for visual presentation

Engage your audience with powerful visual presentations.

Visual tools are critical to have in any presentation as they’re one of the key presentation aids that will help enhance your overall presentation .

We’ll give you tips on how to develop a sense of good presentation design whether you’re using PowerPoint, Prezi, Google Slides or any presentation software under the sun. The secret to creating a great presentation does not lie in a superior software, but understanding a few universal design concepts that can applied for all types of visual presentations.

Don’t be afraid to use a few presentation templates – there are ways to make the presentation ideas in those templates your own ideas and advance it in several different ways. Let’s make your next presentation on point and designed beautifully.

Presentations Are The Visual Communication Tool To Your Story

In the age of information, people remember facts faster through stories. Keep your bullet points and information short. You can use a rule of thumb to not put more than a paragraph and 3 points per slide to start.

Make your presentation the visual component of your story, but not something your audience has to read. Something that is short and succinct on screen will capture your audience’s attention and make sure they retain the main points of your message.

This does not mean incomplete slides. A common mistake presenters make is putting too little information on a slide in the name of simplicity when in fact they’re leaving out the main context.

A well designed visual presentation has a great story behind it and a well rehearsed voice telling it as well. Engaging the audience is also a great way to associate meaning or connection to the content of your slide decks. Ask questions and tell stories while showing off a great visual presentation! Think of writing the copy like writing for social media – you only have a certain amount of characters to use and a short audience attention span.

General Tips For Visual Presentations

Before you begin creating your presentation, you first need to know what makes effective presentations – storytelling. Such presentations target the audience’s emotions leading to a stronger connection to the audience member and the main point of the presentation.

Below are some storytelling tips for your slides, but remember to keep the presentation itself simple and practice makes perfect. And again, these are more for your spoken component that accompanies the visual component. These tips can be useful because they can be applied to all your presentations in general.

Step 1 is to ask yourself who your audience is and how to convey the key message you have in mind to them. Once you settle on your message, you can start designing your slides with that direction in mind.

You may wonder how to connect with an audience with your slides. Look to your own experiences, your own speaking style and tailor your message to what you know. Not many people want to hear others recite facts with no real meaning driving the story. Ask yourself, “Why does this matter to the audience and why should they care?”.

There is a lot of trust that can be built when the audience has a genuine connection to the presenter. Overall, if you have something that can solve a problem or teach someone complex things, that is enough to form a connection with your audience.

Think of the last app you used, the last email you read or perhaps the last business you purchased from. What was the content or visual elements that pulled you in?

Are you making a PowerPoint, Prezi or other form of visual presentation but it’s taking too much of your time? Enlist the help of Presentation Geeks and consider outsourcing your presentation design . Outsourcing your presentation slides allows you to free more of your time while still getting the results of an interesting presentation. You’ll have the support of expert slide designers who know what presentation visuals work and don’t work thanks to years of presentation feedback and background knowledge.

Color Design Tips For Presentation Slides

When designing your presentation, make sure you take into consideration the colors you’re using. We’ve listed a few background color combinations you might want to consider when developing the overall slide deck and the font to use.

Color Wheel Alignments:

Primary Colors: Red, yellow, blue

Secondary Colors: Green, orange, purple

Tertiary Colors: Yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green & yellow-green

Analogous Colors: These are any three colors which are side by side on a color wheel. (Think green, lime green, yellow)

Complementary Colors: These are colors that are directly opposite of a color wheel. (Think green vs. purple, red vs. blue)

Monochromatic Colors: This is when you use one color and various shades or hues of it. It works well for minimal looks.

Color moods:

Red/Orange/Yellow: Generally these convey a sense of energy, are warm colors and catch your attention. Yellow is a happy warm color on one end and red is very striking and can warn of danger, and symbolizes importance, passion and sometimes violence.

Blue/Purple/Green: These colors are calming, reserved, elegant and often used for corporate slides. Think of how indigo blue is used for many large corporate entities. Green often is branded with earth or medical brands. Purple often conveys a sense of royalty, money and creativity.

Use The Power Of Photography Or Video

Pictures and videos are great visuals to incorporate into any presentation. Remember the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Well, it’s true! Photos help visualize complex information. You’ll often come across a lot of photos in research presentations as they help the audience understand examples better.

They can also save you from having to put a thousand thoughts into the PowerPoint presentation slide!

The first tip we can give to make a great visual presentation is to choose all your photos before you start. This way you can keep the consistency of the images across your slide deck and make sure they’re somewhat alike in terms of composition, mood and brand.

Use free stock photos

You don’t have to take the photos or videos yourself.

There are plenty of free resources and web pages for stock photos online – Unsplash , Pexels , Pixabay , Free Range , Creative Commons and some photos from Freepik are free to use with some accreditation.

Effective photo use

Make sure you pick an image that will focus on the main theme of the slide. One image is usually enough if the image choice is very relevant to the slide. If you have multiple photos, avoid poor or loose placement of photos all over the slide. Try to use a grid or gallery placement and it will immediately enhance the layout of the slide.

If you pick great images, making presentations can be faster. Instead of having to create an elaborate template with multiple elements, a photo with a couple of bullet points can go a long way in terms of capturing attention and making your presentation slides look professional. This is true on any presentation design platform – whether its PowerPoint, Google Slides, etc.

You can also embed videos whether they’re located on your computer, YouTube, Vimeo or other major video streaming sites. If you’re feeling nervous about your presentation or have a complex message that would be hard to condense in one slide, a video is a dynamic way of conveying your message in any type of presentation.

The Typography You Use Matters

Typography is how you will arrange and present the words in your presentation. An audience can engage when text is readable, functional and works well with the other elements in the presentation. Fonts and sizing are a good place to start establishing the tone of your presentation.

Overview of Font Choices

Elegant fonts often denote a sense of luxury or lifestyle tone. Use script fonts sparingly, but as titles they immediately give this polished and high-end look. This should not be used as body text or something lengthy to read. Think about if you sent an email in that text – it would be tedious to read. However, maybe if it were a title or a way to name email, the choice may be more correct.

Corporate fonts often are traditional, serif fonts or clean sans serif fonts that evoke a sense of trust and a clear message. Think of the fonts Lato, Helvetica or Arial – they’re go-to fonts that are easy to read, and work across many systems. This is especially helpful if you are working across teams when creating content or having to approve the content, idea or visuals.

Of course, you can incorporate more stylistic or playful fonts if you want to give your presentation a personal feel. Much like the scripted font, when used sparingly but in large titles, this choice of font can be very effective at conveying a certain personality.

Adding Symbols & Icons To Your Presentation

You can consolidate information by using symbols or icons to direct your eye to information such as an arrow symbol. What if you used a symbol instead of a bullet point? Think of symbols as anchors for the eye to quickly find information. You can collect symbols off free stock sites or use the built-in ones in PowerPoint that are free to use!

Depending on if your presentation is formal or informal , you may also want to consider adding emojis! Emojis are fun ways to express different emotions and can help connect with a younger demographic.

Overall Branding, Tone of Voice & Consistency

Another tool you may have at your disposal is if your brand, business or company has brand guidelines. It will be the guide and compass to your presentation’s information that goes within it. By keeping consistent you can achieve a polished look even if it looks very simple.

Use your business voice to communicate ideas and set the tone for your presentation. Are you in an investment banking business and want people to rely on the information given to you? That would inform perhaps using blues and purples, which are calmer colors and a cleaner look. Are you an influencer who’s buying power and spending choices matter to your audience? Maybe choosing bright colors with personal touches will make the connection. Are you designing an innovative app? Maybe more interactive slides would do the trick.

Use these questions to make sure your text and tone is consistent as this is a foundation of a well articulated brand or personal identity.

Consistent Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is how you will arrange objects and text in relation to one another to guide your user and not confuse the objects and how they should read them in your slides. Setting rules helps differentiate and prioritize what’s important in order.

Look at the difference between these two.

Snoop Dogg just launched a wine and it’s coming to Canada

Daily hive branded content | aug 11 2020, 6:30 am.

Australian winery 19 Crimes recently announced that its new Cali Red wine, created in collaboration with Entertainment Icon, entrepreneur, and hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg, will be hitting shelves across Canada later this summer.

The collaboration offers a refreshing take on celebrity partnerships as the apparent shared values and history between the brand and famous rapper make for a perfectly organic pairing.

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You can see a clear distinction in the example below:

Think of hierarchy of a form of narration or story structure. Your eye goes to the title, then to the subtitle, then to the body copy in a logical manner. Where the eye travels is one of those things we don’t think about often. But you can also utilize eye lines in photos. Is your subject in the photo looking left or right? Consider placing text to where your subject is looking and see how effectively your eye travels to that text.

We’ll look at hierarchy strictly as sizing of words for now, but note you can establish hierarchy with type, white space, alignment, etc. As a general rule of thumb, you should have consistent sizing for your Header (or title slide / slide title), your subtitles and your body text. That’s it! If the sizing in your PowerPoint is consistent, your words will look uniform and clean. Everything will be much easier to read and the eye will be trained to move each slide.

Don’t Forget Your Own Style

Also don’t forget to incorporate your own style and what kind of visuals you like. Even if your early visuals may seem simple, build up that design muscle with the basics and design techniques that look clean and consistent.

You’ll find as you design these basics, you’ll probably start noticing other visuals and things you like in other mediums and presentations. Keep a note or screenshot the presentation that inspired you. Create a mood-board that you can refer to in the future for quick idea inspiration. Copying gets a bad rap, but learning how to design something you like even if it’s a clone copy will teach you many things about design. Build a collection of images that informs everything you do: for your color scheme, your designs, the cadence of images, etc.

That being said, you can also use free stock websites like Freepik for some design layouts inspiration. Creative Market is a paid website but the site offers a ton of design inspiration. This site has design templates for what’s currently in and trending. You can subscribe to an email newsletter on either site to get bite sized design influence each day that goes straight to your inbox.

However, don’t be afraid to try something new!

Once you get to a level of comfortable designing, these new ideas will be much easier to execute with the technical knowledge you amassed when you started. You could even try using a new app to design your ideas to keep your knowledge fresh! (Keep in mind that most online apps like SlideShare use cookies to improve functionality and performance.)

Ask your friends or people at your organization to give you feedback and critique, as that’s also crucial to honing your design skills. The people around you also represent different audiences!

