How to appear more confident as a presenter? Design bold slides

PowerPoint slides have transformed completely over the last few years. What was acceptable once looks mundane today. One of the trends today is to use big and bold graphic elements and text. These bolder looking slides will make you look more confident and dependable in front of your audience. Here is an example.

This slide is quite good in itself. But the chart is small and does not make all that impact. A bolder version of the same looks like this (see below). Stretch the chart across the slide (from the left to the right) so that it covers the entire slide and bleeds off the edge giving it a much bigger feel. More confident and visually more powerful and attention grabbing.
 

Here is another example. The first side was part of a deck I recently received from a client of mine in India. This slide talks about an event that my client was organizing across India.

We decided to go bolder and the modified slide is the one you can see below. In this slide the elements get more importance and derive more power from their size and the way they look and feel. More confident, more attention grabbing. When you use small text, it indirectly implies you are not confident and you might be hiding something.

Going bold entails cutting down on words, making the font bigger and using lots of white space. It also ensures the most important messages hog the limelight and less important messages are deleted. The resulting benefit is a professional looking slide which makes you come across as more confident and dependable.

Here is the last example for today. The following slide is also a real slide made by a client of ours. This slide is not very impressive and makes a bad impression.

The bolder version (below) states the main message clearly. White fonts on big black background offer good contrast. The image adds characters but has been blurred so that it does not dominate the chart in foreground. The chart itself has been made bigger and made as a horizontal bar graph.

Conclusion: If you want to come across as more confident and dependable, make slides that are bolder. You could be making a B2B sales presentation or an investor presentation or talking at an international CXO conference, you need to come across as confident and dependable.