that. Susan Weinschenk, a behavioral psychologist who has been working in the field of design and user experience since 1985, says : “If you have five different colors on the screen, nobody’s going to notice anything. But if you have everything in black and white, but the button to register has color – and it’s the only bright color on the screen – that’s what people will notice.” Paying attention to your audience’s background is also important because often colors have different meaning in culture from across the world. (This article features more of Weinschenk’s suggestions for using neuroscience in design work.)

Don’t overdo fonts

Similarly to colors, typefaces can have a considerable role in the way people perceive your work and in the way you can make an effective visual presentation. When Errol Morris, a documentary filmmaker, first read Saul Kripke’s book Naming and Necessity, he was excited to learn that fonts can affect our perception of truth. A couple of years ago, he got the chance to further investigate this subject when the New York Times published a two-part essay on a recent study about optimism. After reading it, the newspaper’s audience could take a quiz and vote on whether they trusted the study’s result. The article was presented in a number of different typefaces including Baskerville, Comic Sans, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica and Trebuchet. More than 40,000 readers took the quiz, and overall, Baskerville was considered the most reliable – curiously, statistically more reliable than a very similar typeface, Georgia.

The Morris study sparked a conversation among design professionals. “Considering these findings, can we state once and for all that we should use Baskerville whenever we want to persuade our audience?” wondered Alessio Laiso, a type designer who worked for IBM. In 2016, he ran a small experiment to study how different typefaces work for different products. He applied a number of fonts to four different types of websites: a bank, a news site, a fitness app, and a clothes shop. He realized that for the bank and news site, Baskerville was still the most trustworthy type. For the fitness app, Fira won; and for the shop, participants liked Helvetica. Although this study might not be completely relevant to your specific industry, considering it can help you pay attention to the choice of specific fonts and think about your audience. Regardless of your choice, you should avoid using too many typefaces and, of course, avoid using something like Comic Sans that people perceive as untrustworthy.

• Remember that sensory channels compete

According to Weinschenk, the visual sensory channel trumps all others. This means that if you are giving a presentation, talking and showing slides with text simultaneously, people stop listening as soon as they start reading. However, slides that are easy to understand and illustrate what you are talking about – like photos, diagrams, illustrations or easy-to-grasp infographics – can serve you well.

So what can you do to ensure that your audience fully understands you? One of Weinschenk’s effective presentation techniques is to write down your main points first without any visual aids and then think about how your slides can illustrate your main arguments better without interrupting the viewer. Weinschenk also recommends using just a few words on each slide.

• Avoid creating long presentations

Now when your work is ready, it’s important to demonstrate your effective presentation skills. When you think about timing, it’s important to consider another trait of human perception: the amount of time people can maintain concentration and digest new information. Susan Weinschenk and other psychologists suggest limiting your presentation to 20 minutes or breaking down a longer talk into chunks with breaks, quizzes or other changes in activity.

In 2007 Maureen Murphy, a psychologist from the University of North Texas, studied the impact of shorter learning sessions on people who participate in workforce training. She observed two groups of adults; for one of them, an hour-long session was broken down into three 20-minute sessions, and the second group had a single, continuous one-hour lecture. The study showed that people in the first group remembered the talk better, the knowledge retention was higher, and the overall reaction was more positive.

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9 Presentation Aids to Use to Make Your Presentation Stand Out

Written by: Caleb Bruski

Looking for a way to make your presentation stand out from the crowd?

When it comes to presentations, your ultimate goal is to communicate clearly and effectively with your audience.

By adding visual aids to your presentations, your audience will more easily understand and connect with your ideas.

Throughout this article, we’re going to cover what presentation aids are, why you should consider using them plus nine different types of presentation aids to test.

Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit presentation templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:

Table of Contents

What are presentation aids, why use presentation aids, 9 types of presentation aids.

Presentation aids, or sensory aids, are any additional resources used to enhance your speech. 

On a very basic level, a presentation is a bunch of words used to convey ideas to an audience. Presentation aids are additional devices, techniques, resources or materials used to enhance the presentation. 

For example, this four-step process model can be a great presentation aid to showcase a step-by-step guide to your audience.

Rather than just talking about the process, a diagram like this actually details it out, making it easier for your audience to understand.

Visual aids help clarify and contextualize your points for your audience.

Whether you deliver your presentation in person or over the web, the goal is to clearly communicate with your audience. Presentation aids help achieve this goal.

Visual aids also help a presenter stay on a predefined train of thought while presenting. 

The entire experience of presenting can be rather nerve-wracking. Studies show that one of the greatest phobias throughout the world  is public speaking. 

When our words fail us, a clear presentation aid can help fill in the gaps and help us be understood. 

Take this slide example. It can be a great way to walk an audience through features. Each bullet can be clicked to take viewers to a video that provides even more information.

Presentation aids help the presenter stay within an allotted set of time. 

For those of us who have a hard time sticking to the main points, visual presentation aids help us progress forward in our thought process and give a good presentation .

Here, we have a second illustration of a presentation aid — this time in the form of a timeline. Mapping out your content like this helps make it even more digestible and can help your audience learn and remember it.

A sense of authority and trust can also be established when using visual aids.

By delivering hard facts and data in a simple way, trust is established with the audience. The authority and expertise of the presenter is also established. 

Visual aids should help your audience understand the data in your presentation.

When used correctly, presentation aids increase the chance of receiving a positive response when making a call to action. 

