Presentation Skills - The 7 Basic Rules of Visual Design

This article clarifying the rules of design visual presentation that, if listened to, almost always assure that your audience will be able to follow your ideas every step of the way. Of course, you must keep in mind that visual design is only one third of the package needed for a successful presentation, the other two are the content and delivery.

As a fine dining experience that requires equal parts food, service and atmosphere to really work, the visual design part of the submission process is just as necessary as others to obtain the desired result - in this case, the transfer of real knowledge.

So without further ado:

7. Maintain the integrity section. First, the entire first paragraph of the text layer should be the same size on all slides. Similarly, all second text Paragraph Level must be smaller and of a different color. Finally, do not go beyond the level 3, and this text should not be less than 20 points.

If all the information of equal importance is the same size throughout your presentation, the audience will not raise question marks over how important this information is with each click of the slide. Take this concept one step further, ensuring that all materials of the same nature is the same color. If, for example, using a lot of numbers of points, are all of a color, different from the text. Once the public recognizes this pattern, they will spend less time digging through the text to find their figures.

6. There are no boring font. Rarely is there the need to use more than two different fonts in any presentation. However, there is a huge need to use any two fonts other than PowerPoint default Times New Roman and Arial!

The problem is that because everyone else uses these two characters for 99% of the time, if your presentation is the fifth the public is seeing that day, soon all the text starts to look the same, and you lose much of your meaning and impact. We often hear from customers who have to sit through presentations themselves that after a while ', can not remember which vendor said what - everything becomes a big spot. Make sure you are not part of the blur.

5. Use correct build. Without a sense of good design, which in most cases means simply showing restraint, animations can quickly overwhelm a presentation otherwise well laid-out. The trick is then to introduce the concepts one at a time in a way that does not draw attention more of the same concepts. Builds are essential elements for turning slides that would otherwise have TMI into ones that people can follow, but like other elements of good design, good build should not announce. Rather, a well animated presentation should simply appear to "happen" without a clue as to why it seems so easy to follow.

4. Be colorful - Light on Dark. Watch a lot of television in black and white these days? Although black and white works as an art form in many ways, humans tend to like color. Even the old guard newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal concluded that to avoid losing readers to more modern means of communication, they had to go to color.

While humans can discern a dozen shades of gray so they can see millions of different colors. We have evolved to use our sense of color to survive - help your audience survive your presentation is not blinding them with black on white.

3. Less is More. This rule is essential for designing good presentation, but absolutely essential for graphs or charts. We often see pie charts to meet our audit service with over a dozen slices, many so small they must be annotated with lines and arrows far from the chart. Do you really think that someone will remember all 25 competing products in your market and their percentage? It might be good information for a handout, but a presentation of a few people capable of absorbing more than six elements in each graph.

Make your point much more effectively when you limit the data displayed on the things the audience is likely to remember. Less information becomes more retention of the things you really want to go home with.

2. A concept for visual. Here is another very common problem we see in most business presentations, and the solution is derived from rule number 3. When more than one concept appear at the same time, the audience not only tries to understand the concepts, but also try to determine which one deserves most of their attention, such as two or more are related, if one is the "right" either a "good", and so on and so on - all that has nothing to do with your actual message.

The time and effort acts as a brake on the flow of presentation, and explains why a 45-slide, properly divided into a single concept, requires less time to present the same information packaged in 15.

1. Favor right-brain information. We humans have evolved different ways to deal with two stimuli from the outside world so that we can react more likely to keep us alive. Our brain responds to the right of entry, such as colors, graphics, shapes and patterns instantly, without stopping to process the information first. Our left brain kicks in when presented with speech, text or numbers, but with this type of information that the first stop to analyze before storing or reacting to it. We have filters on the left side of the brain, and not everything goes through.

If you want your ideas to strike quickly and easily absorbed, so every time you can figure out how to turn your left brain type data into shapely and colorful images of the right brain.