Creating better presentationsA practical guide

You’ve probably been through a million similar presentations

So I am going to quickly skim through the concepts

… but my main objective, is to point you to tools that allow you to implement these concepts

Concept 1: Determine one theme to focus your presentation on

Concept 2: Use striking / professional quality images and graphs

Concept 3: Understand the basics of color (what colors combine well, what don’t)

Concept 4: Not more than 3-4 bullets per slide

(damnit, already crossed 4 bullets)

Coming to Point 1: “Creating a theme”

Just to take this presntation as an example: The theme is, well, how to create better presentations

(now that wasn’t so hard was it…)

Point 1: Creating a theme

But that probably is not too much help to you…

You probably want to create a serious presentation, and not one on a lame topic like ‘Creating better presentations’

In that case, its best to start with the problem that you are trying to solve

For example (serious on this time) – if the your product is … a new diet pill

start by describing the 1000’s of ailments are caused due to excess cholesterol

( obviously, you may want to stay away from the millions of ailments caused by of bad medication)

anyway, moving on

Coming to point 2: “Using striking images, charts and fonts”

“But where on earth do I get these striking images”

There are tons of stock photo sites out there

“Wow, that’s really cool”

“Hey wait a sec”

“I got to pay for this? you got to be kidding me”

Actually, yes, I was kidding you

No stupid site is going to get even a cent out of my pocket

There are free alternatives too (that are quite cool)

Next comes, errr, graphs

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Alvin John Anyoneelse

Snooze time per day

Snooze time perday

How on earth… could anyone… come up with a graph templates so… (damnit don’t even have words for it)

Easy alternatives seem, well, a limited

Google docs seems a little better (though still not too great or flexible)

So, the hunt is still on for a better graphing tool (feel free to mails me if you think you know of a decent graphing tool)

Adobe Illustrator seems to be one of the better options (but obviously – you and I are not going to be able to use that)

Concept 3 – color

So, you have got a great image, and have everything else in place as well

So why does you slide still look like…

“Is this supposed to be my brilliant slide???”

Mmm, not really – but you can make it a lot better by adding a transparent text

placeholder on top of the image… like this

Or by restricting the image to one part of the page… as shown here

But no matter which approach you follow, you would need to understand the basic color concepts

Are the colors of the various images and font matching with each other?

This can be learnt by searching up ‘color tutorial’ on google

One site that I found quite helpful was http://www.worqx.com/color/

That’s it from my side…