In summary, presentation aids are useful for the presenter, the audience and all other parties involved. Best of all, using them is easy and effective.

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Ready to wow your audience with your next presentation? We’re here to help. In this list, you’ll find nine different types of presentation aids that you might consider using to help demonstrate your main points.

1. Charts and Graphs

Charts and graphs are a form of presentation aid used to visually compare statistics and figures. These are some of the most used forms of visual aids in the business world.

Listening to long strings of numbers can be a challenging task. Comparing long strings of numbers without reference can be near impossible. Overwhelmed with this type of data, most audience members will mentally check out.

Comparing simple shapes or lines is an easier task for most people. 

Consider adding a chart like the one below as a presentation aid for your audience.

A simple chart or graph will drastically help your audience comprehend numbers in a way that is easier to understand.

It’s important to select a chart or graph that helps exemplify your point. Not all charts can communicate with clarity the same information. Learn more in our guide on how to create a chart .

2. Handouts

Handouts are physical objects given to the audience that contain information related to the presentation. 

The greatest advantage of using a handout is the physical interaction your audience has with your presentation.

Your audience has the freedom to interact with these handouts during the presentation — they can touch, smell, read, etc., giving them an edge in actually retaining the information.

The more senses your audience uses during a presentation, the better. 

A handout also lets your audience revisit parts of your presentation that were not clear. This helps everyone stay on the same page.

A bonus to using handouts is that these objects don’t just magically disappear. Long after the presentation is over, the handout will still be around. Your audience will remember your presentation every time they see your handout.

3. Demonstration

Demonstrations are actions performed to exhibit or illustrate a point. The goal of a demonstration is to take an abstract point and anchor it in reality, as well as to ensure your audience comprehends a speaking point.

Demonstrations aren’t limited to just physical demonstrations. Demonstrations may also include allegorical stories or proofs used to prove a point. Sharing personal stories or case studies could be categorized as a demonstration. 

Here’s an example of a presentation slide with a demo video embedded. If you don’t have the resources to perform a live demonstration, using a tactic like this can be a great alternative.

To understand the full potential of demonstrations, think back to your old science teacher. A science teacher's job was to teach to a room filled with easily distracted children. 

Science is one of the most complex subjects to teach and the audience is a tough crowd. How did they do it?

With demonstrations! Or more specifically, with science experiments.

Physical demonstrations are some of the most memorable moments of an entire school year. 

The reason demonstrations are more memorable than a simple speech is because demonstrations invite more of your audience’s senses to take part in the demonstration. 

Not only do you hear the lesson, but you can see, touch, smell and sometimes even taste it as well. 

The audience is also involved when the demonstration is a personal story. When the audience hears the story, they imagine it. By recreating the scenario using their own imagination, the memory lasts longer.

Demonstrations are also powerful communication tools. They have the potential to make your presentation go from mediocre to  memorable. 

While powerful, demonstrations can work for or against you. Adding too many, too large or unrelated demonstrations can distract your audience from the actual topic. Ensure that your demonstrations are connected to and accentuate your main points.

4. Diagrams

A diagram is a visual graphic or sketch focused on presenting the inner workings or relations of a subject. A diagram is different from a basic sketch. While a sketch aims to accurately depict an object's shape, a diagram aims to explain and define its functions and relations. 

Diagrams give you the freedom to list, describe, explain and map out your subject matter in a way that is not limited to its physical form. 

While mixing a diagram and physical sketch together can be cool, it’s not necessary. Diagrams ought to be chosen based on their effectiveness in explaining the subject's construction and relation to other objects.

Diagrams help explain complex relations between objects without the need for physical properties. Diagrams are great to use when sketches, photographs and videos can not capture all the attributes of an object. 

Before settling on which diagram to use, it’s best to experiment with different types of diagrams. Your decision should rely upon which diagram will aid your audience the most.

Diagrams are also great for describing and defining things that do not have form. Instead of giving a long and complex definition that no one will remember, consider using a diagram. 

Diagrams can show how this new thing relates to something familiar to your audience. This will help your audience understand and remember complex portions of your presentation.

5. Video or Audio

Audio and video clips are presentation aids used to expand the dynamic range of input in your speech.

Your audience will find it easier to engage with your presentation when you diversify your method of delivery. 

An easy way to increase audiences’ sensory input is by transitioning from a simple speech into a video or audio clip.

Videos allow you to convey information in a fast and rehearsed manner. Professional camera work captures prearranged images, audio and speech. This means video is capable of conveying emotion and information more effectively than speech. 

For this reason, a short video clip may do a better job at summarizing the main points of a presentation than a speech alone. 

While the benefits of  video are high, there are also some potential problems. The most common issue with video usage in presentations being technical compatibility issues.

A smooth transition between speech and video is necessary for your presentation. 

Rough or elongated transitions can be a major distraction for your audience. If this happens, your audience may find it difficult to reinvest in your presentation.

To ensure smooth transitions, your presentation software must be capable of integrating videos clips directly into your presentation. 

It is important to have dependable presentation software .  By doing so, you’ll be able to transition between video clips and other presentation aids.

The transitioning issue is most noticeable at the end of a presentation. Especially when a speaker attempts to transition from a slide-show into a video clip. 

Consequently, many presentations do not have a strong and official close. Lacking a strong close leaves your audience without a clear understanding of what to do next. Check out this article to ensure you know how to end your presentation on a strong and impressionable note.

