It’s common: you are in the middle of your presentation when you realize that your audience is not listening to you. You can’t hold their attention. Someone is not listening, someone else is talking with his friend, and there are even few people who are sleeping. At the end of your presentation, you feel pretty badly about your performance. You can’t understand, you offered many interesting ideas, but they were bored. You trained for that presentation every day in the past few weeks. You are pretty sure that your speech was great, how is possible that people weren’t listening to you? You feel confused and a little frustrated. Probably you don’t know one thing…
The Problem is on the Screen
The problem wasn’t you; the problem was your presentation. Most of the presenters don’t make good slides. Be honest: how many boring, flat, black and white presentation have you seen on the screen for the last years? If you give a look at SlideShare, you’ll notice that most of the presentations there are boring. Not one, not two, not half…most of the presentation! The fault isn’t of the presenters: no one taught them how to make a great presentation; no one taught them that their slides are as important as their speech.
Your Presentation has to Grab Attention
The only way to make people listen to you is to grab their attention with a phenomenal presentation. If your slides show a lot of text, they will bore people. People are lazy; they don’t want to read while you are speaking. They don’t need to read what you are saying them. If your slides are black and white, they’ll appear uninteresting. If your slides show confused data and/or text people won’t pay attention. People want to learn while they get entertained. Some boring slides won’t entertain them.
How to Make a Stunning Presentation
Making a great presentation is pretty easy if you know how to do it. You can follow these steps to learn how to make presentations:
- Use Big Marvelous Images “One picture is worth one thousand words” Images can be very powerful, use them. They are probably the most important part of the presentation. Through the right images, you can evoke emotions in your audience. Think about how effective funny images are. Another example is shocking images: they have a great impact (but don’t exaggerate!). One thing that you should avoid with images is to insert clip art. They are horrible. When you see a clip art on a presentation, you instantly perceive it as unprofessional. Use your images to cover the whole slide. Smaller images can work well if you use them well, but avoid them if you don’t know how to put them in an excellent way. Use similar images. If your images seem to come from a related source, your presentation will get a more professional (and better) look. On the contrary, if your images are totally random, your presentation will appear more…random! Give a look at these two great sources to get good free images:
Compfight Creative Commons Search
- Use Text in the Right Way Don’t insert tons of text in your slides. You are making a presentation, not the next bestseller romance. Insert less text per slide. This means that you have to write only the key points. Your text has to be BIG. Big text impacts, small text will barely be noticed. Give your text a good-looking structure. Try to make a nice composition with your words; don’t put them in a random way. Your text should fit perfectly with your images. Don’t use bullet points! While they are great to highlight key points in an article, they are boring in a presentation. Use one slide per bullet point, it will look better.
- Fonts This is one of the most undervalued parts of a presentation, but it’s really important. Differentiate your presentation with a little known font. How many times have you ever seen words written in Arial or Times New Roman? As you know, the things that we see often are boring. Instead, we feel pretty excited and curious when we see something different. Choose a beautiful font. There are many ugly fonts. You don’t want to use them. You want the best of the best. Search your best font and insert it in your slides. Remember that other people will see your slides so don’t choose unreadable fonts even if they are marvelous. If no one can read it, it will make more damages than benefits. Use two fonts per presentation. If you use too much fonts, your presentation will look confused. You want to build a scheme with your fonts. Use one heavy font to highlight important concepts and one light font for the normal text. These are some great sources to get appealing fonts:
1001 Free Fonts FFonts Font Squirrel
- Colors Colors are what make the difference between a good presentation and a great one. Choose your 2-3 colors and stick to them. The best presentations have some recurring colors. Because of that, your presentation will appear more professional. Your colors have to highlight the text in your slides. For example, if you have a black and white photo, use a vivid color for the text. Train Yourself To improve your slides you have to watch other great ones, borrow ideas, and make lots of attempts. As you get more experience about slides, your presentations will be more appealing. Like writing, speaking, and every other skill, only the training will make you improve. If you want to give a look at some awesome presentations, you can check these down here:
How to Build Your Brand Like a Pro You Suck at PowerPoint You Are Limitless
Up to You
Have you ever thought about the importance of communication in our lives? How we communicate with other people has a huge impact in our lives. Presentations have the power to help us communicate better. What do you think about presentations and communication in general? Also, if you have a presentation, insert a link to it in your comment and I’ll give you advice on how to improve it ;) Featured photo credit: Large Group of Sleeping students via Shutterstock
