10 tricks for creating beautiful business presentations from 2017

Have you seen awful PowerPoint presentations with colorful slides and tasteless pictures? Then you should definitely read this article!

IMPORTANT : here I write only about business presentations for reading - not for public speaking. This is important to understand, as the techniques are different in these two formats. By the format of “business presentations for reading” I mean documents such as commercial offers, sponsorship packages, investment presentations of projects, product presentations, which in most cases are sent exclusively by e-mail.

In this article, I will talk about the most common design mistakes and share my 10 tricks for creating truly cool presentations. Almost all the examples that I give below are excerpts from real cases that we implemented.
It is important to note here that 10 tricks are relevant for 2017 (and the coming months of 2018).

Let's start with the most important thing when creating a presentation:

1 Do not use PowerPoint templates in your presentation


I want to disappoint you, but there are no design templates in PowerPoint. Often, these templates are no longer in fashion and will immediately be perceived by your audience as a “poor-quality product”.

I offer 2 solutions:

1. Do not use templates at all. Combine your slides with a single color scheme and make the format and layout of the headers the same on all slides except the first and last. 2. Create your own templates if you plan to use and edit this presentation in the future. To do this, we need to go to the tab View -> Sample slides. This is a secret room, which not everyone knows about, as practice shows. In this section we can create our own template!

An example of creating a presentation without a template



Create a presentation in PowerPoint



Usually I delete all the standard template slides in the left tab and create my own from scratch. All you need here is to add fillers and shape them.

Next, exit this mode (there is a red cross on the top right) and try to apply the template slides - Right Mouse Button -> slide layouts.

Now you have your own template.

2 Use 3-5 basic colors when creating presentations


Please do not use more than 5 different colors when creating your presentation. Moreover, use only 3 basic colors, since the other 2 are usually shades of the primary colors.

How to choose a color palette.

  • One of the three shades should be highlighted for the background. Decide immediately - it will be a presentation with a light or dark background. If you are an advanced designer, you can try alternating, but in this article I skip these experiments.
  • Next, select a color for the text. It should be as contrasting as possible with respect to the background color. An ideal and common option: white background - black text. But this option is inferior in terms of creativity.

So let's look at a few examples. Maybe I can give you ideas:

Gray background, blue main text and dark gray accent.  White background, black text, blue accent. 3 colors. It alternates with a dark background and white text. Dark background, white text, light green accent. It also uses shades of light green and alternates with a dark and light background. If you still couldn’t decide on a color palette or you don’t have a company / project brand book, then I suggest you the following color.adobe.com resource . Here you can choose a color palette based on the image, and also see in the Explore tab decisions of other users and even find out the number of views and likes.

Presentation Palette Selection Example



Example palette selection for presentation



Example color palette when creating a presentation





Selection of a palette when creating a presentation

3 Refuse 3D icons from search engines - turn to linear and flat icons


Unfortunately, I still often see slides that use voluminous low-quality icons. Now this is an outdated topic and looks very ugly. And some do not use icons at all, which is also bad, because the presentation is important visualization, and not just solid text.

The purpose of the icons : to replace excess text and accelerate the memorization and assimilation of information.

My advice to you : when creating a presentation, use the icons from this resource - flaticon.com

Icons from flaticon will make your presentation more modern and concise.

There is a section " Packs " where you can find icons of a single style on a specific topic from one designer. I advise you in this way to comprehensively select icons so that everyone is in the same style.

Subconsciously, we feel every detail in the presentation up to the line thickness of the icons, and if this thickness is different between the icons, then the presentation immediately ceases to harmonize, and subconsciously we no longer perceive it as a quality one. Also, when working with icons, I want to note such a tendency in people as “blindness syndrome” . This is when everything is done in large sizes in the presentation - “so that everyone sees”. If you make everything huge huge, then this will significantly lower the quality of your presentations, but the icons look good only with small sizes. Let's look at an example:

resource for downloading icons




Example of icons for creating presentations

4 Each slide is a picture, and she needs a frame. Or not needed?


When creating a presentation, follow the border of the slide. Moreover, large frames are now in fashion.
Important: the distance from the borders to the contents of the slide should be the same on all sides.

Example: What could happen? It may happen that the content that you planned to place does not fit on one slide, and that's good! No need to try to squeeze everything on one page. Better split into two slides with one title. One slide is one message. Why do everything large? The slide needs air.Using frames when creating presentations







5 Give up bad habits. Tie with serif fonts


If you are not an avid designer and do not experiment with fonts, then I advise you not to use serif fonts.