Quotations are a type of presentation aid that appeal to outside authority and expertise. Quoting others helps establish a positive rapport with your audience.

Many people fear quoting others makes them appear unoriginal.

The opposite is actually true. Quoting outside sources tends to drastically improve the overall appeal of your presentation.

Quoting others shows that you have listened to others on this subject. This makes the presenter appear as a well thought out and considerate listener. 

It’s recommended that you quote those who both agree and disagree with your conclusion. By doing so, you establish a sense of trust and expertise with your audience.

Quoting those who disagree with your conclusion shows that you have taken the time and effort to engage their thought process. 

Quoting those who agree with you shows your conclusion to be a recurring conclusion.

However, always give credit where credit is due. Not only is plagiarism immoral and possibly illegal, it also damages your personal reputation. This may destroy any trust you established with your audience. Check out this guide about plagiarism to learn more.

Maps are visual representations, generally two-dimensional diagrams, that show the relative position and orientation of something. 

Maps are powerful presentation aids capable of showing valuable information beyond basic geography. 

Because maps are a form of diagram, they can deliver valuable relational information. This is especially true when used in combination with animations or graphical overlays.

Proper presentation software will allow you to update your dataset for your map. The changes should immediately update the output of your map without having to manually manipulate the image.

Visme automatically generates these scalable maps and makes the process of customizing your map easy. With just a few clicks, you can generate and customize maps with your own datasets.

8. Photographs

Photographs are still images captured on a film or digital medium and are a powerful visual aid. When used correctly, photographs can add color and shape to the speech in your presentation.

The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is a true statement. A picture is priceless when it’s able to capture and accentuate a point relevant to your presentation.

Photographs are unique presentations aids that give you the power to make a window for your audience to look through. This allows your audience to see and experience particular aspects of your presentation.

While the color red can be described with many words, there’s an experiential gap. Once seen, you can experience the color red.

When a presentation is given, words can help describe an idea, but not experience the idea. Presentation images give you the possibility to close that visual experiential gap.

Even in a world that sells pocket-sized HD 4k 60fps video cameras, the photograph is still the visual aid of choice for most people.

While videos are powerful in their own right, photos give you the power to capture and highlight one particular moment. 

Photos can be less distracting than videos. Videos may have background noises or other distractions. Photographs let you capture and present one image without any distractions.

When presenting, it’s important for your main speaking points to be aided, not hindered, by the presentation aid. 

While planning out your presentation, consider using photographs more frequently than video. This will help your audience experience your presentations without distractions.

Images are also much cheaper and easier to professionally edit than their video counterparts. Capturing and editing a high-quality video may take hours, days or even months. A professional-looking photo can be captured with ease and edited in a matter of minutes. 

Or, you can take advantage of a free stock photo library like you get with Visme. This way, you can ensure your presentation photos are copyright protected and free to use.

9. Volunteers

Volunteers are people selected from the general population to participate in a demonstration. 

Using volunteers in demonstrations is one of the most effective presentation aids available. Using this tactic efficiently comes with all the advantages of a classic demonstration, and so much more.

Human interaction is hardwired into us. We tend to remember faces, body shapes, expressions and emotions. A demonstration with volunteers lets you instantly change the dynamic of the speech.

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Demonstrations with volunteers encourage audience interaction with your subject matter. 

When the audience sees a volunteer interact with your presentation, the barrier to entry is lowered — plus, it gives your audience the chance to become a volunteer that’s doing the interaction themselves.

This makes your subject more approachable and your call to action more likely to succeed.

Be sure your interactions with the volunteer are somewhere between professional and semi-professional. Most people are already afraid to be on stage. An unprofessional or condescending demeanor will only make things even more uncomfortable.

Ensure that your volunteer’s role has a strong connection to your main point. Like all good demonstrations, make sure it is contributing to your presentation. If a particular portion of the presentation is not related to the main point, your audience's mind may begin to wander. 

At the end of the demonstration, be sure to thank and dismiss your volunteers when they are done contributing. There is nothing more distracting for the audience than having an extra person nervously lurking around on stage. 

If done correctly, your audience will remember the demonstration done with volunteers and recall the driving points of your presentation. The volunteer will likely also remember the event for a longer period of time and may even share parts of your presentation with others.

Try Presentation Aids in Your Next Presentation

Creating and utilizing presentation aids can help your presentation go from acceptable to phenomenal. With proper physical and mental preparation, your presentation is sure to impress.

The best way to mentally prepare yourself for your presentation is to be physically prepared. 

Visme makes presentation preparation easy and takes all the guesswork out of the design process. Visme has thousands of high-quality templates for you to customize and choose from. We are certain that with the right tools, you can make an awe-inspiring presentation.

Create a free account and see why Visme is one of the best and easiest ways to create a stunning and engaging presentation.

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Caleb is a freelance writer, frontend web developer and photographer who is passionate about all things tech.

Home Blog Design What is Visual Communication and How Can It Improve Your Presentations

What is Visual Communication and How Can It Improve Your Presentations

Look around; how is the world communicating with you? Is there music? Are your shoes pinching your heel? Are there a million visual triggers trying to get your attention? We don’t have a crystal ball to answer the first two questions, but the third is a definite YES. What’s behind it? It’s visual communication.