The above image looks boring, right?

That’s because there are no visual elements!

Powerful visual presentations can engage audiences psychologically with both the presentation itself and the energy of the presenter. By understanding a few universal design concepts, you can begin your journey creating wonderful visual presentations and becoming a better presenter ! Thanks for reading this blog post, tell us your tips in the comments below.

Author:  Content Team

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by Tom Rielly • May 12, 2020

When giving presentations, either on a video conference call or in person, your slides, videos and graphics (or lack of them) can be an important element in helping you tell your story or express your idea. This is the first of a series of blog posts that will give you tips and tricks on how to perfect your visual presentations.

Your job as a presenter is to build your idea -- step-by-step -- in the minds of your audience members. One tool to do that is presentation graphics, such as slides and videos.

Why graphics for your presentation?

A common mistake is using slides or videos as a crutch, even if they don’t actually add anything to your presentation. Not all presentations need graphics. Lots of presentations work wonderfully with just one person standing on a stage telling a story, as demonstrated by many TED Talks.

You should only use slides if they serve a purpose: conveying scientific information, art, and things that are hard to explain without pictures. Once you have decided on using slides, you will have a number of decisions to make. We’ll help you with the basics of making a presentation that is, above all, clear and easy to understand. The most important thing to remember here is: less is more.

Less is so much more

You want to aim for the fewest number of slides, the fewest number of photos, the fewest words per slide, the least cluttered slides and the most white space on your slides. This is the most violated slide rule, but it is the secret to success. Take a look at these examples.

As you can see in the above example, you don’t need fancy backgrounds or extra words to convey a simple concept. If you take “Everything you need to know about Turtles”, and delete “everything you need to know about” leaving just “turtles”, the slide has become much easier for your audience to read, and tells the story with economy.

The above example demonstrates that a single image that fills the entire screen is far more powerful than a slide cluttered with images. A slide with too many images may be detrimental to your presentation. The audience will spend more mental energy trying to sort through the clutter than listening to your presentation. If you need multiple images, then put each one on its own slide. Make each image high-resolution and have it fill the entire screen. If the photos are not the same dimensions as the screen, put them on a black background. Don’t use other colors, especially white.

Your slides will be much more effective if you use the fewest words, characters, and pictures needed to tell your story. Long paragraphs make the audience strain to read them, which means they are not paying attention to you. Your audience may even get stressed if you move on to your next slide before they’ve finished reading your paragraph. The best way to make sure the attention stays on you is to limit word count to no more than 10 words per slide. As presentation expert Nancy Duarte says “any slide with more than 10 words is a document.” If you really do need a longer explanation of something, handouts or follow-up emails are the way to go.

Following a “less is more” approach is one of the simplest things you can do to improve your presentation visuals and the impact of your presentation overall. Make sure your visuals add to your presentation rather than distract from it and get your message across.

Ready to learn more about how to make your presentation even better? Get TED Masterclass and develop your ideas into TED-style talks.

© 2024 TED Conferences, LLC. All rights reserved. Please note that the TED Talks Usage policy does not apply to this content and is not subject to our creative commons license.

• Alternatives 🔥

2024's Must-See Visual Presentation Examples to Power Up Your Deck

Anh Vu • 05 April, 2024 • 8 min read

Keep on reading because these visual presentation examples will blow your boring decks away! For many people, delivering a presentation is a daunting project, even before it turns to hybrid and virtual displays due to the pandemic. To avoid the Death By PowerPoint phenomenon, it is time to adopt new techniques to make your presentations more visual and impressive.

This article tries to encourage you to think outside of the slide by providing essential elements of a successful visual presentation, especially for the new presenter and those who want to save time, money, and effort for the upcoming presentation deadline.

Table of Contents

What is a visual presentation.

• Types of Visual Presentation Examples

How to Create a Visual Presentation

• What Makes a Good Presentation Visual?

Frequently Asked Questions

How ahaslides supports a good visual presentation.

As mentioned before, you need a presentation tool to make your presentation more visual and engaging. The art of leveraging visual elements is all intended visual aids make sense and kick off audiences' imagination, curiosity, and interest from the entire presentation.

The easiest way to create interaction between the presenter and the audience is by asking for rhetorical and thought-provoking quizzes and quick surveys during the presentation. AhaSlides , with a range of live polls , live Q&A , word clouds >, interactive questions, image questions, creative fonts, and integration with streaming platforms can help you to make a good visual presentation in just a second.

• Types of Presentation
• College Presentation
• Creative Presentation Ideas
• AhaSlides Free Public Templates

Start in seconds.

Get free templates for your next interactive presentation. Sign up for free and take what you want from the template library!

So, what are the visual presentation examples? When providing as much information as possible, many presenters think that text-heavy slides may help, but by contrast, they may lead to distraction. As we explore the characteristics of good presentations, illustrations and graphics play an important role in delivering compelling content and turning complex concepts more clearly, precisely, and instantly to understand. A visual presentation is the adoption of a range of visual aids on presentation to ensure information is easier to understand and memorize. 

In addition, visual aids can also help to keep presenters on track, which can be used as a cue for reviving a train of thought. They build better interaction and communication between presenters and the audience, making them notice more deeply what you are saying.

Types of Visual Presentation Examples 

Some possible visual presentations include infographics , charts, diagrams, posters, flipcharts, idea board , whiteboards, and video presentation examples. 

An infographic is a collection of different graphic visual presentations to represent information, data, or knowledge intended more visually quickly and clearly to grab the audience's attention.

To illustrate quantitative data effectively, it is important to make use of graphs and charts. For both business use and research use, graphs and charts can show multiple and complex data in a way that is easy to understand and memory.

When it comes to presenting information systematically and logically, you can use diagrams. A diagram is a powerful tool for effective communication and brainstorming processes. It also is time-saving for people to read and collect information.

A poster, especially a research project poster, provides brief and concrete information about a research paper straightforwardly. The audiences can grab all important data knowledge and findings through posters. 

A flipchart and whiteboard are the most basic presentation aids and work best to supplement lecture slides. Excellent whiteboard and flipchart composite of well-chosen words, and clear diagram will help to explain complex concepts.

A video presentation is not a new concept, it is a great way to spread ideas lively and quickly attract the audience's attention. The advantages of a video presentation lie in its animation and illustration concepts, fascinating sound effects, and user-friendliness. 

In addition, we can add many types of visual aids in the presentations as long as they can give shapes and form words or thoughts into visual content. Most popular visual aids include graphs, statistics, charts, and diagrams that should be noted in your mind. These elements combined with verbal are a great way to engage the listeners’ imagination and also emphasize vital points more memorable.

It is simply to create more visual presentations than you think. With the development of technology and the internet, you can find visual presentation examples and templates for a second. PowerPoint is a good start, but there are a variety of quality alternatives, such as AhaSlides , Keynote, and Prezi.

When it comes to designing an effective visual presentation, you may identify some key steps beforehand:

Visual Presentation Examples - Focus on Your Topic

Firstly, you need to determine your purpose and understand your audience's needs. If you are going to present in a seminar with your audience of scientists, engineers, business owners… They are likely to care about data under simple charts and graphs, which explain the results or trends. Or if you are going to give a lecture for secondary students, your slides should be something fun and interesting, with more colourful pictures and interactive questions.

Visual Presentation Examples - Animation and Transition

When you want to add a bit of excitement to a slideshow and help to keep the listener more engaged, you use animation and transition. These functions help to shift the focus of audiences between elements on slides. When the transition style and setting are set right, it can help to give fluidity and professionalism to a slideshow.

Visual Presentation Examples - Devices for Interactivity

One of the approaches that improve communication between audiences and the use of visual aids is using technology assistance. You don’t want to take too much time to create well-designed visual aids while ensuring your presentation is impressive, so why not leverage a presentation app like AhaSlides ? It properly encourages participant engagement with interactive visual features and templates and is time-saving. With its help, you can design your presentation either formally or informally depending on your interest.

Visual Presentation Examples - Give an Eye-catching Title

Believe it or not, the title is essential to attracting audiences at first sight. Though don’t “read the book by its cover”, you still can put your thoughts into a unique title that conveys the topic while piquing the viewer’s interest. 

Visual Presentation Examples - Play a Short Video

Creative video presentation ideas are always important. “Videos evoke emotional responses”, it will be a mistake if you don’t leverage short videos with sound to reel in and captivate the audience's attention. You can put the video at the beginning of the presentation as a brief introduction to your topic, or you can play it as a supplement to explain difficult concepts. 

Visual Presentation Examples - Use a Prop or Creative Visual Aid to Inject Humour

It is challenging to keep your audience interested and engaged with your audience from the whole presentation. It is why to add a prop or creative visual aid to pull your audience's focus on what you say. Here are some ideas to cover it:

• Use neon colour and duotones
• Tell a personal story
• Show a shocking heading
• Use isometric illustrations
• Go vertical

Visual Presentation Examples - Rehearsal and Get Feedback

It is an important step to make your visual presentation really work out. You won’t know any unexpected mirrors may come out on D-day if you don’t make the rehearsal and get feedback from a reliable source. If they say that your visual image is in bad-quality, the data is overwhelming, or the pictures are misunderstood, you can have an alternative plan in advance.

What Makes a Good Visual Presentation?

Incorporate visual or audio media appropriately. Ensure you arrange and integrate suitable data presentation in your slides or videos. You can read the guidelines for visual aids applications in the following:

• Choose a readable text size about the slide room and text spacing in about 5-7 doubted-spaced.
• Use consistent colour for overall presentation, visual aids work better in white yellow and blue backgrounds.
• Take care of data presentation, and avoid oversimplification or too much detail.
• Keep the data shown minimum and highlight really important data points only.
• Choose font carefully, keep in mind that lowercase is easier to read than uppercase
• Don’t mix fonts.
• Printed text is easier to read than handwritten text.
• Use the visual to emphasize punctuation in your verbal presentation.
• Say no to poor-quality images or videos.
• Visual elements need to be strategic and relevant.

What well-designed visual aids should have?

To make an effective visual aid, you must follow principles of design, including contrast, alignment, repetition, and proximity.

Why is it important to keep visual aids simple?

Simple ads help to keep things clear and understandable, so the message can be communicated effectively.

What is the purpose of visual aids in the classroom?

