All hands on deck

A presentation deck is vital to most businesses, it communicates the company’s values and personality so your audience emotionally connects with you.

Here are our top tips to designing the best presentation deck for your brand.

Software

The process for creating branded decks starts with choosing the best software for the job. The two most popular desktop programs are Powerpoint and Keynote. There’s also a number of online tools available for creating decks such as Slidebean, Prezi and Ludus. Here at Dodgems & Floss we use Keynote as it’s very flexible and has great options for customisation to create professional grade decks.

Typography

Using the right typography to present your content is crucial. Using branded fonts helps bring the company’s personality across, but make sure it is readable on digital screens. The font size is also very important, making sure the font is large enough to be read and using a hierarchy to your typography is a must.

Colours

It’s all about using the right colours and contrast. Your company’s style guide is the foundation to using the right colours for your brand but don’t go over the top and use every colour, less is always more. To make text legible on a slide you need to have contrast, you can do this by keeping your background colour (eg purple) and text colours opposite (eg white). Colours and contrast should be consistent across all slides.

Whitespace

Whitespace gives slides breathing room, if every element on a slide has enough space it makes it easier for the audience to digest. Having certain elements in a consistent position and space across all slides such as the logo, keeps the brand at the forefront of the deck. Don’t overload slides with information, keep it simple! You can add detail verbally as needed – great decks are conversation starters.

Photography

Using photography helps tell a story, which keeps your audience engaged. Never underestimate the importance of strong photography, it’s a powerful tool to convey your message visually. Think about the type of photography you use, it can help deliver an impactful message or reaction. Don’t waste photography space stating the obvious.

Graphics

Illustrations, icons, diagrams and graphs are all great ways of enhancing what could otherwise be very dull slides. Diagrams and graphs need to look like they are part of your brand, using branded colours and fonts will help with this.

Icons are useful to make bullet points much more interesting using a style that works with your brand whether that’s line icons or solid icons but keep the same style throughout the deck. Illustrations will enhance slides that don’t have a lot of text on. If your brand has an illustration style use that but otherwise create illustrations that complement your brand using elements of your brand in them such as the colours. Under no circumstances use Clipart, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb and lower the tone of your presentation. If in doubt, keep the whitespace.

Animations

Keep animations to the minimum, they district the audience and tend to slow your decks down. There’s certain places they can help such as showing a flow on a diagram or subtly animating graphs and statistics but that’s it, no one wants to see cheesy transitions between slides. This isn’t the 90s, and nobody wanted to see them then either.

So in summary, the design of the deck you present to your audience needs to convey everything about your brand, whether you’re presenting a webinar or pitching for new business. The best way to communicate your brand with your audience is through the visual language.

Is your presentation deck working for you? Is it a visual representation of your brand? If not, get in touch!