Today’s article will be devoted to how to create a good presentation, even if you do not have the skills of a designer. What should be the design of your presentation? Before proceeding to specific advice, we would like to make a small digression. You may not be a designer, you may not know how to draw at all, and all your skills in Photoshop may be reduced to performing commonplace basic actions. But despite this, you may love and know how to create simple, yet sympathetic presentations.
If among the readers there are people who think that they cannot create a beautiful, effective and simply good presentation because they do not have the talent for drawing and the proper design skills, they are wrong. So, here are the rules that need to be observed so that your presentation is fashionable and effective:
Discard the ready-made templates.
They are soulless, dull and everyone is tired of them. It is better to create something of your own. Moreover, now it is not necessary to have design skills to make a presentation of high quality. There are a lot of programs and services that will do all the work for you.
Use a good combination of colors.
One of the most common mistakes of people who are unfamiliar with modern trends of web design is that they choose the most unfortunate combination of colors: brown, dark blue, burgundy, etc. If you use these colors with each other, and even with an font badly selected, it can seem that the image came to us from the 90s. Now such colors are not used in web design. More precisely, they are used, but in combination with other, more pleasant and “clean” shades (so-called flat colors).
If what we said above is not entirely clear to you, and you still do not know what colors to choose, use the resource called Flatcolors. There are ready-made palettes with very fashionable and juicy combinations. To copy the code of the color you like, simply click on it with the left mouse button.
Another way to choose a good palette: find a picture that you like, and decompose it into colors using the Adobe Kuler service. To do this, open the service we’ve specified, click on the camera icon and upload the image you like.
As it seems to us, this method is best suited for layout on the colors of landings or some simple images from design communities (such as Behance), because usually they use a few colors and all of them are very well combined with each other. But generally it can be used for layout of any images.
Once the service has issued a ready-made palette, you must copy the code for each color. To do this, use the free plugin Colorzilla. This is done as follows:
- Install the Colorzilla plug-in in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
- Click the dropper in the upper right corner of your browser.
- Select the Page Color Picker Active command.
- Click on the desired color to copy its code in the HEX format to the clipboard (code of the format # ed3434 is a grid and six characters).
- If you need code in RGB or HSL format, click on the pipette, click Copy to Clipboard and select the format that you need.
- Paste the code into the program in which you are working.
- Done!
Use no more than five colors in the whole presentation.
Do not turn your presentation into a rainbow, even if your report is devoted to a children’s theme. A large number of colors interfere with reading and perception of the meaning of the slides. On one slide, it is best to use no more than two or three colors, taking into account the main background color. In the whole presentation, use no more than five colors.
Make the contrast of text and background proper.
Here everything is simple: if the background is dark, use a light font. If it’s light, then use a dark font. The text should be clearly readable on your slide, otherwise your audience will be uncomfortable, and instead of listening to you, they will waste their attention on what you have written there.
Don’t use shadows, gradients and other old-fashioned effects.
Try to keep up with the times and design your slides so that they are not perceived as a relic of the past. After all, the level of trust of the audience to you as a specialist will depend on how well you make a presentation. A good specialist always develops and follows new trends. A bad one does not want to perceive anything new and believes that he or she doesn’t need to improve skills. Do you agree? Then strive for minimalism.
Don’t use poor-quality stock images.
Low-quality stock images will spoil the impression of your presentation, even if clever ideas are written on the slides. Please do not use them. It is better to spend more time, but find images that will be pleasant to watch. How to distinguish a low-quality stock image from a quality one? Low-quality stock images have certain characteristics:
- They are used on every second site.
- They contain poor-quality graphics (usually on a white background).
- They depict artificial situations and artificially smiling people.
Use modern fonts.
Calibri, Comic Sans, Times New Roman – these fonts can be used, but we would not recommend this to you, because they are rather boring and do not produce the desired effect on the audience. Better make a choice in favor of more modern fonts. For example, Helvetica, Open Sans or Roboto. These fonts are simple enough, but they are suitable for almost any project. The font must be readable. When choosing a font, be sure to pay attention to how well it is read. Unusual, ornate fonts with serifs look interesting, but sometimes they are so hard to read that it is better to abandon them altogether.
If you want to learn more on how to make a good presentation, read also other related articles on our blog, like What Is a Presentation and How to Complete It.