To encourage the learning process and make it easier and more interesting so students would want to engage in lessons more.

Tips to Engage with Polls & Trivia

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Blog Data Visualization 18 Presentation Design Tips For Success

18 Presentation Design Tips For Success

Written by: Midori Nediger May 15, 2023

Bad presentations. We’ve all had to sit through them.  Heck, we’ve probably all given one or two. I know I have.

You know the type: twice as long as they need to be, slides chock-full of text, no visuals in sight. 

How can you ensure you don’t fall victim to these presentation faux-pas when designing your next presentation for your team, class, or clients?

In this blog, I’ll walk you through tips on how to design an impactful presentation along with presentation templates that can help you deliver it with style to leave a lasting impression.

Tips for designing and delivering an impactful presentation

What makes a presentation memorable?

It usually comes down to three things:

• The main idea.
• The presenter.
• The visuals.

All three elements work together to create a successful presentation. Just like how different presentation styles serve different purposes, having a good presentation idea will give the audience a purpose for listening.

Here are some top tips to consider to help you design and deliver an impactful presentation:

• Include less text and more visuals in your presentation design
• Identify one core message to center your presentation design around
• Eliminate any information that doesn’t immediately support the core message
• Create a strong presentation outline to keep you focused
• Use text to reinforce, not repeat, what you’re saying
• Design your presentation with one major takeaway per slide
• Use visuals to highlight the key message on each slide
• Use scaffolding slides to orient your audience and keep them engaged
• Use text size, weight, and color for emphasis
• Apply design choices consistently to avoid distraction
• Split a group presentation by topic
• Use a variety of page layouts to maintain your audience’s interest
• Use presentation templates to help you get started
• Include examples of inspiring people
• Dedicate slides to poignant questions
• Find quotes that will inspire your audience
• Emphasize key points with text and images
• Label your slides to prompt your memory

1. Include less text and more visuals in your presentation design

According to David Paradi’s annual presentation survey , the 3 things that annoy audiences most about presentations are:

• Speakers reading their slides
• Slides that include full sentences of text
• Text that is too small to read

The common thread that ties all of these presentation annoyances is text. Audiences are very picky about the text found in presentation slide decks .

In my experiences speaking at conferences and in webinars over the past few years, audiences respond much more positively to presentations that use visuals in place of text.

Audiences are more engaged, ask more questions, and find my talks more memorable when I include lots of visual examples in my slide decks. 

I’m not the only one who has found this. We recently surveyed nearly 400 conference speakers about their presentation designs and found that 84.3% create presentations that are highly visual.

A great example of a high visual presentation is the iconic AirBnB pitch deck design , which includes no more than 40 words per slide. Instead of repeating the speaker’s script on the slides, it makes an impact with keywords, large numbers, and icons:

Learn how to customize this presentation template:

To help you take your presentations to the next level, I’d like to share my process for creating a visually-focused presentation like the one above. I’ll give you my top presentation design tips that I’ve learned over years of presenting:

• Class presentations
• Online courses

You can then apply this process to our professional presentation templates  or pitch decks , creating unique presentation decks with ease! Our user-friendly editor tools make customizing these templates a breeze.

To leave a lasting impression on your audience, consider transforming your slides into an interactive presentation. Here are 15 interactive presentation ideas to enhance interactivity and engagement.

We’ll cover the most important steps for summarizing lengthy text into a presentation-friendly format. Then we’ll touch on some presentation design tips to help you get visual with your slide decks. Read on for the best creative presentation ideas .

2. Identify one core message to center your presentation design around

We know from David Paradi’s survey that audiences are easily overwhelmed with lots of text and data, especially when presentations are long.

(You when you see a presentation with lots of text and data and it’s long)

So unlike in a white paper , report , or essay , you can’t expect to tackle many complex ideas within a single presentation.

That would be a recipe for disaster.

Instead, identify a single central message that you would like to communicate to your audience. Then build your presentation around that core message.

By identifying that core message, you can ensure that everything you include in your presentation supports the goal of the presentation .

As seen below, a great presentation tells you exactly what you’re going to learn (the core message), then gets right to the facts (the supporting information).

To ensure you create an asset that’s clear, concise, impactful, and easy to follow, design your presentation around a single core message.

3. Create a strong presentation outline to keep you focused

Think of your outline as a roadmap for your presentation. The outline will shape the  presentation structure  and guide you through your content. Creating a strong presentation outline straight away helps make sure that you’re hitting all of the key points you need to cover to convey a persuasive presentation .

Take this presentation outline example:

• Introduction and hellos
• Vision and value proposition
• Financial profit
• Your investment
• Thanks and questions

These are all things that we know we need to talk about within the presentation.

Creating a presentation outline makes it much easier to know what to say when it comes to creating the actual presentation slides.

You could even include your presentation outline as a separate slide so that your audience knows what to expect:

The opening moments of your presentation hold immense power – check out these 15 ways to start a presentation to set the stage and captivate your audience.

4. Eliminate any information that doesn’t support the core message

Next, use that core message to identify everything that doesn’t belong in the presentation.

Aim to eliminate everything that isn’t immediately relevant to the topic at hand, and anything remotely redundant. Cut any information that isn’t absolutely essential to understanding the core message.

By cutting these extra details, you can transform forgettable text-heavy slides:

Into memorable slides with minimal text:

Here’s a quick checklist to help you cut out any extra detail:

Get rid of:

• Detailed descriptions
• Background information
• Redundant statements
• Explanations of common knowledge
• Persuasive facts and figures
• Illustrative examples
• Impactful quotes

This step may seem obvious, but when you’re presenting on a topic that you’re passionate about, it’s easy to get carried away with extraneous detail. Use the recommendations above to keep your text in check.

Clarity is key, especially if you’re presenting virtually rather than in-person. However, Lisa Schneider (Chief Growth Officer at Merriam-Webster) has had plenty of experience making that adjustment. She recently shared her tips for adapting in-person presentations into virtual presentations on Venngage that you can check out. 

Watch: How to design a presentation [10 ESSENTIAL TIPS]

5. Use text to reinforce, not repeat, what you’re saying

According to presentation guru  Nancy Duarte , your audience should be able to discern the meaning of your slides in 6 seconds or less.

Since your audience will tend to read every word you place on each slide, you must keep your text to an absolute minimum. The text on your slides should provide support for what you’re saying without being distracting.

Never write out, word for word, what you’re going to be saying out loud. If you’re relying on text to remember certain points, resist the urge to cram them into your slides. Instead, use a tool like Venngage’s speaker notes to highlight particular talking points. These can be imported into PowerPoint — along with the rest of your presentation — and will only be viewable to you, not your audience.

For the actual slides, text should only be used to reinforce what you’re saying. Like in the presentation design below, paraphrase long paragraphs into short bulleted lists or statements by eliminating adjectives and articles (like “the” and “a”).

Pull out quotes and important numbers, and make them a focus of each slide.

6. Design your presentation with one major takeaway per slide

As I mentioned above, audiences struggle when too much information is presented on a single slide.

To make sure you don’t overwhelm your audiences with too much information, spread out your content to cover one major takeaway per slide.

By limiting each slide to a single simple statement, you focus your audience’s attention on the topic at hand.

My favorite way to do this is to pick out the core message of whatever I’m talking about and express it in a few keywords, as seen in this presentation slide below.

This helps ensure that the visuals remain the focus of the slide.

Using the text in this way, to simply state a single fact per slide, is a sure-fire way to make an impact in your presentation.

Alternatively, pull out a significant statistic that you want to stick in your audience’s minds and make it a visual focus of the slide, as seen in this popular presentation by Officevibe .

This might mean you end up with a slide deck with a ton of slides. But that’s totally ok!

I’ve talked to many professionals who are pressured by their management teams to create presentations with a specific number of slides (usually as few as 10 or 15 slides for a 30-minute presentation).

If you ask me, this approach is completely flawed. In my mind, the longer I spend sitting on a single slide, the more likely I am to lose the interest of my audience.

How many slides should I use for a 10 minute presentation?

A good rule of thumb is to have at least as many slides as minutes in your presentation. So for a 10 minute presentation you should have at least 10 slides .

Use as many slides as you need, as long as you are presenting a single message on each slide, (as seen in the lengthy presentation template below). This is especially important if you’re presenting your business, or delivering a product presentation. You want to wow your audience, not bore them.

7. Use visuals to highlight the key message on each slide

As important as having one major takeaway per slide is having visuals that highlight the major takeaway on each slide.

Unique visuals will help make your message memorable.

Visuals are a great way to eliminate extra text, too.

You can add visuals by creating a timeline infographic to group and integrate information into visual frameworks like this:

Or create a flowchart  and funnels:

Or by representing simple concepts with icons, as seen in the modern presentation design below. Using the same color for every icon helps create a polished look.

Using visuals in this way is perfect for when you have to convey messages quickly to audiences that you aren’t familiar with – such as at conferences. This would also make the ideal interview presentation template.

You can alternatively use icons in different colors, like in the presentation templates below. Just make sure the colors are complimentary, and style is consistent throughout the presentation (i.e. don’t use sleek, modern icons on one slide and whimsically illustrated icons on another). In this example, presentation clipart style icons have been used.

Any time you have important stats or trends you want your audience to remember, consider using a chart or data visualization to drive your point home. Confident public speaking combined with strong visualizations can really make an impact, encouraging your audience to act upon your message.

One of my personal favorite presentations (created by a professional designer) takes this “key message plus a visual” concept to the extreme, resulting in a slide deck that’s downright irresistible.

When applying this concept, don’t fall into the trap of using bad stock photos . Irrelevant or poorly chosen visuals can hurt you as much as they help you.

Below is an example of how to use stock photos effectively. They are more thematic than literal and are customized with fun, bright icons that set a playful tone.

The content and visual design of a presentation should be seamless.

It should never seem like your text and visuals are plopped onto a template. The format and design of the slides should contribute to and support the audience’s understanding of the content.

8. Use scaffolding slides to orient your audience and keep them engaged

It’s easy for audiences to get lost during long presentations, especially if you have lots of slides. And audiences zone out when they get lost.

To help reorient your audience every once in a while, you can use something I like to call scaffolding slides. Scaffolding slides appear throughout a presentation to denote the start and end of major sections.

The core scaffolding slide is the agenda slide, which should appear right after the introduction or title slide. It outlines the major sections of the presentation.

