Thanks to the BBC we discovered today that PowerPoint is 25 years old today.
Fortunately, we don’t have to sit through many draining presentations in our line of work, but we do get asked to design presentations and templates from time to time. We also make the occasional presentation ourselves, either to a client, or to an audience, such as recently when I spoke at Brunel University about setting up your own business after graduating.
The article and comments on the BBC website are well worth a read, especially if you are guilty or stuffing slides with too much information. In all the presentations we’ve been asked to design we use imagery to explain the key information one point at a time. After all the software is called PowerPoint, not PowerPoints!
So, our top tip for a successful presentation? Use a stock image library to source quality images which illustrate your point. (iStockPhoto is an excellent resource, and for free images you can’t beat StockXchng). Overlay this with one clear point, such as an important increase, decrease or percentage. Your audience won’t be distracted and will absorb the rest of the information from what you say.