Visual communication is the magic behind all the visible things in the world that tell stories, share information, and attract interest. As a person who makes presentations, you own the power of visual communication to impact, inform and attract your audience with visuals. All you need is the knowledge and the tools to make it work.

In this guide, we’ll share essential facts you need to know about visual communication and how they can help improve your presentations.

Table of Contents

Visual Communication Strategy

Visual communication design.

• Why is Visual Communication Important for Presentations?

7 Types of Visual Communication Techniques in Presentation Design

• How to Use Visual Communication at Work Beyond Presentations

Final Words

What is visual communication.

Simply put, visual communication is the practice of communicating through the sense of sight. In a more profound sense, It democratizes communication in general because with visuals, there’s less need for language or translation.

But what does visual communication do? It tells stories through images, video, illustrations , and anything the audience can see.

Visual communication sits at the top of the list of effective communication strategies and designs for all industries and fields. It’s in all the conversations about marketing, community building, and the future of work. If your presentation design still hasn’t embraced the need to thrive on visual communication, it’s time to fix that.

A visual communication strategy is key to a presentation’s overall mood and message. To create a visual communication strategy, follow the same steps as any communication strategy, and develop them simultaneously. 

To give you an idea of the scope of influence of a visual communication strategy, consider all the advertisements you see regularly. Regarding the most successful ones, their visual qualities have been minutely strategized to inspire emotional reactions from you. 

Do you want to get reactions when making your presentations ? Use a visual communication strategy to create an overarching visual quality for your presentations’ slides. 

FYI: Professionals building visual communication strategies include; brand specialists, marketing strategists, content designers, UX/UI designers, publicists, art curators, and anyone that understands how important planning and strategy are for every project.

Once a visual communication strategy is in place, it’s time to take care of the visual communication design. This is the actionable part of the process; the strategy is the plan, and the design is the creation. 

Visual communication design is essential for your presentations. You’re telling a story with your information, and visual techniques will help you add interest. Even a text section can have visual communication techniques applied. For example, the font, spacing, and layout.

Your visual communication strategy will help you choose the proper visual layout, data visualizations, and graphics for the presentation slides. 

Why Is Visual Communication Important for Presentations?

If you aren’t aware, storytelling is a massive factor in effective presentation design. To achieve it, you can’t depend on text content; you need visuals to support the information and create connections with the viewer. On a presentation slide, what’s better? A bullet point list or an infographic widget composition? The answer to this question would be the most visual option, in this case, the infographics .

Surely you’ve heard of “Death by PowerPoint.” It’s the perfect example of how visual communication influences the audience. In this case, how can it go wrong and get undesired effects? Humans create emotional and memorable connections with everything they see. As soon as a presentation proves to be a drab PowerPoint, your audience clocks out and checks their phone.

Thankfully, visual communication harnesses many benefits for your presentation designs:

• Ideas and concepts are easier to understand and transmit in visual form.
• Visuals deliver information faster and more directly.
• A good visual communication strategy is attention-grabbing and engaging.
• Visual elements and characteristics make an impact on the viewer.
• A strong visual component improves the credibility of the message.

Visual communication is vital in presenting a slide deck to an audience. Your outfit, body language, and poise all matter. The audience isn’t just looking at your presentation; they’re looking at you. Take the time to expand your presenting skills by practicing, trying new things, and improving your confidence.

Visual communication techniques are the puzzle pieces of successful content. They are so important that there are psychological applications for all of them.

Here’s a quick list to give you an idea of their importance.

1. Shapes 

Shapes have subliminal, subconscious, and even cultural perceptions. The shapes you choose to include across the slides will set the tone for the entire presentation. For example, circles represent completeness, triangles represent up and forward motion, lines represent connection, and rectangles represent stability.

2. Colors 

In design, colors are the trigger for emotion in content and visualization. Each color has a meaning and an association. Combining colors to create palettes is a practice in mood and emotional communication through vision. If a presentation is all blue and gray, it feels corporate, a vibrant color combination feels happy and inspiring. Muted and desaturated colors feel calm and inviting.

3. Typography 

The way letters look brings a sense of meaning from content to the eyes—from text to visual. There are two main font types; serif and sans serif. Serifs are more serious, while sans serifs are friendlier and easygoing. On top of that, each type has a personality that emanates through the content. The visual style of the typography in your presentation must match energetically with the tone and message of both visual and textual content.

4. Infographic elements 

Infographics are the poster boy for visual communication. Data visualization and information design are at the core of data stories and exciting business communication. Data viz graphics simplify complex ideas that can take up lots of text space in a presentation slide. Your regular charts and graphs can fall through the cracks if you don’t add a good dose of visual communication strategy and design. 

5. Photography and Illustration

Photography and illustration are classic tools for storytelling. Every slide can be easily turned into a pictorial presentation to tell your story, and you have the power to structure it how you want. Be wary of stock photography; overused images will negatively affect your presentation. Custom imagery adds integrity and uniqueness that only a visual communication strategy can achieve.

When using icons in your presentation templates , remember to keep a visual unity between them. Icons can also tell a story from slide to slide in your presentation. Stay consistent in terms of style, color, size, and positioning.

7. Layout & Visual Hierarchy

Viewers use their eyes to see, read and understand your content. When the layout is designed in a way that helps them absorb the information subconsciously, engagement is seamless. It’s as simple as following visual hierarchy and placing elements in the viewer’s line of sight in a Z or F reading pattern.