At the beginning of each section, you should show that agenda again but highlight the relevant section title, as seen below.

This gives audiences the sense that you’re making progress through the presentation and helps keep them anchored and engaged.

Alternatively, you can achieve a similar effect by numbering your sections and showing that number on every slide. Or use a progress bar at the bottom of each slide to indicate how far along you are in your presentation. Just make sure it doesn’t distract from the main content of the slides.

You can imagine using this “progress bar” idea for a research presentation, or any presentation where you have a lot of information to get through.

Leila Janah, founder of Sama Group, is great at this. Her  Innovation and Inspire  talk about Sama Group is an example of a presentation that is well organized and very easy to follow.

Her presentation follows a logical, steady stream of ideas. She seems comfortable talking in front of a crowd but doesn’t make any attempts to engage directly with them.

9. Use text size, weight and color for emphasis

Every slide should have a visual focal point. Something that immediately draws the eye at first glance.

That focal point should be whatever is most important on that slide, be it an important number, a keyword, or simply the slide title.

We can create visual focal points by varying the size, weight, and color of each element on the slide. Larger, brighter, bolder elements will command our audience’s attention, while smaller, lighter elements will tend to fade into the background.

As seen in the presentation template above, this technique can be especially useful for drawing attention to important words within a long passage of text. Consider using this technique whenever you have more than 5 words on a slide.

And if you really want your audience to pay attention, pick a high-contrast color scheme like the one below.

When picking fonts for your presentation, keep this technique in mind. Pick a font that has a noticeable difference between the “bold” font face and the “regular” font face. Source Sans Pro, Times New Roman, Montserrat, Arvo, Roboto, and Open Sans are all good options.

The last thing to remember when using size, weight, and color to create emphasis on a slide: don’t try to emphasize too many things on one slide.

If everything is highlighted, nothing is highlighted.

10. Apply design choices consistently to avoid distraction

Audiences are quick to pick out, and focus on, any inconsistencies in your presentation design. As a result, messy, inconsistent slide decks lead to distracted, disengaged audiences.

Design choices (fonts and colors, especially), must be applied consistently across a slide deck. The last thing you want is for your audience to pay attention to your design choices before your content.

To keep your design in check, it can be helpful to create a color palette and type hierarchy before you start creating your deck, and outline it in a basic style guide like this one:

I know it can sometimes be tempting to fiddle around with text sizes to fit longer bits of text on a slide, but don’t do it! If the text is too long to fit on a slide, it should be split up onto multiple slides anyway.

And remember, a consistent design isn’t necessarily a boring one. This social media marketing presentation applies a bright color scheme to a variety of 3-column and 2-column layouts, remaining consistent but still using creative presentation ideas.

11. Split a group presentation by topic

When giving a group presentation it’s always difficult to find the right balance of who should present which part.

Splitting a group presentation by topic is the most natural way to give everybody the chance to attempt without it seeming disjointed.

When presenting this slide deck to investors or potential clients, the team can easily take one topic each. One person can discuss the business model slide, and somebody else can talk about the marketing strategy.

Top tips for group presentations:

• Split your group presentation by topic
• Introduce the next speaker at the end of your slide
• Become an ‘expert’ in the slide that you are presenting
• Rehearse your presentation in advance so that everybody knows their cue to start speaking

12. Use a variety of page layouts to maintain your audience’s interest

Page after page of the same layout can become repetitive and boring. Mix up the layout of your slides to keep your audience interested.

In this example, the designer has used a variety of combinations of images, text, and icons to create an interesting and varied style.

There are hundreds of different combinations of presentation layers and presentation styles that you can use to help create an engaging presentation . This style is great for when you need to present a variety of information and statistics, like if you were presenting to financial investors, or you were giving a research presentation.

Using a variety of layouts to keep an audience engaged is something that Elon Musk is an expert in. An engaged audience is a hyped audience. Check out this Elon Musk presentation revealing a new model Tesla for a masterclass on how to vary your slides in an interesting way:

13. Use presentation templates to help you get started

It can be overwhelming to build your own presentation from scratch. Fortunately, my team at Venngage has created hundreds of professional presentation templates , which make it easy to implement these design principles and ensure your audience isn’t deterred by text-heavy slides.

Using a presentation template is a quick and easy way to create professional-looking presentation skills, without any design experience. You can edit all of the text easily, as well as change the colors, fonts, or photos. Plus you can download your work in a PowerPoint or PDF Presentation format.

After your presentation, consider summarizing your presentation in an engaging manner to r each a wider audience through a LinkedIn presentation .

14. Include examples of inspiring people

People like having role models to look up to. If you want to motivate your audience, include examples of people who demonstrate the traits or achievements, or who have found success through the topic you are presenting.

15. Dedicate slides to poignant questions

While you might be tempted to fill your slides with decorative visuals and splashes of color, consider that sometimes simplicity is more effective than complexity. The simpler your slide is, the more you can focus on one thought-provoking idea.

16. Find quotes that will inspire your audience

A really good quote can stick in a person’s mind for weeks after your presentation. Ending your presentation with a quote can be a nice way to either begin or finish your presentation.

A great example of this is Tim Ferriss’ TED talk:

Check out the full talk below.

17. Emphasize key points with text and images

When you pair concise text with an image, you’re presenting the information to your audience in two simultaneous ways. This can make the information easier to remember, and more memorable.

Use your images and text on slides to reinforce what you’re saying out loud.

Doing this achieves two things:

• When the audience hears a point and simultaneously read it on the screen, it’s easier to retain.
• Audience members can photograph/ screencap the slide and share it with their networks.

Don’t believe us? See this tip in action with a presentation our Chief Marketing Officer Nadya gave recently at Unbounce’s CTA Conference . The combination of text and images on screen leads to a memorable presentation.

18. Label your slides to prompt your memory

Often, presenters will write out an entire script for their presentation and read it off a teleprompter. The problem is, that can often make your presentation seem  too  rehearsed and wooden.

But even if you don’t write a complete script, you can still put key phrases on your slides to prompt jog your memory. The one thing you have to be wary of is looking back at your slides too much.

A good presentation gets things moving! Check out the top qualities of awesome presentations and learn all about how to make a good presentation to help you nail that captivating delivery.

Audiences don’t want to watch presentations with slide decks jam-packed with text. Too much text only hurts audience engagement and understanding. Your presentation design is as important as your presentation style. 

By summarizing our text and creating slides with a visual focus, we can give more exciting, memorable and impactful presentations.

Give it a try with one of our popular presentation templates:

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• Communication

How to Tell Effective Visual Stories in Your PowerPoint Presentations (+Video)

Long, boring presentations don't work. They're full of text-heavy slides and the conclusions tend to be hidden at the end of the presentation, taking too much time to reach. Those presentations are bound to be forgotten.

The solution is to get visual. Charts and graphs, infographics, stock photos and more can combine to combat the text-heavy slides that give PowerPoint a lousy reputation.

Great presentations take your audience on a journey. Visuals support that journey by immersing your audience. In this tutorial, I'll give you visual presentation ideas , and help you build an engaging presentation. Let's dive in.

Key Components of Great Visual Storytelling in PowerPoint

When it comes to storytelling using PowerPoint, it’s crucial to focus on business storytelling. The story you share, while it's about your business, has to resonate with your audience and encourage them to take action.  

In a lot of ways, business storytelling isn't all that different from the stories we remember from our childhood. In order for your story to resonate, you've got to have the key elements of a great narrative: 

• Traditional story structure . Your story needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the simplest structure you can follow and incorporate into your presentations for more impact.
• Human element . Your story also needs a hero. It should be someone your audience can relate to, someone who makes them stop and think why they should care about the topic of your presentation. Introduce your hero at the beginning. Then share a relatable background story that'll hook them into wanting to learn more.
• Conflict . The middle of your presentation should introduce a conflict. In a business setting, this can be all about challenges and obstacles your hero needs to overcome. What burning problem does your audience have? What’s preventing them from taking the plunge and investing into your products and services?
• Resolution . The end of your story needs a happy resolution. This is the area where you can use graphs, charts, icons, and infographic elements to show what the success looks like. Remember to always refer to the hero and what the data has to do with them.

The elements above are the basics for building a great narrative. But those elements alone aren't enough to make a great presentation. You also need visuals to go with it.

According to research (source: Boston Globe, Global Business Hub), we’re able to process images 60,000 faster than information presented as text alone. Also, we can recall up to 65% of information received if it’s accompanied with an image three days later.

Align your story with your visuals to make it come to life and engage your audience.

Top Tips on How to Tell Effective Visual Stories in Your PowerPoint Presentations (Video)

Do you want a quick headstart with some of our best tips for storytelling using PowerPoint? Check out our video below:

5 Quick Tips to Tell More Effective Visual Stories in PowerPoint

So, you already know that visuals matter. You might be wondering how to build an effective visual presentation. There are so many different ways to craft a presentation that it can be daunting to know where to start. Storytelling in PowerPoint is all about reaching an audience in a unique way that stands out.

Let's look at four tried-and-true PowerPoint visual tips for building a visual presentation. Use these tips in your next PowerPoint to make sure that your presentation makes an impact and drives the story in the way you imagined.

1. Align Your Story With Your Visuals

A story is more effective when you've got PowerPoint visuals that align with it. Create a stronger emotional connection with your audience and make a greater impact with your presentation. If you want your visuals to be effective, keep the following in mind:

• Use authentic photos . Styled feeds and flawless images are beautiful. But they won’t help you make a connection with your audience. Opt for candid shots and look for images that convey what you stand for as a brand. 
• Make them relevant . Be aware of what’s happening in the world around you. Use photos that are relevant to the time and the culture. Remember, your brand doesn’t exist in a bubble. Ignoring current events can do more harm than good.
• Use images that engage the senses . As great as your images are, they're not a replacement for the real thing. But you can get pretty close by using images that engage the senses. Use macro shots and closeups to show textures. Or opt for a long shot that offers a wide perspective so your audience can immerse themselves into the scene.

2. Convert Data Tables to Graphics

Whether you're giving a business pitch or reviewing the results of a project, it's likely that your slides include some data. After all, hard facts and stats can show that your company or project is moving in the right direction.

The mistake that I see many presenters make is loading up slides with critical data and statistics in plain text format. When you overwhelm the audience with  too many  data points, it's likely that they'll forget them. 

