How do you feel giving presentations at work?

Perhaps you’d do virtually anything to avoid them, just as 20 percent of employed Americans would, even pretending to be sick or placing the burden on a colleague instead. 

Yet despite this obvious widespread dislike of presenting to co-workers, stakeholders, and clients, 70 percent of people agree good presentation skills are crucial to their workplace success nevertheless. 

But are we all delivering presentations to the right standard to achieve that success? Possibly not — 75 percent of people questioned want to improve their presenting capabilities and to “captivate” their audience. 

And that’s not easy. You need to consider the quality of your writing, your body language, your tone of voice, and your pacing. 

But good design is another critical (yet often overlooked) element of improving your presentations. 

What does this mean and why does it matter?

1. The power of good presentation design
2. Create professional presentations quicker than ever
3. Customize templates to build bespoke presentations
4. Achieve consistency for a more professional style
5. Help to make your content more visual
6. Key design principles are already applied to slides
7. Skip the headache of creating from scratch and use a presentation template

The power of good presentation design

Think about the best TED talks. They tend to incorporate strong visuals and beautiful design, working in conjunction with the presenters’ powerful delivery to engage audiences.

That’s because great design isn’t just a way to embellish your presentations — it’s vital for effective communication. A well-designed presentation deck can:

• engage the audience and motivate them to listen
• reduce miscommunication
• demonstrate the presenter’s expertise and professionalism
• help to sell your idea or product
• take the pressure off the presenter and boost their confidence in the quality of their material

Unless you happen to be a designer, achieving quality presentation design can be a formidable challenge. But there’s a way to make it easier: instead of facing a blank title slide every single time you start to prepare, kick-start your presentation with a professional template. 

Here are five reasons to take advantage of presentation templates right now. 

1. Create professional presentations quicker than ever

Sitting down to create a new presentation might feel daunting and even stressful when you’re confronted by that blank slide. You have ideas. You have things you want to say. But how should your presentation actually look? What visual texture will work best for the topics you intend to discuss?

This can slow the process down significantly, leaving you less time to refine the material, practice delivery, and ensure your presentation makes an impact.

But using a presentation template helps you avoid the hassle and wasted time of essentially reinventing the wheel each time you sit down to start working on a new presentation. 

You’ll have a good starting point in each slide, so you can focus on the content rather than the basics. This puts you in a fantastic position to hit the ground running and create presentations that convey your message effectively. 

2. Customize templates to build bespoke presentations 

Perhaps your presentation has to incorporate your company’s branding to align with internal guidelines. Maybe you want to add more personality to your slides than usual, to create a more engaging and distinctive experience for your audience. 

Whatever your goals, whatever your motivations, the best presentation templates offer streamlined customization to help you achieve the right aesthetic. 

Templates can be modified easily, to align with your specific preferences, branding requirements, and the tone of your presentation. 

For example, if you’re planning to deliver a pitch for a product aimed at a young audience, a dynamic design style packed with vibrant colors may be appropriate. On the other hand, more sober subject matter will call for an understated approach. It’s all about context.

And with good presentation templates, you can change colors, fonts, and graphics for unlimited possibilities. This suits businesses and organizations of all sizes, in all industries. You can even add a logo to the design for authentic branding, bringing a professional touch to your presentations.

3. Achieve consistency for a more professional style 

If you’re new to creating presentations or just pushed for time, you could create slides with a mix of design styles. This leads to an inconsistent aesthetic, with jarring transitions from one slide to another. Your audience will notice a shift from one color scheme or layout style to another without good reason.

A lack of consistency can create the impression that you cobbled your presentation together at the last minute, or even borrowed slides from a batch of existing presentations. Either way, it doesn’t make the strongest impact on audiences. You’ll pull them out of the experience — and you might struggle to get them back.

But embracing templates ensures your presentations will be consistent and harmonious from the first slide to the last.

4. Help to make your content more visual

Visual aids can make a big difference to audience engagement. A study found that people who watched a presentation featuring visual information remembered around 65 percent of it three days later, compared to those who recalled just 10 percent of a presentation lacking visual information.

That’s because 90 percent of all data transmitted to our brains is visual, and images are processed 60,000x faster than text.

High-quality presentation templates usually include graphics, diagrams, icons, maps — all reminding you to incorporate more visuals into your content. This helps to make it more interesting at a visual level, but as the stats above show, enables your audience to absorb more of the information you provide.

Templates include a wealth of different layouts to help you explore your creativity. And yes, while consistency is essential, you can experiment with varied page layouts to keep your audience interested. 

5. Key design principles are already applied to slides

Remember when we mentioned reinventing the wheel with each new presentation? Well, another massive advantage of using templates is that key design principles have already been applied. That means you don’t need to keep crucial visual rules and guidelines in mind while designing slides from scratch.

White space, balanced color palettes, text hierarchy, professional typographies, good composition, grids, and emotional design — this all seems overwhelming if you’re not a professional designer. 

But they’re already present in a well-designed template. 

This makes the entire process quicker, easier, and less daunting, especially for beginners. You can dive into constructing a presentation that looks incredible and communicates your message effectively, without worrying about fundamental technical elements. 

You’ll see the best font combinations, balanced color schemes, and perfect structures as standard. 

So, to sum up: presentation design really matters. So skip the headache of creating from scratch and use a presentation template. 

Presentation templates are a fantastic resource for anyone looking to improve the quality of presentations you deliver, whether for internal meetings, product pitches, keynote speeches, or anything else. 

You can take advantage of templates to create more engaging and memorable presentations, incorporating strong visuals that reinforce your content. Using branding, graphics, visual data, evocative imagery, and other elements will add a professional flourish to your slides. 

But when people see the same old boring PowerPoint themes, there’s a risk that they’ll lose focus. You could break their engagement and, soon enough, realize they’re daydreaming the rest of your presentation away. You’ll waste your time and theirs. Not to mention the hours you invested into preparing it.

Demand for creative, engaging visual content is higher than ever. Presentations are easier to make, but not everyone’s aware of the tools available to create great presentations. 

If you really want to wow your audience (who doesn’t?), you need to take advantage of fresh designs like those available at SlidesCarnival.

So, design well — with presentation templates, there’s no longer an excuse for anything less.

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