How To Use Visual Communication At Work Beyond Presentations

Visual communication doesn’t stop at presentations. There are countless other ways to incorporate visual communication at work. Here’s a—not complete—list of the design practices that embody visual communication.

• Infographics
• Visual guides
• Flowcharts and processes
• Employee training
• Internal communication
• Work attire
• Body autonomy

If someone can see it and understand it, it can be communicated visually. Take advantage of that and harness the power of perception, association, and emotional response. 

In visual communication, it’s important to remember that first impressions matter. Your presentations and the message they deliver depending on the value of the visuals throughout the slides. Discover more techniques for improving your presentations in the SlideModel blog . Learn how to incorporate SlideModel templates into your PowerPoint slide decks and leave your audiences satisfied and informed.

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Presentation Guru

5 ways to make your presentation more visual and effective.

Visualizing slides (just a fancy word for transforming slides full of text into more visual slides) is a big part of my job, but you don’t need to be a PowerPoint expert to apply some basic visualization techniques to your presentations. Even minimal changes can make your presentations much more effective and can help people understand your messages better.

Listening to someone present, who is just reading a slide full of text, doesn’t add to understanding. It actually distracts, because the audience will end up reading the text on the slides themselves instead of listening to what the presenter is saying.

On the other hand, slides with less text and more visuals, whether it be graphs, pictures or diagrams can help the audience retain more information, because visuals and speech work hand-in-hand rather than compete for attention in the brain.

It’s a proven concept we follow at BrightCarbon, and one that we often preach about on our own blog . So, to get you started, here are 5 simple things that you can do to make your presentations more visual and more effective.

1) Cut down text on slides

Bullet-point filled slides have been plaguing audiences since PowerPoint began. But they aren’t just painfully dull: bullet points are really ineffective for communicating information to an audience.

So, the easiest way you can quickly make your presentation 1000 times better is by simply cutting out some of the text.

The easiest way to cut down text is to first break it down into chunks, then break it into key points – so, one short bullet-point per chunk – and then to get rid of filler words. This will help you take large paragraphs of text and break them into short and snappy phrases that can fit into text boxes or other shapes.

For example, let’s look at the following block of text:

Peonies are my favorite type of flower. They’re pretty to look at because they come in a range of beautiful shades of pink. They also smell amazing and make great perfume. Lastly, they are larger than a lot of other flowers and make a gorgeous, lush bouquet.

Instead of filling an entire paragraph, we could break this text into three key points:

• Peonies come in range of pink shades
• They make great perfume
• They make a gorgeous bouquet

Then, if we get rid of any filler, we are left with:

• Pink shades
• Great perfume
• Gorgeous bouquet

And voila! You have yourself some bullets that are ready to be fit into shapes. By allowing your text to fit into shapes you gain the ability to organize it in a linear way and then you can animate it on clicks, to stagger the flow of information and tell a more compelling story.

So, BEFORE :

and AFTER :

If you want to learn more about how to ditch the bullet points for good, find out more here .

2) Show locations on maps

I’ve worked on quite a few presentations at this point and I think it’s safe to say most of them include a list of locations at some point. This is because it is really common for companies to have a narrative that includes showing their impact on a national, or global, scale by showing their locations. Often, this is just presented as a list of places. But it’s a lot more interesting – and memorable – to show locations on a map.

For example, if a company has opened a couple stores per year, in different locations, they could animate icons representing these stores on a map and have information such as the year, location or size of store in a box next to the icon.

This is a good way to make the slides illustrate a story about the company’s growth, in a way that is easy for the audience to understand.

3) Add color cues

Adding color to slides in an organized way can enable you to manipulate the audience’s attention and increase their understanding of your content.

For example, if every element on your slide is blue and then you color one object yellow, people will understand that the differently colored object is important or different in some way.

The same idea of ‘color coding’ works when you want the audience to get certain ideas from colors e.g. yellow and black mean warning; green is positive; red is negative.

Keep in mind that these associations are partly based on cultural teachings, so they might not apply if the people you are presenting to have a different cultural understanding of color.

You can also use color to set a ‘mood’ for your presentation. For example, if your company is heading a green initiative then using green tones in your presentation will make it feel more environmentally friendly. Most brands already apply this theory in their logos and brand guidelines, so continuing this thought process in your slides can create even more cohesion and understanding.

Find out more about using color effectively here .

4) Use Timelines

A great way to organize text-heavy slides that involve dates and events is to divide them into a timeline.

This is similar to the map idea above, in that it requires a certain type of information to be successful, but if you have dates and information, it’s much more effective to see them organized linearly than in a list of bullet points.

A timeline is a pretty simple element to create on PowerPoint and just involves a line and some evenly aligned and distributed boxes. Create your boxes using the Insert -> Shape functionality, then use the built-in alignment tools to space everything out neatly .

5) Replace text with labelled images

The last, and arguably most important, point is to get rid of text all together, and replace it with images.

For example, if you want to talk about a new product and its features, the best way of doing this is to insert an image of the product and just label it with key words.

You can insert shapes to pin-point areas you’d like to highlight and then animate them in on clicks so you can stagger the rate at which you mention each feature, which can help the audience follow along.

It’s also useful to have images of the product being used by customers so that you can show the audience exactly how it will look and work.

Being complacent and adding tons of text or bullet points to your presentations won’t do you any favors, because people will become instantly bored and disengaged while you’re presenting, and will start reading what’s on the screen instead of listening to the important things you’re saying.