That's why you should consider converting basic data sets to charts and graphs instead. Line charts, bar charts, and more can all convert flat data into effective visual presentations.

If you're getting started in working with data in PowerPoint and want to help your audience visualize it, check out the tutorial below:

3. Remove Unnecessary Elements

You're the presentation when you're speaking to an audience. The slides are just a supporting point.

Rookie presenters often the slide up with every imaginable detail—this is a mistake! You'll know this has happened if the audience's eyes glaze over and they start checking their cell phones. To avoid losing your audience's attention, remove any element that doesn't make an impact.

Here are a few common mistakes I see in content-heavy slides:

• Paragraphs  with many sentences have no place in a presentation. Instead, convert these to talking points instead.
• Too many  animations bring the content on in too many stages, creating distractions that dilute the message.
• As mentioned above, eschew  data tables  and represent information as a simple visual chart instead.

A visual presentation should focus on a few key objects. Use only as much as needed to tell the story, and no more.

Many times, excess slide content should be moved into a non-visual speaker note and presented verbally. Learn more about using the speaker notes feature in the quick video lesson below:

It's fine to use PowerPoint to build files that are detail rich. For example, I often use PowerPoint to create work instructions for my team or clients. 

But this isn't the type of  presentation  that I plan to present to an audience. Learn the difference between PowerPoint as a layout tool, and PowerPoint as a tool for building visually appealing presentations.

Less is more. If you remove unnecessary slide elements, your audience will re-focus on the key points. That helps you drive your message. This is a crucial principle for visual presentation ideas.

If your PowerPoint slide layout has too many elements on it, whittle it down to the key concepts with the tutorial below:

4. Add Images, Video, and Graphics

This tip seems like a no-brainer: to be visual, you've got to include visual elements on your slides. Luckily, PowerPoint does a great job of handling images and visuals:

• Stock photos  are a great way to put your audience in the middle of a scene. Professional photography brings a sense of polish to almost any presentation.
• Short video clips  provide a nice change-of-pace. They can present your idea from a different perspective. For example, consider a YouTube explainer video that discusses an expert's view on an issue.
• Graphics and illustrations  can add another visual element to explain ideas. Like the graphic in the opener to this tutorial, for example!

Typically, I source all these from Envato Elements when building a presentation . The advantage of using Elements is that it's a flat-rate subscription model. It includes access to many creative tools , like PowerPoint presentation templates, stock photos, and graphics.

To keep learning more about how to include multimedia in your visual PowerPoint presentations, jump over to the articles below:

5. Show Off Process Steps With Infographics

Processes keep the world running. Whether it's the way that a company handles its order system, or a university admitting students step-by-step, robust processes make sure that teams can grow, and things run smoothly.

It's common to show off a process in a presentation. It's better to use visual elements than walls of text to describe a process. That's why I often use infographics to add a visual angle to explaining a process.

 An infographic is all about taking simple information and transforming it into a visual explainer. Of course, infographics can cover a lot more than process steps. But the idea is the same: take text-based information and convert it to great visuals for presentations.

For visual PowerPoint presentation examples that include the best infographics, check out the two pieces below:

Use Templates for Visual Stories in Microsoft PowerPoint

Throughout this tutorial, we've showcased example slides that include the best visual presentation ideas. All the examples I've shown you for visual presentation examples are included at a flat rate , thanks to Envato Elements.

If you want visual presentation ideas, then the Envato Elements library is for you. Best of all, you can jump from one presentation template to the next to glean your favorite ideas. Borrow concepts and slide designs from each template to bring together a cohesive presentation.

I always recommend adding imagery, video, and graphics to take your visual presentation to the next level. Elements also includes unlimited access to those as well. There's a huge stock photo library that you can use to improve your presentation.

Using templates is all about giving you visual presentation ideas. The graphic designers and expert presenters that build these templates have given you a head start in designing your next presentation. 

5 Top PowerPoint PPT Templates for Better Visual Storytelling

Now you know how to use storytelling to create more engaging presentations. Plus, you know where to find the best templates to use as a starting point for your presentation.

Here are our top five PowerPoint templates from Envato Elements. Download your favorite today and start working on your presentation slide deck: 

1. Be PowerPoint Template

The Be PowerPoint template has a beautiful, clean design. You’ll find 125 unique slides that combine text, images, and other visual elements to help you create an engaging story. The template also includes 550+ unique icons and image placeholders for easier editing. It was designed in full HD resolution and it’s easy to customize. 

2. Kalium PowerPoint Presentation

Kalium is another gorgeous PowerPoint presentation designed for business presentations. It offers text slides, image slides, and a combination of text slides with images so you can tell your story effectively. It’s easy to customize and comes with 50 unique slides designed in full HD resolution.

3. Minimalism PowerPoint Template

Try this template if you’re looking for a way to make an impact with your story. Clear of clutter and distractions, the minimalist slides help draw attention to the text and make the visuals stand out. The template includes:

• more than 50 unique slides
• image placeholders
• custom icons
• and vector shapes 

4. Permanent PowerPoint Template

The Permanent template is a great choice if you want to pair color psychology with storytelling for the most impact. This slide design features full color backgrounds. Easily customize them with your brand colors. The template comes with 32 master slides designed in standard 4:3 resolution.

5. Clean Business PowerPoint Template

This clean business PowerPoint template offers several slides that use photos as the background. The slides also incorporate a subtle text overlay. This makes them a great choice for enhancing your presentation with story. The template comes with 50 slides in full HD resolution and image placeholders for easy editing.

Learn How to Make Great Presentations (Download This Free eBook)

Take the PowerPoint tips you learned in this article further with our eBook: The Complete Guide to Making Great Presentations ( grab it now for FREE ) . 

It'll help walk you through the complete presentation process. Learn how to write your presentation, design it like a pro, and prepare it to present powerfully.

Tell an Effective Visual Story in PowerPoint Today

Effective visual presentations are a must. They cater to the expectations of modern audiences and help you tell a story with images, graphs, and more. The visual angle of a presentation explains ideas in a way that reaches your audience.

The easiest way to tell a great visual story is to start with a template that already has a wealth of visual ideas for a presentation. Jump over to Envato Elements for an all-you-can-download option for sourcing visual presentation ideas . 

Editorial Note : This post was originally published on April of 2019. It's been comprehensively updated with special help from Brenda Barron . A video has been added by Nathan Umoh .

What you need to know about human perception to be great at presentations

One of the most important factors that contribute to a team’s efficiency is communicating your ideas in the right way. Visual presentations (which can be easily created in Miro) are probably the most widespread way to share your ideas, so we decided to dig deeper and find some studies of human perception that can educate you on how to give an effective presentation.

• Think of how people digest information

How does human visual perception work and how can you make presentations that are easily digestible for the viewers? These are the questions that Stephen M. Kosslyn, the Dean of Social Science and John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, poses in his book, Clear and to the Point . Together with a number of colleagues, he came to the conclusion that there are three steps to digesting information: it needs to be acquired, processed and then connected to existing knowledge. Without any of these phases, people don’t process the presentation’s content.

To complete the first step, the scientists recommend setting a clear structure, using easily distinguishable colors and fonts and visually highlighting the most important concepts, ideas or terms. To help people process the information, you should avoid unnecessary visual elements that can distract the viewer and make everything easily understandable (imagining you’re explaining something to a child or a novice in your field often helps). The third step, connection to the viewer’s knowledge, is related to the second step; you need to avoid jargon, think about how the information is relevant to your audience’s life and explain the difficult concepts.

• Help the majority in the room

According to a 2004 Social Science Research Network study, 65% of the world’s population are visual learners (the research also shows that around 30% of people are verbal learners, “who benefit from class lectures and from discussion of class materials in study groups or in oral presentations,” and 5% of people are experiential learners who learn by doing and touching). This research explains why visuals are so important in a presentation. Also, the study states that “variations in learning styles have been linked to gender: women tend to be more visually oriented than men, who are generally more kinesthetic.”

William C. Bradford, the author of the study, points out that these results can be used to enhance the teaching style at US law schools (the paper was originally published in The Law Teacher), but you can easily implement this learning in your work life. If you bet on visuals, the majority of people in the meeting room will be likely to appreciate it.

• Be more persuasive

According to the often-cited study Persuasion and the Role of Visual Presentation Support by Douglas R. Vogel, Gary W. Dickson and John A. Lehman from the University of Arizona and University of Minnesota, presentations that provide some visual aid are 43% more persuasive than unaided presentations. This study is falsely cited by multiple companies and blogs that claim that visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text. But both the scientists behind it and commentators are sure that this is wrong.

After conducting the research, the authors created guidelines that can help people create better visual presentations. They claim that adding visuals can improve the perception of the presenter, audience attention, comprehension and agreement, and influence audience action. They also recommend using different colors instead of just black and white and using illustrations if you want to increase the density of visual information, display multiple dimensions, organize complex issues, support abstract concepts or illustrate trends.

• Choose your colors wisely

There multiple studies on color psychology that can help us with creative visual presentation ideas. They show how how different colors can affect our mood, perception and overall mental state. For example, in 2011, psychologists from the University of Rochester found out that color red increases the speed and strength of reactions. Other colors are often associated with specific emotions and reactions — a lot of us probably noticed that many companies, and especially tech startups, often choose blue because it’s often read as a symbol of trustworthiness and reliability.

However, other studies point out that one should be very careful when choosing color accents. Researchers from the University of Toronto realized that people who used Adobe Kuler , a web-based tool that helps to create color schemes or browse color combinations, usually stick to their 2-3 favorite colors, and there is a reason for that. Susan Weinschenk, a behavioral psychologist who has been working in the field of design and user experience since 1985, says : “If you have five different colors on the screen, nobody’s going to notice anything. But if you have everything in black and white, but the button to register has color – and it’s the only bright color on the screen – that’s what people will notice.” Paying attention to your audience’s background is also important because often colors have different meaning in culture from across the world. (This article features more of Weinschenk’s suggestions for using neuroscience in design work.)

