PowerPoint Design Secrets: Creating Consistent and Cohesive Slides

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Secret PowerPoint slide design tips to easily make your presentation stand out from the rest

Creating stunning and professional PowerPoint presentations requires a lot more than simply inserting images and text onto slides. Consistency and cohesiveness are key elements that can enhance the overall appearance of your presentation and are two of the most common things people struggle with.

In this post, we’ll explore essential design secrets to help you create excellent slides that are visually engaging and effective. Including useful tips regarding font and sizes, color selection, alignment, and more. Plus, the best place to download free PowerPoint presentation templates to save hundreds of hours of work.

Start With A Good Template

Choosing the right template sets the tone for your presentation and ensures all your slides look professional and cohesive. There are hundreds of free Microsoft PowerPoint templates online, and if you struggle with finding the right one for your project, we have a full category of the best PowerPoint templates for different niches.

Templates are excellent for ensuring consistency throughout your presentation, saving time, and connecting with your audience. When browsing for the perfect template, consider a theme that will complement your content and maintain a consistent color scheme and typography.

Feel free to customize your template according to your needs and preferences, such as modifying your font size or changing the color scheme for your company’s own palette.

Keep A Consistent Color Scheme

One of the biggest secrets behind PowerPoint slide design is keeping a consistent color scheme. Maintaining a cohesive color palette reinforces your brand and enhances the visual appeal of your presentation, making it more likely to be remembered by your audience.

Choose a color palette that reflects your brand or the theme of your presentation (for example, the ocean, featuring shades of blue) and keep your color options limited to three to five to avoid overwhelming your audience. If you struggle with choosing the right colors, use free color palette generators like Adobe Color or Coolors.

Here are some useful Microsoft PowerPoint tips for choosing the perfect color scheme:

• - Make sure your text color contrasts well with the background to be easily read; if you choose a dark gray as your background and a black font for your text, the audience might struggle to read. The same applies to beige backgrounds and white texts.
• - Apply your colors consistently across all slides. Use the same colors for headings, subheadings, and body text, and apply a different color to highlight important points or data.
• - Test your presentation from afar. Once you’re done with your PowerPoint slide design process, play your presentation and stand at the back of the room, this way, you’ll be able to determine whether the color scheme chosen can be easily read from anywhere or if you need to make some changes.

Carefully Choose Your Typography

Choosing the wrong font can take your perfect presentation, with carefully chosen data and countless hours of research, to the trash. You might want to use fancy fonts with thin strokes or funny cartoon-like ones for a special touch, but if you stand just a few feet away from the computer, you’ll realize they’re completely unreadable.

A great and easy-to-remember Microsoft PowerPoint tip is to use professional fonts that can be read from afar, such as sans-serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, and Calibri.

Use one font for headings and another for body text, ensuring they complement each other, to give your slide a whole new look. Don’t forget to keep font sizes and style consistent throughout your presentation, establishing a clear hierarchy between headings (larger and bolder), subheadings (slightly smaller), and body text (normal size, no bold).

Pay Attention To Layout and Alignment

Even with PowerPoint presentation templates, you can have a hard time aligning elements neatly, which is why you’ll love the following tip. Enable guides and grids to easily align different elements and keep a structured design throughout your presentation. To do this, go to View>Guides and View>Gridlines, then use alignment tools to position text and images, which you can do by navigating to Home>Arrange>Align.

Use the same slide layout for different types of content, such as title, content, and image slides. Don’t be afraid to use whitespace, thus it is essential for avoiding clutter and separating different elements, making the slide easier to read.

Maintain Visual Consistency

The main part of PowerPoint slide design is maintaining visual consistency throughout your presentation. In this section, we’re talking about images and graphics, which are critical to making your presentation look more professional and useful.

Avoid mixing clipart with high-resolution photos, and use images that have a uniform style, such as if they were part of the same photo shoot. Websites like Unsplash offer hundreds of free stock images you can use in your presentations. For icons, use a consistent style throughout your slides as well; a user favorite for finding quality icon sets is Flaticon.

Review and Refine

Consistency checks are critical in the final stages of your presentation design. Spend time reviewing your presentation for any inconsistencies in fonts, colors, and layouts, and proofread to catch any errors. We recommend you seek feedback from colleagues to ensure your presentation can be understood and easily read by anyone.

Add special touches such as subtle transitions and animations to enhance the flow of your presentation without distracting the audience. Finally, practice your presentation speech to ensure smooth delivery.

Final Words

In this post, we talked about the best Microsoft PowerPoint slide design tips to help you create the best presentations ever. Overall, the most useful tip would be to use free PowerPoint presentation templates so you can easily modify key aspects like font sizes and colors, rather than spending hours designing each slide from scratch.

At SlideStack, we have a wide collection of free presentation templates you can use, divided into categories like business, social media, marketing, and more. You simply download the template and import it into PowerPoint or Google Slides.