I offer you the following list of fonts:

System fonts:
Arial
Arial narrow
Arial Black (for headers only)
Calibri

Third-party fonts:
Bebas (for headers only)
Raleway
Roboto
Helvetica
Circe
Open Sans
Gotham Pro

How to combine fonts when creating a presentation?

If you have never before touched on the subject of font combination, then I advise you to use only one group of fonts and only change its type when creating a presentation. For example, make the title Arial Black, and for plain text Arial, or another version of third-party fonts, the title is Raleway Bold, and the main text is Raleway Regular.

If you still decide to experiment , then you can try the following combinations:
Bebas Bold -
Raleway Regular heading - plain text For the

rest of the combinations, I prefer to choose one font and change only its type. This is more correct.

And here are a couple of links that I personally use to download fonts:

Google Fonts
Font Squirrel

6 When creating a presentation, use only high-quality images


This is generally a sore subject. Especially in Russia. If anyone read Artemy Lebedev’s book “Covodstvo” , then he clearly notes how, due to the decline in design culture after the collapse of the USSR, our population simultaneously distorted the taste for quality design.
Perhaps you are reading now and never appreciate the works that I glorify here. And this is not because you are a bad person, but because our environment did not allow you to develop a good designer taste.

I can only advise what works great in our studio for several years and is valued internationally.

  • Do not use images from search engines as background images unless necessary
  • Download images only from specialized sites where photographers publish their work.
  • Use high-resolution images as the background - for me it is at least 1000 pixels in height and width
  • Do not use stock images with tightened smiles of people and a white background. It looks unnatural.
  • You can use the following resources as sources: flickr , unsplash , everypixel


7 Do not use outlines. Either thick or nothing


Now a little deeper into the design.

You may notice that when drawing a shape in PowerPoint, it can turn out blue and with a blue outline.

Important: remove these contours immediately. They only emphasize that you are not in the trend and did not want to bathe with the design of the presentation.

The question begs: now the contours are generally out of fashion?

Answer: no, they just mutated into large frames.

Here are some contours that can still be used now: But for the rest - yes, the contours are out of fashion like once white wigs.

Using frames when creating presentations



8 Do not use shadows. Either large and blurry, or none


Shadows, of course, did not go out of fashion, in contrast to the contours. But they turned into something exclusive and expensive. Like a Patek Philippe watch. You either buy the original or a Chinese fake and everyone understands that this is a Chinese fake.
The moral of this story is this: if you know how to create trend shadows - great! If not, please cancel them everywhere in the " Format " tab.

PowerPoint comes standard with shadows (especially in earlier versions). And I can tell you for sure that such shadows need to be removed immediately from the template.

Let's look at some examples:

Bad shadows from PowerPoint Good shadows from Dribbble Good shadows from PowerPoint I attach you even settings

Bad shadows when creating presentations



PowerPoint Shadow Example



Shadow example when creating a presentation

if you still want to use shadows. But use this power wisely and do not put such a shadow on all the figures in a row so that they do not fill the entire background.

Shadow example when creating a presentation

9 How to make tables and diagrams beautiful? Remove all unnecessary


Here, in fact, the rules intersect, but I noticed that for some, when it comes to tables and diagrams, they seem to forget everything: the rule of colors, contours, shadows, frames, and the like.

However, I have already described all the errors to you. It remains only not to commit them.

Let's look at the practice:

Here is the smoker's table: But the healthy person: What is the difference?  One is heavy and bulky, the other is clean and concise. Note:

Bad table example in PowerPoint



Shadow example when creating a presentation




  • There is free space between the cell border and the content.
  • Of course there are no contours
  • No extra shadows
  • Some fields are not filled at all



10 Slide is your canvas. Be creative. Imagine holding a brush in your hand


If presentations were created in Paint, the slides would look much more creative. I say this to the fact that we often drive ourselves into PowerPoint template frames ourselves, although there you can also create unique works of art.

Let's look at examples of slides created in PowerPoint:

Presentation design with brush

Presentation for Starpack

Presentation for Sberbank in PowerPoint

Presentation design for an insurance company.

Creating a presentation for a startup from India

Investment Presentation Design


I wish you to create only high-quality presentations for your projects!

Read the following article “Conversion Improvement Tips from Your Business Presentations”

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