3 Visual Design Tips to Make Your Presentation Slides Pop

Cammy Bean is hilarious - and she's also just spot on. Some months back she wrote about her newly discovered syndrome - SoMeFat. My friend Neil Lasher talked about that on his blogpost to kick off the year. It feels like a bit of an epidemic to me, I tell you because I think the SoMeFat bug has reached me. Don't worry, I'm advised that it's a minor disorder and that I should be back to my vocal nature on all social media channels. I'm also told that my upcoming three week vacation starting 21st April, will bring me back recharged. In the mean time, I'm going to take the doctor's advice and not blog about social media or social business today. Instead, in today's blogpost I'll share with you three tips that can really help bring your presentations alive. Of course, there's several other things you can try - all I want to do is share some interesting techniques to bring the zing back to your slides.

Use Contrast to your Advantage

Contrast is a great way to lead your audience's attention to items that deserve their attention. There are several ways of creating contrast. You could choose a variation of size, colour or shape to draw people's attention. You'll see several presentation gurus use this trick all the time and it comes in handy when there are more than one element on the screen and you need to focus only on one of them. Take a look at some of the examples I've put up for you above.

Build a Consistent Theme

I recently attended Tom Kuhlmann's talk at Learning Solutions 2011. Tom's obviously a great practitioner of slide-based presentations and his talk last month was no exception. What I was quite interested by however, was the consistent moon theme that he adopted for his talk. You should see the slides here. The slide design actually added an element of fun and consistency to his visuals and kept me engaged. Tom's made a habit of using a consistent visual theme, and you'll see that even on the presentation he did at DevLearn 2010. Actually if you look hard, you'll see that several illustrious presenters use this approach as well. Take a look at this presentation by Garr Reynolds and also this one. And while you're at it, don't miss Guy Kawasaki's enchantment, though I know one of the viewers found it disappointingly predictable!

Use Hand Drawn, Organic Graphics

One of the trends I've seen in recent years, is that of hand-drawn graphics. While Garr Reynolds did a bit of it in this presentation, I see it being more prevalent these days with a lot of us wanting to stamp our personalities with custom graphics. And what can be more custom than a hand-drawn picture? Take a look at Richard Lee's entertaining Pecha Kucha talk to get an idea of how you can use this style effectively. I've also added one of my presentations to this post (nothing really confidential), so you can see how some of this applies for real, business presentations. And by the way, if you were scared of sketching stuff out by yourself, there's help. The Articulate community has some really cool hand-drawn assets for download. If you do feel like sketching things up, it's quite easy - buy yourself a pen tablet and then just use Powerpoint as Dan Roam recommends. And if you have something like an iPad, then there are free tools like Adobe Ideas that are so simple that even I can draw!

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So, I hope that you like this little break from social media and that these tips help you improve your presentations in some small way. By the way, I am going on holiday from 21 April as I already mentioned. I am taking a three week break from blogging during that time unless there's some way I can find an internet connection and the motivation to write during that time. I do promise to come back and spew my thoughts on this blog as usual when I'm back, so hang in here if you do like the blog. Until next week - tada!