How to Design Better PowerPoints
| Global: | UNE myLearn |
| Site: | Learning Online at UNE |
| Book: | How to Design Better PowerPoints |
| Printed by: | Guest user |
| Date: | Friday, 4 April 2025, 9:30 AM |
1. Turning Presentations into Stories
Turning Presentations into Stories
How telling a good story will help you deliver an engaging and memorable presentation.
Death by PowerPoint
Have you ever been bored to death by a presentation? Watch this for a laugh!
Try to avoid creating a presentation with too many slides, too much text and too many ideas. The best way to engage an audience and get them to pay attention to what you are saying is to tell them a good story.
Hook your audience with a good story
Most famous Hollywood movies, like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aquaman, Titanic, etc., tell the story of a heroic character who takes action and overcomes insurmountable odds to achieve victory. We love these kinds of stories that follow a three-act structure. You can use this same structure to develop a compelling presentation.
Using the Three-Act Structure in your Presentation
Let’s look at the three-act story and how it relates to presentations.
Act 1: The World Out of Balance – in the first act we see a world that is out of balance, there is a problem in the world that we, as the audience, can relate to.
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The Problem and the Solution: So, for you, as a presenter, tell the audience of the problem that they care about. This problem could be causing unwanted impacts on society, a community, a school or hospital, etc. This problem needs fixing! Tell the audience what you decided to do about it.
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The Findings: Now tell the audience what happened when you or your team took action. Present the data, facts or evidence that relate to the problem. Keep this interesting. What setbacks, surprises, disappointments or victories did you experience? Did these struggles help you to move towards or away from a resolution of the problem?
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Act 3: The Hero Returns – in the final act, we reach the climax of the story. The hero returns to the village, bringing back the knowledge or treasure that puts the world back into balance.
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Next Steps: Now it’s time to wrap up your story. Have you solved the problem? Maybe the ‘adventure’
continues. Tell the audience what you are going to do next.
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Tips for Finding the Story
- Start brainstorming your presentation with pen and paper. Try to work out what you want to say to the audience before you open up PowerPoint
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Jot down all your ideas that come to you while you work out the story, write down colours, images, ideas and words that your story suggests.
- Be creative and think outside the box!
For more on Storytelling read the section Presentation outline: Telling a (great) story
2. Designing Compelling Presentations
Designing Compelling Presentations
There are many ways to design effective presentations. The guidelines on this page are one approach that we’ve found helpful because they are easy to understand, remember and use.
The 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint
In 2005 Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist and tech evangelist proposed the 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint. Watch this video to find out more.
Kawasaki advised that you should use only 10 slides, speak for only 20 minutes and use no font less than 30 points. Kawasaki has sat through hundreds of presentations pitching him ideas to invest in, so he’s probably a good judge of what works and doesn’t.
| Note: At 1.25 in the video, Kawasaski advises that you should only use black backgrounds with white text as this choice suggests ‘seriousness’. Having a dark presentation also shifts the focus onto the presenter as long as you are not also wearing black. However, you may run out of printer ink trying to print off lots of slides with black backgrounds, so think before you print! |
The 10-10-30 Rule - Kawasaski updated!
A lot has changed since Kawasaki first proposed his rule. For one, our attention spans are getting shorter. For this reason, we’ve adjusted the 20 minute talk time down to 10 minutes. This also better fits our academic context in which there may be hundreds of student presentations to review.
Use no more than 10 slides
According to Kawasaki, ten slides is the optimum number for a slide deck because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting. We like this rule because it forces you to identify and communicate the most important things in the story you want to tell. We believe, though, that you do not even need ten slides; why not nine, or eight or seven? So, we’ll leave this up to you, but definitely, no more than 10 slides.
Speak for no more than 10 minutes
As Mark Twain once wrote to a pen friend, “I apologize for writing such a long letter - I didn’t have time to write a short one. Do not fall into the trap of thinking a longer presentation will get you more marks. Usually an overly long presentation is a sign that you don’t really know what you’re talking about and hoping to bamboozle the audience with loads of facts, figures and unrelated ideas. Don’t be fooled - less is more.
Use no font smaller than 30
This rule forces you to reduce the number of words on each slide. presentation. If you use a smaller font, you’ll be tempted to read out loud what is on the slide. At that point your presentation is lost, as your audience will read the slide much faster than you can speak it.
Source: https://guykawasaki.com/the_102030_rule/
If you’d like to read about the relevance of the 10-20-30 Rule for Powerpoint to today’s audiences, read this: https://slidestore.com/blog/guy-kawasakis-10-20-30-rule-presentation/
3. Design Principles for Slides
Design Principles for Slides
Some slides look good and others look ugly. Find out about the graphic design principles behind good design by watching the videos below.
A Crash Course in Slide Design
This video (5:42) from Slidebean gives you an excellent overview of what works and what doesn’t with slide design.
Tip 1: Remember the Golden Rule: “Less is More”
The less you add into a slide, the more impact it has. The more you put on a slide, the less people remember it. So be very selective about what goes on to each slide.
Tip 2: Be visual!
Interesting and beautiful images and engaging visuals, diagrams and icons win over text almost every time in catching people's attention. So try your best to express your ideas with visual material and limit your text.
For high-quality free images, try:
Source: https://slidebean.com/blog/design-presentation-deck-ideas
How to Make Your Presentation Pop
This video (7:08) from BrightCarbon goes into more detail about these graphic design concepts and introduces some new ones that you should know.
Graphic Design Concepts
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Use quality images to tell a story
- Don’t be afraid to have blank or negative space
- Align objects on a slide using the rule of thirds
- Take advantage of the built-in colour and templates in PowerPoint
- Use of contrast and highlights
- Image editing
If you’d like to read more about these graphic design principles, have a look at their blog.
4. Five Principles of Good PowerPoint Design
Five Principles of Good PowerPoint Design
In this TEDxTalk, David JP Phillips presents some PowerPoint design principles that you should know by now, and some new ones:
And here they are:
- Keep to only one message per slide - keep it simple
- Don't overload the audience’s working memory with too much information to process on each slide - avoid reading out loud what is written on a slide
- Use size to signal the most important thing or things on a slide - perhaps the heading should NOT be the biggest thing on the slide
- Use contrast to focus the audience's attention - use dark backgrounds on your slides!
- Only six objects on each slide
Final Thoughts
In this module, you’ve encountered a variety of principles and tips on how to design more effective PowerPoint presentations. There is no one formula for designing good PowerPoint presentations, but there are definitely things you should avoid, like trying to cram too much information into your presentation. Know what your story is, keep that story simple, and try to present it so the slides support you, the presenter, rather than you supporting the slides. After all, what you say should be the main part of your presentation and what is on the slides should support what you are saying.
5. Adding Narration/Audio to a PowerPoint
Watch the video below to find out how to add narration or audio to your PowerPoint.