By applying a couple of easy-to-learn tips to your next presentation, you can significantly increase its effectiveness and make it much more visually appealing. Your audience will stay engaged throughout your presentation and will remember more of the content you are sharing.

It’s amazing how much visuals can do to improve communication between a presenter and an audience, so just remember that the next time you’re pasting reams of text into a 25-slide deck: there are better ways.

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• 5 Ways to Make Your Presentation More Visual and Effective - 6th April 2017

Craig Hadden (@RemotePoss)

11th April 2017 at 4:05 am

These are great ideas, so thanks for sharing. Recently I’ve tried to use colour in a more systematic way, so I was especially interested to read your thoughts on that.

You might also like this makeover I did on a (real) slide. It was stuffed full of bulleted text, but ended up being far less wordy and much more visual. See what your think. (And any comments or questions are always welcome!)

15th April 2017 at 12:47 pm

Thanks for this. and if you’d like to write that piece for us, to help the thousands of designers and presenters out there, we’d love to publish that piece too. The guru is our community after all!

Abigail Lee

25th June 2019 at 12:11 pm

Great article. Prior to stumbling upon your article on Google, I have found similar another engaging article on this website https://www.slideteam.net/blog . It has a collection of enthusiastic articles on PowerPoint as well as professional slides. Feel free to explore all of them.

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The Only PowerPoint Templates You’ll Ever Need

Anyone who has a story to tell follows the same three-act story structure to...

Developing Effective Visuals

Garr Reynolds’ book  Presentation Zen  is a great introduction to effective use of slides in presentations.  Garr also maintains  a great blog on presentations . Some key points from Presentation Zen:

• Limit bullet points and text.  Keep in mind that your slides probably shouldn’t function as your own personal teleprompter. Your slides are for your students’ benefit. If your slides say just about everything that you say, then your students won’t know where to pay attention–to you or to your slides.
• Use high-quality graphics.  The clip art that comes with PowerPoint is certainly convenient (and more visually appealing than it used to be), but there are online sources of free, high-resolution images that can have much greater visual impact. For instance, millions of photos are available for free, educational use on the photo-sharing site  Flickr  under the  Creative Commons license .

• Choose your fonts well.   Sans-serif fonts  are often easier to read on slides than  serif fonts . Too many different fonts in a slide or a presentation can be distracted, so try to limit yourself to one or two. Font size matters, too. Be sure that your fonts are large enough to be read at the back of the room. And if you’re keeping your slides simple and limiting your use of text, you can usually use very large fonts.

For more thoughts on these and other suggestions by Garr Reynolds, along with example PowerPoint slides, see his  Top Ten Slide Tips .

For an alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote, try  Prezi , “the zooming presentation tool.”

For more information about using slides please check out our “Using Slides in the Classroom” Guide!

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10 reasons why you need good presentation visuals Getting your message across with the best visual content

Presentation visuals are one of the most compelling parts of a presentation. Some presenters underestimate the importance of a visual presentation and decide to only speak, or use text slides to back up what they’re saying.

This is a huge mistake – effective visual presentations can have a massive positive impact on your viewers. Almost all information transmitted to the brain is visual (see below), which underlines the effectiveness of visuals in a good presentation.

Here, we will go over the top 10 benefits of using visual content to help you deliver an engaging and memorable presentation.

1. Visuals save you time in preparing your presentation

We understand that creating a great presentation is a demanding and time-consuming process! Why spend hours transcribing your notes onto a PowerPoint presentation when you could use effective visuals that communicate your message better and save you a lot of preparation time? Besides, it’s unlikely audience members will be trying to read a lot of text as they will be focussing on what you are saying. And if they are reading large text slides, they will your speaking. Visuals make it easy for your listeners to follow along and hear you at the same time.

2. Visuals make your presentation more interesting

Everyone has had a bad presentation experience, and it might be said that we’re all suffering from PowerPoint presentation fatigue, to an extent. To avoid casting your audience’s mind back to the experience of fighting to stay awake in a particularly dry university lecture, use photography and video content to keep them hooked. Visuals used correctly can make your presentation a lively and engaging affair.

3. Visuals grab the audience’s attention

The bottom line is, visuals are more likely to grab your audience’s attention. Presentations can be difficult to follow, especially when the information being presented is unfamiliar or challenging. According to the Visual Teaching Alliance , visuals transmit information faster than spoken or written words; we can get the sense of a visual scene in less than 1/10 of a second, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. With people processing images at lightning speed, it is a mistake to miss out on visuals in your presentation.

4. Visuals help the audience to understand your presentation

Not only is visual content attention-grabbing, but it is a powerful tool for helping your audience to understand your content. The majority of us are visual learners. According to Forbes, 65% of us are visual learners . Considering that much of public speaking is conjuring an image in the audience’s mind by painting a picture with your words – why not cut out the middle man, and use a literal image? Visuals are much more likely to be effective in communicating your message, given that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual .

5. The audience is more likely to remember the content with visuals

The average person only remembers about a fifth of what they hear, and visual aids can improve learning by 400% . Furthermore, a study conducted by Georgia State University found that imagery is an effective way to enhance memory . If you want your audience to remember your presentation once it’s finished, use visual content to embed the information in their mind.