Don’t overdo fonts

Similarly to colors, typefaces can have a considerable role in the way people perceive your work and in the way you can make an effective visual presentation. When Errol Morris, a documentary filmmaker, first read Saul Kripke’s book Naming and Necessity, he was excited to learn that fonts can affect our perception of truth. A couple of years ago, he got the chance to further investigate this subject when the New York Times published a two-part essay on a recent study about optimism. After reading it, the newspaper’s audience could take a quiz and vote on whether they trusted the study’s result. The article was presented in a number of different typefaces including Baskerville, Comic Sans, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica and Trebuchet. More than 40,000 readers took the quiz, and overall, Baskerville was considered the most reliable – curiously, statistically more reliable than a very similar typeface, Georgia.

The Morris study sparked a conversation among design professionals. “Considering these findings, can we state once and for all that we should use Baskerville whenever we want to persuade our audience?” wondered Alessio Laiso, a type designer who worked for IBM. In 2016, he ran a small experiment to study how different typefaces work for different products. He applied a number of fonts to four different types of websites: a bank, a news site, a fitness app, and a clothes shop. He realized that for the bank and news site, Baskerville was still the most trustworthy type. For the fitness app, Fira won; and for the shop, participants liked Helvetica. Although this study might not be completely relevant to your specific industry, considering it can help you pay attention to the choice of specific fonts and think about your audience. Regardless of your choice, you should avoid using too many typefaces and, of course, avoid using something like Comic Sans that people perceive as untrustworthy.

• Remember that sensory channels compete

According to Weinschenk, the visual sensory channel trumps all others. This means that if you are giving a presentation, talking and showing slides with text simultaneously, people stop listening as soon as they start reading. However, slides that are easy to understand and illustrate what you are talking about – like photos, diagrams, illustrations or easy-to-grasp infographics – can serve you well.

So what can you do to ensure that your audience fully understands you? One of Weinschenk’s effective presentation techniques is to write down your main points first without any visual aids and then think about how your slides can illustrate your main arguments better without interrupting the viewer. Weinschenk also recommends using just a few words on each slide.

• Avoid creating long presentations

Now when your work is ready, it’s important to demonstrate your effective presentation skills. When you think about timing, it’s important to consider another trait of human perception: the amount of time people can maintain concentration and digest new information. Susan Weinschenk and other psychologists suggest limiting your presentation to 20 minutes or breaking down a longer talk into chunks with breaks, quizzes or other changes in activity.

In 2007 Maureen Murphy, a psychologist from the University of North Texas, studied the impact of shorter learning sessions on people who participate in workforce training. She observed two groups of adults; for one of them, an hour-long session was broken down into three 20-minute sessions, and the second group had a single, continuous one-hour lecture. The study showed that people in the first group remembered the talk better, the knowledge retention was higher, and the overall reaction was more positive.

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7 Types of Visual Presentations

When it comes to delivering a presentation, visuals can be extremely helpful in getting your point across. There are many types of visual presentations that can be used to communicate your message.

This blog post will discuss seven different types of visual presentations and when they might be appropriate to use. We will also provide examples of each kind of presentation. Let’s get started!

What are Visual Presentations?

3. whiteboards, 5. infographics, 7. paper handouts, which one is right for you.

Visual presentations are a visual aid that can be used in both business and academia to help explain concepts or topics that might otherwise be difficult for an audience member to understand without seeing them firsthand.

In addition, visuals allow the presenter to provide more information than just words alone would do on their own because they provide context and give the audience something concrete to look at while listening.

There are many types of visual presentations, but we will focus on seven of the most common ones here. Each type has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to understand when each would be appropriate to use.

Slides are the most common type of visual aid. You can use slides to demonstrate your point and make it easier for the audience to follow along with what you’re saying. They are also pretty easy to prepare.

For example, a slide that shows how much money was spent on advertising last year might be useful in an annual meeting where everyone’s attention span is short or they don’t want to take the time to read a long report.

Graphs and charts are other types of visual presentation that can be used to show trends or compare data.

For example, you might use a graph to illustrate how your company’s revenue has increased or decreased over the past five years. Or, you could use a chart to compare the number of sales your company has made this year compared to last year.

Whiteboards are a great way to explain something in detail, as they allow you to draw pictures and write on them. For example, if your company is thinking about designing a new website but needs some ideas first, then using whiteboards would help everyone get their thoughts out.

One issue about using whiteboards is that they cannot be easily saved and shared with others. Moreover, as you need to write manually, it can be time-consuming and prone to errors.

Videos are another type of visual aid that can be used to demonstrate a concept or show how something works. It’s beneficial when you want to show live instances of your products or services through movements.

For example, if you’re selling cars, then showing them driving around would help people get an idea of what they look like in action (and not just sitting still on a lot).

The downside to using videos is that creating one from scratch can be time-consuming and expensive, so this isn’t always feasible. In addition, videos can be challenging to follow if they are not properly edited.

Infographics are visual presentations that use images and text to convey information. They can be used in many ways, from illustrating trends or comparing data points graphically; to explaining complex concepts in an easy-to-understand manner.

Infographics are especially handy when trying to illustrate a point based on a massive number of data. For example, if you wanted to show how much data your company has collected over the past year, you could use an infographic.

Posters are used primarily in academic settings because they allow students to display their research findings at conferences or other events where the audiences are present.

For example, if someone were presenting on the use of social media in politics, they might create a poster with an image of the political landscape and then use text to explain how social media is being used.

Posters can be created using software or hand-drawing, but they should always be designed with legibility.

Paper handouts are visual aids that can be used to supplement slides or other visuals.

They can be especially useful if you want to provide the audience with additional information that isn’t easily conveyed in a slide or chart.

For example, you might use paper handouts to give the audience more details about the data shown in a graph or provide them with a list of your company’s products and services.

Now that you know about the different types of visuals, how do you decide which one is right for your presentation?

Well, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you want to make your presentation more interesting and engaging, then using slides or videos might be a good option.

However, if you need to show complex data or explain a concept in detail, charts, whiteboards, or infographics might be better.

In the end, it’s crucial to pick the right type of visual that will help you communicate your message most effectively.

While there are many different types of visual presentations, the seven we’ve outlined in this blog post should give you a good place to start when creating your own visual presentation.

Keep in mind the tone and purpose of your presentation as you select which type will work best for you. And always be sure to test out your visuals on a small audience before presenting them to a larger group. Happy presenting!

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How to create visual presentations and eLearning

• Written by: Richard Goring
• Categories: PowerPoint design , Visual communication
• Comments: 4

Most presentations are a cascade of text-heavy Death-by-PowerPoint slides, while online learners suffer the torture of wading through page after page of brochures converted to click-through-eLearning. However you look at it, a wall of text doesn’t work to engage people or compel them to action, so it really can’t be effective. That’s why most people now recognize that using visuals is the way to go. But how do you create visual presentations and eLearning that works? We think there are six steps you need to follow.

Step 1. Understand the audience

To know how to make a presentation effective, you need to understand the person on the receiving end and also decide what you’re trying to achieve. Are you trying to inform the audience of something – i.e. give them information they don’t have and help them understand it. Or persuade them to do something or change their behaviour – i.e. convince the audience the reasons to act in a certain way are stronger than the reasons not to. (Selling is typically a subset of this).

And it’s worth noting that a lot of the time, when you’re trying to inform people of something as your primary objective, you’ll also need to do at least a little persuasion, to get them to believe that your information is valid, valuable, and worth acting upon. Likewise, if you’re persuading people, you need to inform your audience so that they understand enough to be able to buy into your ideas.

When informing, you should have a clear idea of what exactly you are trying to inform about, and note it down in a couple of words so that you can easily refer back to it throughout the process.

If you’re persuading people, the same thing applies, but more specifically, we find it most helpful to think about this in terms of how the audience will benefit. What’s in it for them?

The options are many and various, but something short and punchy helps you to focus your story on what’s important to your audience and will make the story worth listening to.

Step 2: Identify key message or story

Now you need to decide what information to present to your audience in order to achieve your goal. And assess how much your audience already know about the topic, so you don’t repeat unnecessarily.

Typically, anything you’re attempting to visualise into a visual presentation has a lot of detailed content with relatively little structure. So to help, we recommend you simplify down to the core message in a nicely structured way that’s easy to understand, which then helps you to pick out what detail is most important and how to bring everything together.

Then take the necessary pieces of information and organise them into a story that flows, so it’s easy to follow. Often the framework of Problem -> Solution -> Impact is a good one to follow.

• Problem sets up the context and shows why this is something people need to know and pay attention to. It helps to frame the rest of the story.
• Solution is the details of what happens, or how something works.
• Impact is the end result – that will often lead to the outcome that your audience will achieve.

Step 3: Identify key objects

The next job, within these short sentences, is to identify the objects that are crucial to telling the story.

Person, role, company – Typically these are physical things, like objects or people. You can easily spot some of these – any mention of people, groups of people, job roles, or companies, could be represented by a photo of someone, or a silhouette, or a logo.

Object, product – You may have things that aren’t people, but are still easily recognizable entities, like objects – a computer, a phone, a bicycle, a hippopotamus – or a product or service, which might be a little bit more abstract, like ‘consulting’ or ‘water treatment’ – but still a concept that you can easily put a label on. Pretty straightforward visually, you could use an icon if you just want to get across the idea of a deliverable, or a photo of the product, or a label of the product or service, or you might even have a logo for it, especially if it’s something fairly abstract.

Quote – If you want to show a direct quote from someone, try to keep it short and to the point. It should really speak for itself, which means you’re going to have to keep quiet and let the audience read it.

Location – Then you might have locations – a point on a map, like a city, or maybe a type of building, like a hospital or office tower, or it could be an office floor plan. It could be something more abstract like an objective or a target you’re aiming towards.

Data, measurable – And then you might be able to pick out some data, like figures, percentages, dates, costs, that sort of thing, or some kind of measurable quantity, which are similar but they’re more vague – concepts that you can quantify, but that don’t really have any ‘number’ attached to them – things like a level of risk, or confidence, or effort.

That’s a starter gallery of different types of key objects. What these things all have in common is that they can all be represented with some sort of visual device that can be easily recognized, so you don’t have to do too much explanation and the audience doesn’t spend too long trying to figure out what it is. You might be using pictures, or icons, or labels to represent these things to create your visual presentation, or they might make up part of a diagram, which is what we’re going to look at in the next part of the process.

Step 4: Establish relationships

Once you know what’s involved in the story, start to look at the relationships between each of the key objects, and how they interact, which will give you the layout of the slide, the framework, or the diagram. There are plenty of options, but there are a few reliable regulars that you can draw on.

