Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

PowerPoints are awful. Long and uninteresting, they are the corporate drone of visual media—synonymous with endless meetings, academic conferences, and corporate retreats.

For graphic designers, however, slide-based presentations like PowerPoint are synonymous with "client decks," and they're necessary for pitching a design to a client or potential client.

These are not your typical boardroom slide show presentations. They can be impeccably designed and visually engaging because, if done right, they'll persuade the client to go the direction the designer wants. Presentations can be a designer’s best tool for selling an idea.

Admittedly, it’s not graphic designers' favorite part of the job, but there is a lot that others can learn from how they do it. We asked five designers from four top studios and agencies for tips on creating slide-based presentations—whether on PowerPoint, Keynote, or some other program....

Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report for Kleiner Perkins is a comprehensive and provocative collection of data about technology change. It’s also the most cluttered, visually jumbled 213-slide pileup in the history of PowerPoint.

Reading this deck is like walking through a construction site in which the Hell’s Angels are putting on three simultaneous Cirque de Soleil shows during a Green Day concert. In a snowstorm.

While it’s arguable whether there is a unifying intellectual concept here, one thing is completely clear: there is no unifying design concept (unless you count the wordy, telegraphic headings on each slide).

Just as you can learn from Meeker’s trend insights, you can also learn from her design disasters. As you look at these slides, ask yourself two questions:

- In a quick glance, what main idea jumps out from the slide? If I study the slide further, does it reveal more information?

- In too many cases here, the answer to the first question is “Gee, I dunno,” and the answer to the second is “Ouch, I am getting a headache.”...

Each year, we see new trends surfacing in the world of presentation design. From passing fads to design standards that will endure beyond 2016, these trends will continue to shape the way presentations are created and delivered before boardrooms, classrooms or even TED audiences across the globe.

While some of them may exist only for the sake of aesthetics, others have actually been adopted to suit the needs and preferences of modern-day consumers. For example, the use of flat design, many experts say, is more than just the latest craze; it responds to the fact that realist elements are very hard to incorporate into responsive systems designed for screens of all sizes.

To keep you up to date with the latest design techniques, we’ve compiled a list of presentation design techniques that will help you create a presentation that looks fresh and contemporary–just like the content you will hopefully deliver to your audiences....

Speed and agility are traits that define our society today.We avoid reading extensive articles, watching long how-to videos on YouTube or checking websites that are hard to navigate as we usually look for quick and easy solutions. While a technological progress provides us with plenty of utilities, now finding the right one with user-friendly interface and relevant functions becomes a challenge.

Presenting information in a crisp and concise way is something that we need daily needs such utilities as well. So we took our time to find tools that are time-efficient and offer some class in presenting yourself and/or your project....