The Secret to Beautiful Presentations
Great speakers don’t need slides. Good speakers can make any slides work. OK speakers are perceived as good with good slides or bad with bad slides.
Unless you are a professional public speaker it is quite likely that you are in that “OK speaker” category. So your slides can either make or break your public speaking reputation. At the same time, most likely, you create your presentation content yourself (unless you are in sales or “evangelism”) and you are not a designer. Same here. So what do we do?
Obviously, getting rid of bullet points is a good place to start, but how do you make your presentations visually appealing?
Hiring a designer for each slide deck can be prohibitively expensive and makes you less agile when you want to adjust your slides based on new information or ideas. You can hire a designer to make a template for you at places like 99designs or Design Crowd, but that will likely lead you back into “bullet point hell”, as you will have a frame to work in, but limited ways to differentiate. You can use whatever comes with PowerPoint or Keynote. It will either be solid but bland, or cheesy, or noticeable to anyone who ever used one of these presentation applications.
You suck, but your slides rock
Back in the early days of my foray into public speaking I was training to pitch my startup and one of the coaches commented on my pitch:
- Your delivery kind of sucks, but you have beautiful slides, so I don’t know what to say.
As my oratory skills are not the subject of this post, let’s focus on the latter part of the statement. I made that deck myself and I have close to none design skills. So what was my secret?
Enter Stock Photos
The only professional thing about that slide deck were images, but they were the star of the deck. I am not a photographer and I didn’t hire one. I just invested a little bit of money to get beautiful looking photos that symbolized whatever I was trying to say on each slide and added a line of text to each of them. That’s it.
When I disclose this “trick” to people who ask me about the designer who made my deck, their first reaction is to suggest that this must be very expensive. But it’s not. You can even get stock photos for free from places like Pixabay.
I don’t have a problem with paying for the work that benefits me as long as the price is proportional to the value I get. And that’s exactly what stock photo marketplaces provide.
My stock photo site of choice is Fotolia (now acquired by Adobe). For presentation-type needs (would also work for blogging, etc.) Fotolia’s M-size photos would work and if you get a monthly plan for €40 you can get 20 of those (a the time of this writing). This should be enough for most presentations and you can most definitely reuse them in the future!
That’s it. Just pick a nice font, avoid long text, put one idea per slide and you got yourself a nice and unique looking presentation without any help from designers.
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Check out my book “Conferences for Introverts”