6. Visuals make you an effective communicator

Not everyone is skilled in the art of oratory and that’s okay. You don’t need to have elocution lessons to deliver the perfect presentation. Public speaking is just one element of presentations. as we have already seen, visual content is incredibly important in helping you deliver your speech. If public speaking isn’t your best asset, we have some good news for you. Photographs, infographics, and videos can all be used to help deliver your message and make an engaging and informative presentation.

7. Visuals can be emotive

Sometimes you can describe an emotive scene to someone, and they can acknowledge the emotions but they don’t feel them. Seeing an image is much more evocative than hearing someone describe it. Sometimes, the emotions just don’t register until you can see them with your own eyes. If you want to get your audience to feel something, use photos and videos to make your audience members feel happy, excited, amused, empathetic, sad, or inspired.

8. Visual presentations are more inclusive

Many presenters fall into the trap of assuming everyone in the audience thinks in the same way. When we assume everyone thinks the same way as us, we are discounting the fact that audiences are linguistically diverse, culturally diverse, and neuro-diverse. Because not everyone operates at the same level of comprehension, some of your speech is likely to go over the heads of members of your audience. To help deliver a useful and engaging presentation for everyone, use effective visuals which are more likely to get through to them.

9. Impressive visuals increase your credibility

Using polished, well-constructed photos, videos and infographics is a sure-fire way to increase your credibility. Linking to someone else’s YouTube video or using a generic stock photo doesn’t rouse the same admiration and respect as using your custom-made visual content. Professionally made visuals upgrade the overall look and feel of your presentation as well as sending a message of professionalism and trustworthiness in you and your brand. 

10. Unique visuals make your presentation stand out

If you want to deliver a truly memorable and unique presentation you cannot use the same tired formula. One of the best ways to enhance your presentation to an outstanding quality is to use unique visuals. Custom photography and videography allow you complete creative control over your presentation, which means it will be unique to you and your cause. For maximum personalisation, create your visual content the way you see fit.

We hope you enjoyed our top 10 reasons why you need good presentation visuals!

Splento has experienced experts in visual content; get in touch today if you require any visual content creation , or even if you just have a query.

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Create Interactive Infographics with AI

Quickly and easily make high-quality visuals with an AI infographic generator.

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Make Your Work Easier

Creating engaging infographics can be challenging, especially with tight deadlines, complex designs, and the need to show data clearly. Infogram’s new AI-powered infographic generator makes this process much easier by simplifying design and data presentation. It's designed to help even those with little design experience create high-quality infographics quickly and easily.

Why try it out? The infographic AI maker streamlines everything, so you can produce professional-looking infographics with less effort and in less time. Whether you’re a writer, journalist, analyst, marketer, or teacher, it helps you work faster, boost your creativity, and make your visuals more captivating and clear.

What makes it special is how it uses smart suggestions to help you design your infographics, so you don’t have to do everything manually. It’s a step up from other tools, which often require a lot of manual work.

Ready to change how you create infographics? Check out Infogram’s AI infographic generator and see how it can make your work easier and more effective.

Why an AI Infographic Generator Matters

Learn about the benefits of using an AI infographic generator.

You can save a significant amount of time with the AI-powered infographic generator. Instead of spending hours designing from scratch, simply input your raw data and watch as it transforms into a polished infographic. 

For example, if you’re a small business owner, you can quickly input quarterly metrics and have a finished infographic ready in minutes, giving you more time to focus on what matters most in your business.

Speed Up the Process

The AI quickly generates high-quality infographics by automatically suggesting layouts and content based on your input. Just enter your data or text, and the AI will craft a professional infographic in seconds. This streamlined process eliminates the need for complicated design tools, making it ideal for tight deadlines and limited resources. 

For instance, if you’re a marketing manager, you can easily visualize survey results with the AI’s intuitive design suggestions, saving you time and effort.

Boost Creativity

Not only does the AI infographic maker simplify the design process, but it also fuels your creativity by suggesting innovative layouts and visuals. Whether you're a designer in need of fresh ideas or someone looking to enhance a presentation, the AI’s recommendations can help you overcome creative blocks and inspire new approaches.

Once the initial design is generated, you can customize it to align with your brand’s style, ensuring that the final infographic is both engaging and uniquely yours.

Versatility in Use Cases

The AI infographic generator caters to a broad range of needs, from academic presentations to business reports and marketing materials. Its versatility makes it a valuable tool for various contexts, so you can rely on it for all your infographic requirements, no matter the setting or purpose.

User-Friendly Interface

The AI is designed to be easy to use. Its user-friendly interface ensures that anyone, regardless of design experience, can create stunning infographics with ease. The intuitive controls and straightforward process mean that even if you’re new to design, you can produce professional results with minimal effort.

AI Infographic Types to Explore

Statistical Infographics

Showcase your data clearly with charts like bar graphs, line charts, pie charts, and scatter plots.

Timeline Infographics

Visualize the flow of time by displaying key events, dates, and their descriptions in an easy-to-follow layout.

Process Infographics

Break down processes into clear steps with a mix of images and text to make complex procedures easy to understand.

Comparison Infographics

Compare different items or options with side-by-side visuals, charts, and tables to help make decisions easier.

Geographical or Map Infographics

Use maps to show data by region, with color codes and icons to illustrate trends and distributions.

Hierarchical Infographics

Display the structure of a system or organization with diagrams that show different levels and their relationships.

Infographic Reports

Combine text with charts, graphs, and illustrations to provide a detailed summary or research report.

