Experts say interesting and thoroughly thought out slides increase the effectiveness of public speeches by 30%. Nevertheless, some presenters prepare their keynotes in a rush.

How to make a great webinar presentation?

On the contrary, they might run into another extreme — make their slides too “beautiful”. This results in a loss of effectiveness of the whole webinar. How to find the balance and create slides that attract the audience’s attention and persuade it?

Step 1. Elaborate presentation structure

The presentation structure needs to be extremely clear. You’d better note down the plan of the future presentation on paper or using any text editor. Otherwise, use your mental map to make the structure of your report.

Step 2. Select software for slide creation

In case you admire Microsoft PowerPoint, you can simply omit this step. But in case you are sick and tired of the standard patterns of this software, it is high time to look for something more creative. For instance, you could download the application Keynote to Apple computers.

If installing additional software to your computer is not the case, stick to an online solution. Among them are Haiku Deck, Prezi and Google Presentation. You can make slides using online services for presentation creation and edit them from any device.

Step 3. Prepare slides

Stick to 4 principles that would help you avoid typical mistakes and create a more qualitative sharing presentation.

Principle 1. Style unification

Appearance details should reduplicate. Contours, colors, sizes, forms — when you use them throughout the presentation, they make a single entity. If you or your company have a corporate design, it can and should be used to create a presentation.

Principle 2. One idea — one slide

Never present all information on 10 slides. One slide should contain one idea — a thesis and an element supporting it. That could be a picture, graph or text.

Any slide presentation shouldn’t be restricted to a single idea that you reflect on every slide. Instead, your goal is to come up with as many topic ideas as your presentation has slides. What’s more important, a slide presentation must be visually appealing. It should attract your audience’s attention. How to make a slide presentation eye-catchy? Foremost, make sure that every slide represents a topic idea that you suggest in the form of an infographic, chart, or other types of visual content. Furthermore, you can apply different creative presentation ideas that will help you make the presentation diversified. Among these ideas, you’ll find suggestions to use:

• Monochrome palette
• Neon colors and duotones
• Isometric illustrations
• Thick and bold fonts
• Scrunched paper background
• And many more

If you happened to think that all these visual elements would make your presentation hard to absorb, you are wrong. By adding visuals to your slide presentation, you will have more chances to retain the audience’s attention. However, don’t overwhelm the presentation with tons of information. Make it simple. That we’re going to cover next.

Principle 3. Simplicity

People do not read slides but rather scan them. When a slide contains much text, graphics, it is usually hard to perceive. Most people are not able to read and listen simultaneously. Simplify your slides.

Remove all needless. Limit the number of fonts used to one or two only. To create a presentation, use not more than 3 colors. Avoid complicated effects and animations. Make the slide laconic and intuitively understandable. Use great presentation ideas to create top-notch slides.

Principle 4. Accent

Stress the main things in the slide. Without any accents made, slides do not draw attention. Focus on the main idea of the slide using color, underlining or fonts. Remember that texts written in capital letters push attention back!

Stick to these simple rules when you create presentations, and you will be able to make them simple and easy for comprehension.