Preparing slides are very much easy nowadays with built-in templates and all but producing an effective slideshow is not child’s play. Slides easily grab audience attention and hence are more prone to spell disasters as well. Here are five commonly seen mistakes in PowerPoint presentations:
Slide Animations and Audio Effects:
Great care should be taken while using slide transitions and sound effects. If not, these can distract and even disturb the audience. They are just gimmicks that barely improve any presentation, it may even ruin your entire presentation by making it sluggish. Keep away those laser-guided texts! They aren’t cool. Also remove those unnecessary effects like fade-ins, fade-outs, wipes, blinds, dissolves, checkerboards, cuts, covers, splits, etc. They feel creepy on many occasions. Keep your content cool and forget about these effects, that is more than enough to make your presentation admirable.
Cliche Representations and Uneven Standards:
The audience wants new ideas in every presentation design agency and not the cliché things that they are bored of seeing every day. Cliché visuals symbolize a lack of creativity and minimal efforts taken by the presenter. Use unique and standard clip arts throughout your presentation. Also, try to maintain the simplicity, only use such clip arts or any such graphics if they enhance your content, else not even think of touching those options!
Built-In Templates:
Built-in Templates are another great example of visual cliché. They limit your imagination and force you to fit into someone else’s custom-built mold, they don’t reflect you, you try to fit into their ideas and suppress yours. You might have also seen many templates with dark colors which feels disturbing to the majority of the audience. Create your own distinctive look in your slides and try to use your company/institution logo on the top side of your slides or as watermarks.
Crowded Slides:
Text-Heavy slides are not at all encouraged, not one likes these crowded slides. So, try to stay away from such cases whenever possible. Slides are a good tool for picturing an idea graphically or providing an overview of the idea but are rather a poor medium for detailed reading. People can read a novel with lots of interest, but not a slide. An overcrowded single slide itself seems annoying. So, imagine a group of text-heavy slides! It is worth ditching off for sure. Avoid paragraphs, quotations, or even complete sentences. Small pointers for each sentence and headings can make the slide much more interesting. Use a maximum of five lines of text and use words/phrases to make your points clear. Remember, slides are not your notes. Make it as simple and on point!
Being One among the Audience:
While preparing the slides visualize yourself as one of the audiences. Ensure that the idea gets clear enough to understand, stand in their shoes, think about the questions that they may get. Adding graphs and tables as images can create difficulty to understand, hence take time and prepare these graphs and tables your own in the simplest manner. Too detailed visuals can also be difficult for your audience to digest. The same is true for font size as well, a 12-point font can be adequate for you, from your standing position, but always remember, the audience is a few feet away from you. So, in a slideshow, keep a minimum of 40-point font. Remember your audience and change your perspective from “Me” to “Us”.