Interactive Infographics

Engage users with interactive features like animations and clickable elements that allow them to explore content in depth.

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Learn More Practical Tips

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To begin, click the "Create with AI" button in your project library. On the AI infographic generator page, choose a template that suits your vision, provide a brief description of your topic or paste your data, and the AI will generate the infographic for you. Afterward, you can easily customize it by adjusting the layout, editing text, or adding elements like charts, icons, or animations.

What are the best practices for creating infographics with Infogram’s AI infographic generator?

To get the most out of Infogram’s AI infographic generator, follow these best practices:

• Start with clear content: Provide a concise description of your topic or paste well-structured data. The more precise your input, the better the AI can generate accurate visualizations.
• Choose the right template: Select a template that aligns with your topic and audience. You can always switch templates later, but starting with a relevant one can save time.
• Use AI-generated content as a foundation: While the AI provides a solid starting point, take the time to customize the colors, fonts, and layout to match your brand or theme.
• Balance visuals and text: Don’t overwhelm the infographic with too much data or text. Use charts, icons, and images strategically, and let the AI summarize long text into bullet points for better readability.
• Test different chart types: Use the AI chart suggestions to experiment with different chart styles that best represent your data. The AI will recommend options, but always ensure the chart is easy for your audience to read.
• Iterate and improve: Don’t hesitate to refine your infographic. Use the "Regenerate content" feature or manually adjust elements to perfect your design before publishing.

How does AI help me create infographics faster?

Infogram’s infographic AI generator speeds up the process by suggesting the best layout and producing content based on your input. Whether you're visualizing data, explaining a concept, or summarizing information, AI automates much of the design process. This allows you to focus on refining the final touches rather than starting from scratch, saving you valuable time.

How does AI boost creativity when designing infographics?

AI boosts creativity by offering suggestions for layouts, visuals, and presentation styles based on your data. It can transform paragraphs into concise bullet points, recommend visuals, and provide design ideas to help you create engaging AI infographics effortlessly. This AI-powered assistance removes creative blocks, ensuring a smooth and efficient design process.

Can AI choose the best chart for my data?

Yes! Infogram’s infographic generator AI can analyze your data and suggest the best chart for visualizing it. Whether it's a bar chart , pie chart , or a more complex option like a spider chart or word cloud , AI ensures your data is clearly and effectively displayed.

How can AI-powered infographics benefit my work or studies?

AI-generated infographics help you create professional, engaging visuals while saving time. In marketing, sales, or consulting, AI can turn raw data into impressive presentations. For students and teachers, AI simplifies turning academic content into clear, visually compelling materials that improve learning and communication.

What are some ideas for infographic topics using the AI infographic generator?

Here are some topic ideas based on different needs:

• For journalists: "Trends in Renewable Energy Over the Last 10 Years" or "How Social Media Affects Political Campaigns."
• For content writers: "Top 10 SEO Writing Tips for 2024" or "How Blogging Impacts E-commerce Sales."
• For government employees: "Public Health Spending by Region" or "Growth in Renewable Energy Projects Each Year."
• For marketers: "Consumer Behavior Trends After the Pandemic" or "ROI for Digital Marketing Channels."
• For sales teams: "Quarterly Sales Performance by Region" or "Customer Satisfaction Rates in Different Industries."
• For consultants: "Strategies to Reduce Employee Turnover" or "Key Performance Indicators for Business Success in 2024."
• For teachers: "Important Events in World History" or "Understanding the Water Cycle with Data."
• For students: "How Social Media Affects Mental Health" or "Key Facts About the Solar System."

These ideas can be easily turned into clear and engaging infographics with the AI infographic generator, helping you present your data or message effectively.

Can I customize the infographic after AI generates it?

Absolutely! After Infogram's AI creates your infographic, you can fully customize it. You can change colors, add new elements, edit text, or even completely regenerate the design if needed. This flexibility allows you to fine-tune every aspect of your infographic until it's perfect.

How does AI ensure that my data is presented securely and accurately?

Infogram’s AI tools analyze a sample of your data to suggest the best visualizations while maintaining security. Your data privacy ( https://infogram.com/terms ) is protected, and the AI provides accurate visual representation without compromising sensitive information. This makes it a reliable tool for creating AI infographics in professional settings.

How can AI help with text editing in my infographics?

Infogram's infographic AI generator can streamline text editing by summarizing long paragraphs, breaking content into bullet points, or improving readability. This ensures that your infographic is not only visually appealing but also easy to understand, helping you communicate your message more effectively.

What types of users will benefit most from Infogram’s AI features?

Infogram’s AI is designed to assist a wide range of users, including professionals in marketing, data analysis, education, government, and more. Whether you're creating reports, presentations, or marketing materials, AI can make the process faster and more effective by generating smart designs tailored to your needs.

How can I use AI to collaborate with my team on infographics?

Infogram allows you to collaborate on AI-generated infographics in real-time by sharing a link or inviting others to edit. Multiple team members can contribute data, tweak layouts, or refine content together, making it easier to work collaboratively on reports, presentations, or other projects. This feature speeds up the approval process and improves team productivity.

Where can I learn more about AI functionalities available on Infogram?

For additional details on how to create charts, infographics, or edit text using Infogram’s AI tools, visit Infogram's support page ( https://support.infogram.com/hc/en-us ). Explore the full capabilities of the AI infographic generator from text and other AI functionalities designed to simplify your design process now. 

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