First you’ve got your different types of graph , which will probably be the first choice if you’re showing data. You could make an XY graph , two axes, and the data might be bars or lines, or an XYZ graph that shows a three dimensional data set, which might shrink or stretch across the three axes.  A pie chart , to show proportions – this might be useful if you have percentages, as long as they all belong to the same category. Or you could have a Matrix arrangement, showing where elements are placed in different regions.

Then you’ve got a few ways of laying out elements that are distinct from one another. If you’ve got a sequence of dates in your information, a timeline might be a good choice, or if you haven’t you could just show a process diagram . You might just want to lay out the elements in a two dimensional space , or play around with the proportions to make a three dimensional scene , to add focus in on some elements and put others in the background. A hierarchy arrangement can show how elements are ranked in layers, useful for organization diagrams , or you could use a mind-map style layout to show connections between one big idea and a few other ideas that are linked up to it, or to each other.

A few other options for showing how things relate to one another might be a cluster or Venn diagram , to show connections or intersections between ideas, a jigsaw if you’ve got a number of things that fit together to form a larger picture, or just to get the idea across that a couple of things are well-suited to one another, and if you’re talking about a causal relationship, where one thing directly affects another, a balance diagram might work well, or a sequence that shows a push-pull relationship between two things.

This is a fairly small selection of the types of layouts you could come up with to create a visual presentation or eLearning, and a lot of slides might use two or more of these at once in order to get a complex idea across. To work out which ones to go for, you’ll have to look at your information and think about how you’d explain it, the order you’d point to your key objects, and how those key objects are related to one another. Crucially, you also have to think about the overarching message that the slide is supposed to be getting across, which you established in steps 1 and 2.

Step 5: Create visuals

Now is the time to bring everything together. The individual key objects that you’ve got, with the layouts that show the relationships between them. Think about the order you want the story to be told, which will inform the layout of your visual slides, but also the sequence in which you’ll want to use the individual elements. And animations are a real help here, as they can pace the flow of information and ensure that you keep the audience focused on the right thing at the right time. They can also be a key part of actually telling the story, to make things happen, change elements, and emphasize the relationships between your key objects.

So if you’re introducing new ideas you can add things onto the slide. If you’re simplifying a diagram or removing things you don’t need, you can remove . You can make things grow , or shrink to show changing amounts, or changing importance, and you can make things move around to new locations. If you want to combine elements together you can merge them into one, or connect them together. You can highlight something that’s especially important, for your key message, and show something being passed along from one person to another, or data being transferred. You can also change something into something else, by replacing it.

Again, there are countless examples of these, and you’ll probably want to use a few of them for each slide, but this should give you a few good ideas of ways to move your key objects around, change the relationships, and end up with the right kind of visual punchline. These things can all be done with native PowerPoint animation (and check our animation articles  and masterclass schedule for a lesson on animation if you’re not already a master at it!).

Step 6: Design

What you should have now is an idea or sketch of everything that’s going to happen on your slide to tell the story. You ‘just’ need to bring it to life and share your ideas. That’s not always an easy task, but if you check out this post by my colleague Bethany on some practical tips to achieve good presentation design , this post on some of our favorite websites for free design resources , and this one on presentation design in general, you’ll have a good head start. And of course the various PowerPoint tutorials and master classes are a wealth of information to help you out.

And if you’d like to see some examples of presentations that we’ve developed using these ideas, and then created in PowerPoint, you can draw inspiration from our presentation portfolio , showing you that pretty much anything is possible in PowerPoint.

Richard Goring

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By applying some key principles of presentation design, you can make your PowerPoint design really standout and deliver both a more ‘popping’, but also more effective presentation.

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Thank you very much, you are helping me to understand how to produce presentations so my students will want to see and learn from.

Great Estrella, lovely to hear that it’s working so well.

Its really helpful, thanks for providing such informative data in a unique way.

Just came across this while searching for Colour-Vision-Deficient-friendly PowerPoint tips. Aside from giving excellent advice, it’s wild that you’ve got graphics of what looks like Coronavirus in an article from 2017 – did you know something we didn’t 🙂 ?

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What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

• Carmine Gallo

Five tips to set yourself apart.

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

• Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10 books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman  (St. Martin’s Press).

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Presentation Skills: The Essential Abilities You Need to Deliver Engaging and Impactful Presentations

Delivering a powerful presentation isn’t just about having great content. It’s about how effectively you communicate your ideas, engage your audience, and leave a lasting impact.

Mastering presentation skills is key to succeeding in business meetings, sales pitches, conferences, or any other scenario where you need to deliver information clearly and confidently. Here’s a breakdown of the essential presentation skills that will help you elevate your performance.

1. Effective Communication: The Core of Every Successful Presentation

Clear and concise communication is the foundation of any presentation. Your ability to express ideas in a way that’s easily understood and remembered is what differentiates a good presenter from a great one.

Simplifying complex ideas and presenting them in a structured, logical flow.

How to Develop it:

Practice speaking clearly and at a moderate pace. Use straightforward language and avoid jargon unless your audience is familiar with it.

2. Storytelling: Engage and Captivate Your Audience

Humans are wired to respond to stories. Incorporating storytelling into your presentations helps you connect with your audience on an emotional level, making your message more relatable and memorable.

Crafting a compelling narrative that aligns with your presentation’s goals.

When structuring your presentation, think about how you can weave real-life examples, anecdotes, or success stories into your content to make it more engaging.

3. Audience Engagement: Keeping Their Attention from Start to Finish

Even the best content won’t matter if your audience loses interest. Strong presentation skills include the ability to keep your audience engaged throughout your talk.

Using techniques like asking questions, incorporating interactive elements, and responding to audience feedback.

During your presentation, periodically check in with your audience. Use polls, ask questions, or invite them to share their thoughts, keeping the session dynamic and interactive.

4. Body Language: Conveying Confidence and Authority

Non-verbal communication plays a crucial role in how your message is received. Your posture, gestures, and facial expressions can either enhance or detract from your message.

Using open body language, maintaining eye contact, and leveraging gestures to emphasize key points.

Practice presenting in front of a mirror or record yourself. Pay attention to your posture, hand movements, and facial expressions. Aim for a confident stance with controlled, purposeful gestures.

5. Adaptability: Adjusting on the Fly

Even the most carefully planned presentations can run into unexpected issues. Being adaptable allows you to handle disruptions, audience questions, or technical glitches with composure.

Thinking on your feet and modifying your approach based on audience reactions or unforeseen circumstances.

Prepare backup plans for potential issues and practice scenarios where things go off-script. Stay flexible and be ready to shift your focus if necessary.

6. Visual Design: Enhancing Your Message with Compelling Visuals

Visual aids, when used correctly, can significantly enhance your presentation. Good presentation skills include designing slides and other visuals that are clear, appealing, and support your message.

Creating slides that highlight key points without overwhelming your audience.

Use tools like Canva or PowerPoint to design clean, minimalist slides. Stick to key visuals and avoid cluttering your presentation with too much text or overly complex graphics.

7. Time Management: Staying On Track and Respecting Your Audience’s Time

Effective time management ensures that you cover all your content without running over or rushing through important points.

Pacing your presentation to fit within the allotted time while delivering all key information.

Rehearse with a timer to refine your pacing. Plan buffer time for questions or discussions, and be prepared to adjust your delivery based on real-time conditions.

8. Handling Questions and Feedback: Navigating Interactions with Ease

Q&A sessions or spontaneous audience questions are common in most presentations. Handling these interactions gracefully is a critical skill.

Listening carefully, responding clearly, and managing difficult or unexpected questions professionally.

Prepare for likely questions in advance. Practice maintaining your composure when addressing challenging or unexpected queries, and always keep your responses respectful and concise.

Mastering these presentation skills takes practice, but they are essential for anyone looking to deliver impactful presentations consistently. Whether you’re presenting to a small group of colleagues or addressing a large audience, honing these skills will help you communicate your ideas effectively, engage your listeners, and leave a lasting positive impression.

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9 Presentation Aids to Use to Make Your Presentation Stand Out

Written by: Caleb Bruski

Looking for a way to make your presentation stand out from the crowd?

When it comes to presentations, your ultimate goal is to communicate clearly and effectively with your audience.

By adding visual aids to your presentations, your audience will more easily understand and connect with your ideas.

Throughout this article, we’re going to cover what presentation aids are, why you should consider using them plus nine different types of presentation aids to test.

Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit presentation templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:

Table of Contents

What are presentation aids, why use presentation aids, 9 types of presentation aids.

Presentation aids, or sensory aids, are any additional resources used to enhance your speech. 

On a very basic level, a presentation is a bunch of words used to convey ideas to an audience. Presentation aids are additional devices, techniques, resources or materials used to enhance the presentation. 

For example, this four-step process model can be a great presentation aid to showcase a step-by-step guide to your audience.

Rather than just talking about the process, a diagram like this actually details it out, making it easier for your audience to understand.

Visual aids help clarify and contextualize your points for your audience.

Whether you deliver your presentation in person or over the web, the goal is to clearly communicate with your audience. Presentation aids help achieve this goal.

Visual aids also help a presenter stay on a predefined train of thought while presenting. 

The entire experience of presenting can be rather nerve-wracking. Studies show that one of the greatest phobias throughout the world  is public speaking. 

When our words fail us, a clear presentation aid can help fill in the gaps and help us be understood. 

Take this slide example. It can be a great way to walk an audience through features. Each bullet can be clicked to take viewers to a video that provides even more information.

Presentation aids help the presenter stay within an allotted set of time. 

For those of us who have a hard time sticking to the main points, visual presentation aids help us progress forward in our thought process and give a good presentation .

Here, we have a second illustration of a presentation aid — this time in the form of a timeline. Mapping out your content like this helps make it even more digestible and can help your audience learn and remember it.

A sense of authority and trust can also be established when using visual aids.

By delivering hard facts and data in a simple way, trust is established with the audience. The authority and expertise of the presenter is also established. 

Visual aids should help your audience understand the data in your presentation.

When used correctly, presentation aids increase the chance of receiving a positive response when making a call to action. 

In summary, presentation aids are useful for the presenter, the audience and all other parties involved. Best of all, using them is easy and effective.

