Oct 5, 2010

6 Tips to Become an Awesome PowerPoint Designer

If you make slides for others (as a professional designer or as a secretary/subordinate/colleague) this post is especially for you.


A PowerPoint designer is a person who works on the slides and makes it look good. There are times when you get to edit the content but most of the times you just make the slides look great. Your boss gives you a raw PPT file and it is your job to jazz it up. Having worked on umpteen presentations as a PowerPoint designer (as a freelancer also) I have six tips to share with you.

I have shared the tips on my recent article at www.24Point0.com. You can read the complete post by clicking here. Here is a small summary of the complete post.


1. Don't start by opening MS PowerPoint. Think about the bigger picture and then get into slide modification.

2. Customise and make every presentation unique. Do not treat every presentation as the same. Do one thing which is different in all presentations.

3. Keep your creativity alive. It is very easy to use the same template and same tricks in every presentation. That's not good. You need to challenge your creativity. Read more here.

4. Use a 'Presentation Brief' to save time and create an awesome presentation. This way you can add a lot of value to the original presentation.

5. Seek feedback actively from your clients/boss. Find out how much they like your work and how did their presentation go?

6. Know what your client/boss expects and work hard to deliver more.

Want to share some tips of yours? Leave in a comment.


Image credit: Stefano Valle

5 comments :

  1. A tool that works great with PowerPoint is Freepath. Drag and drop multiple decks along with videos, audio, web pages...you name it. Then, present it all from the Freepath user interface.

    http://www.freepath.com

    -Dave

    ReplyDelete
  2. Shouldn't the first step be to ask the boss/client/speaker "what do yo actually want to accomplish from this speech?"

    ReplyDelete
  3. Absolutely. One has to find out the objective of the presentation before anything else. Even if your job is just to 'jazz up' a PPT, knowing the objective will take you far, give you a bigger picture and you will be able to add more value to the PPT beyond just making it look great.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Learning has no age bar. although i am a powerpoint pro and designs professional PowerPoint designs for clients in UAE but still i read articles and tip on internet for more knowledge. So thank you so much for sharing.

    ReplyDelete