Transforming average into awesome: More Tips for powerful presentation makeovers

By Kevin Lerner
Executive Director of The Presentation Team

Like a festive fireworks show, many PowerPoint presentations often fill the screens with light, color and sound...only to quickly fade away into the forgotten recesses of their audiences' minds. Creating a PowerPoint presentation that dazzles and delights...and is remembered by its audience is a little easier with some creativity and digital design tools. Following the success of our first presentation makeover article, here are some more tips, based on real samples, for powerful presentation makeovers.

After: Working in Adobe Photoshop, we modified the hue and saturation of a stock template from Digital Juice's Presenter's Toolkit, adding a 80% white horizontal bar near the top of the page for a title block, and a black bar at the very top to hold the Oracle logo we moved from the bottom. We also added three stock photos on the bottom left to carry the strategic and time-oriented theme.

Creating a uniform size and shape of the text blocks helps to improve legibility. The arrows have been converted to red with the line color removed.

After: With the use of topical photos, we converted the bullet points into three distinct image blocks. This gives the audience distinct focus points and makes the results data clear and memorable.

Before: Four bullets and a quotation compete against each other for visual flow.

After: We split this single page into two separate slides. On the first page, we placed the bullets in a centered list set against a background graphic from Digital Juice’s Presenter’s Toolkit. We then dissolved into the second slide, featuring the quotation set against a panoramic image reflective of accomplishment.

Before: This five-element flowchart displays poorly on screen. All the audience can make out is the slide's title, five red shapes and a lot of unreadable text.

After: We changed the vertical orientation of the chart so it would flow left to right, leaving the presenter and the handouts to fill in additional details. The green of the shapes matches the template and supports the environmental theme of the presentation.