In the past 5 years, I can’t remember the last time I attended a presentation that didn’t include PowerPoint. If you’re using PowerPoint (or Keynote), take a look at the following 3 presentations:
[slideshare id=28639555&doc=storytellingslidesharefinalpdf-131126090124-phpapp02]
[slideshare id=28621886&doc=thepowerofthepause-131125205315-phpapp01]
[slideshare id=28618640&doc=howthestarbucksexperiencebecamecontagious-131125193116-phpapp02]
These presentations have obviously been put together by people with good graphic design sense. They’ve put a lot of time, thought and effort into creating these. If you don’t have hours and hours to put together your next slide deck, you can at least copy the following lessons from these amazing presentations:
- Not a single one of these slide decks is using a template from the Design tab in PowerPoint. Start with a blank page (as in NO BACKGROUND at all) and build your story from there. Speaking of stories, the second thing you can emulate is…
- Each presentation tells a story. None of these presentations dumps data on the audience with a seemingly endless string of graphs and charts and tables. When you’re putting together your next presentation, start with a question or a declaration of how you’ll solve a problem. And then build to the solution.
- Each presentation uses powerful imagery. I challenge you to find a single element of clip art in any of these presentations. When you’re putting together your slide deck, you can tap into your audience’s emotions by finding images and photos that go with your content. After all, when was the last time you saw a graph (or some clip art) that you remembered for years (or months or even days)?
One note of caution: each of these presentations was posted to Slideshare in order to stand alone. There’s a lot of text in these presentations that wouldn’t need to be there if you were presenting in person.
Looking for some more ways to create amazing visual presentations, check out these recent posts:
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