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Ready to wow your audience with your next presentation? We’re here to help. In this list, you’ll find nine different types of presentation aids that you might consider using to help demonstrate your main points.

1. Charts and Graphs

Charts and graphs are a form of presentation aid used to visually compare statistics and figures. These are some of the most used forms of visual aids in the business world.

Listening to long strings of numbers can be a challenging task. Comparing long strings of numbers without reference can be near impossible. Overwhelmed with this type of data, most audience members will mentally check out.

Comparing simple shapes or lines is an easier task for most people. 

Consider adding a chart like the one below as a presentation aid for your audience.

A simple chart or graph will drastically help your audience comprehend numbers in a way that is easier to understand.

It’s important to select a chart or graph that helps exemplify your point. Not all charts can communicate with clarity the same information. Learn more in our guide on how to create a chart .

2. Handouts

Handouts are physical objects given to the audience that contain information related to the presentation. 

The greatest advantage of using a handout is the physical interaction your audience has with your presentation.

Your audience has the freedom to interact with these handouts during the presentation — they can touch, smell, read, etc., giving them an edge in actually retaining the information.

The more senses your audience uses during a presentation, the better. 

A handout also lets your audience revisit parts of your presentation that were not clear. This helps everyone stay on the same page.

A bonus to using handouts is that these objects don’t just magically disappear. Long after the presentation is over, the handout will still be around. Your audience will remember your presentation every time they see your handout.

3. Demonstration

Demonstrations are actions performed to exhibit or illustrate a point. The goal of a demonstration is to take an abstract point and anchor it in reality, as well as to ensure your audience comprehends a speaking point.

Demonstrations aren’t limited to just physical demonstrations. Demonstrations may also include allegorical stories or proofs used to prove a point. Sharing personal stories or case studies could be categorized as a demonstration. 

Here’s an example of a presentation slide with a demo video embedded. If you don’t have the resources to perform a live demonstration, using a tactic like this can be a great alternative.

To understand the full potential of demonstrations, think back to your old science teacher. A science teacher's job was to teach to a room filled with easily distracted children. 

Science is one of the most complex subjects to teach and the audience is a tough crowd. How did they do it?

With demonstrations! Or more specifically, with science experiments.

Physical demonstrations are some of the most memorable moments of an entire school year. 

The reason demonstrations are more memorable than a simple speech is because demonstrations invite more of your audience’s senses to take part in the demonstration. 

Not only do you hear the lesson, but you can see, touch, smell and sometimes even taste it as well. 

The audience is also involved when the demonstration is a personal story. When the audience hears the story, they imagine it. By recreating the scenario using their own imagination, the memory lasts longer.

Demonstrations are also powerful communication tools. They have the potential to make your presentation go from mediocre to  memorable. 

While powerful, demonstrations can work for or against you. Adding too many, too large or unrelated demonstrations can distract your audience from the actual topic. Ensure that your demonstrations are connected to and accentuate your main points.

4. Diagrams

A diagram is a visual graphic or sketch focused on presenting the inner workings or relations of a subject. A diagram is different from a basic sketch. While a sketch aims to accurately depict an object's shape, a diagram aims to explain and define its functions and relations. 

Diagrams give you the freedom to list, describe, explain and map out your subject matter in a way that is not limited to its physical form. 

While mixing a diagram and physical sketch together can be cool, it’s not necessary. Diagrams ought to be chosen based on their effectiveness in explaining the subject's construction and relation to other objects.

Diagrams help explain complex relations between objects without the need for physical properties. Diagrams are great to use when sketches, photographs and videos can not capture all the attributes of an object. 

Before settling on which diagram to use, it’s best to experiment with different types of diagrams. Your decision should rely upon which diagram will aid your audience the most.

Diagrams are also great for describing and defining things that do not have form. Instead of giving a long and complex definition that no one will remember, consider using a diagram. 

Diagrams can show how this new thing relates to something familiar to your audience. This will help your audience understand and remember complex portions of your presentation.

5. Video or Audio

Audio and video clips are presentation aids used to expand the dynamic range of input in your speech.

Your audience will find it easier to engage with your presentation when you diversify your method of delivery. 

An easy way to increase audiences’ sensory input is by transitioning from a simple speech into a video or audio clip.

Videos allow you to convey information in a fast and rehearsed manner. Professional camera work captures prearranged images, audio and speech. This means video is capable of conveying emotion and information more effectively than speech. 

For this reason, a short video clip may do a better job at summarizing the main points of a presentation than a speech alone. 

While the benefits of  video are high, there are also some potential problems. The most common issue with video usage in presentations being technical compatibility issues.

A smooth transition between speech and video is necessary for your presentation. 

Rough or elongated transitions can be a major distraction for your audience. If this happens, your audience may find it difficult to reinvest in your presentation.

To ensure smooth transitions, your presentation software must be capable of integrating videos clips directly into your presentation. 

It is important to have dependable presentation software .  By doing so, you’ll be able to transition between video clips and other presentation aids.

The transitioning issue is most noticeable at the end of a presentation. Especially when a speaker attempts to transition from a slide-show into a video clip. 

Consequently, many presentations do not have a strong and official close. Lacking a strong close leaves your audience without a clear understanding of what to do next. Check out this article to ensure you know how to end your presentation on a strong and impressionable note.

Quotations are a type of presentation aid that appeal to outside authority and expertise. Quoting others helps establish a positive rapport with your audience.

Many people fear quoting others makes them appear unoriginal.

The opposite is actually true. Quoting outside sources tends to drastically improve the overall appeal of your presentation.

Quoting others shows that you have listened to others on this subject. This makes the presenter appear as a well thought out and considerate listener. 

It’s recommended that you quote those who both agree and disagree with your conclusion. By doing so, you establish a sense of trust and expertise with your audience.

Quoting those who disagree with your conclusion shows that you have taken the time and effort to engage their thought process. 

Quoting those who agree with you shows your conclusion to be a recurring conclusion.

However, always give credit where credit is due. Not only is plagiarism immoral and possibly illegal, it also damages your personal reputation. This may destroy any trust you established with your audience. Check out this guide about plagiarism to learn more.

Maps are visual representations, generally two-dimensional diagrams, that show the relative position and orientation of something. 

Maps are powerful presentation aids capable of showing valuable information beyond basic geography. 

Because maps are a form of diagram, they can deliver valuable relational information. This is especially true when used in combination with animations or graphical overlays.

Proper presentation software will allow you to update your dataset for your map. The changes should immediately update the output of your map without having to manually manipulate the image.

Visme automatically generates these scalable maps and makes the process of customizing your map easy. With just a few clicks, you can generate and customize maps with your own datasets.

8. Photographs

Photographs are still images captured on a film or digital medium and are a powerful visual aid. When used correctly, photographs can add color and shape to the speech in your presentation.

The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is a true statement. A picture is priceless when it’s able to capture and accentuate a point relevant to your presentation.

Photographs are unique presentations aids that give you the power to make a window for your audience to look through. This allows your audience to see and experience particular aspects of your presentation.

While the color red can be described with many words, there’s an experiential gap. Once seen, you can experience the color red.

When a presentation is given, words can help describe an idea, but not experience the idea. Presentation images give you the possibility to close that visual experiential gap.

Even in a world that sells pocket-sized HD 4k 60fps video cameras, the photograph is still the visual aid of choice for most people.

While videos are powerful in their own right, photos give you the power to capture and highlight one particular moment. 

Photos can be less distracting than videos. Videos may have background noises or other distractions. Photographs let you capture and present one image without any distractions.

When presenting, it’s important for your main speaking points to be aided, not hindered, by the presentation aid. 

While planning out your presentation, consider using photographs more frequently than video. This will help your audience experience your presentations without distractions.

Images are also much cheaper and easier to professionally edit than their video counterparts. Capturing and editing a high-quality video may take hours, days or even months. A professional-looking photo can be captured with ease and edited in a matter of minutes. 

Or, you can take advantage of a free stock photo library like you get with Visme. This way, you can ensure your presentation photos are copyright protected and free to use.

9. Volunteers

Volunteers are people selected from the general population to participate in a demonstration. 

Using volunteers in demonstrations is one of the most effective presentation aids available. Using this tactic efficiently comes with all the advantages of a classic demonstration, and so much more.

Human interaction is hardwired into us. We tend to remember faces, body shapes, expressions and emotions. A demonstration with volunteers lets you instantly change the dynamic of the speech.

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Demonstrations with volunteers encourage audience interaction with your subject matter. 

When the audience sees a volunteer interact with your presentation, the barrier to entry is lowered — plus, it gives your audience the chance to become a volunteer that’s doing the interaction themselves.

This makes your subject more approachable and your call to action more likely to succeed.

Be sure your interactions with the volunteer are somewhere between professional and semi-professional. Most people are already afraid to be on stage. An unprofessional or condescending demeanor will only make things even more uncomfortable.

Ensure that your volunteer’s role has a strong connection to your main point. Like all good demonstrations, make sure it is contributing to your presentation. If a particular portion of the presentation is not related to the main point, your audience's mind may begin to wander. 

At the end of the demonstration, be sure to thank and dismiss your volunteers when they are done contributing. There is nothing more distracting for the audience than having an extra person nervously lurking around on stage. 

If done correctly, your audience will remember the demonstration done with volunteers and recall the driving points of your presentation. The volunteer will likely also remember the event for a longer period of time and may even share parts of your presentation with others.

Try Presentation Aids in Your Next Presentation

Creating and utilizing presentation aids can help your presentation go from acceptable to phenomenal. With proper physical and mental preparation, your presentation is sure to impress.

The best way to mentally prepare yourself for your presentation is to be physically prepared. 

Visme makes presentation preparation easy and takes all the guesswork out of the design process. Visme has thousands of high-quality templates for you to customize and choose from. We are certain that with the right tools, you can make an awe-inspiring presentation.

Create a free account and see why Visme is one of the best and easiest ways to create a stunning and engaging presentation.

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About the Author

Caleb is a freelance writer, frontend web developer and photographer who is passionate about all things tech.

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Visual presentation judge training.

Event date/time:  Thursday, October 17, 2024 - 6:30pm Tuesday, November 12, 2024 - 6:30pm Monday, September 16, 2024 - 6:30pm Event Type:  Online Contact's name:  Meg McDermott Contact's email:  [email protected] This event will be recorded:  No

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