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Discover 5 quick tips to create beautiful slides that look professional. These tips are easy to implement and the difference in results is clearly noticeable.
Why create beautiful PowerPoint slides?
Does it really matter if your slides look beautiful or not? Does it have a bearing on the business decision your audience takes at the end of your presentation?
The answer is – YES.
Slides that look beautiful have a higher chance of grabbing and retaining your audience’s attention, than the same old boring slides filled with text.
Professional slides show that you care enough about your ideas and the way your thoughts are perceived by your audience. The quality of your slide deck reflects your preparedness.
Don’t waste time decorating:
We don’t advocate that you spend hours polishing your slides. It’s a good idea to spend the majority of your time strengthening your content rather than the slides. The quick tips in this article are meant to improve the look and feel of your slide elements in a matter of few seconds and get you the result you deserve.
Are you ready to learn the tips? Here we go:
1. Use the power of PreSet Shape Styles:
When you fill your text boxes with solid colors, you usually get a plain boring look. Next time try using ‘quick style’ option to fill colors. You get a nice gradient that adds character to those plain boring colors.
Take a look at these two slides with colored text boxes and see the difference.
The one on the left looks boring with plain colors. The one on the right looks interesting with quick style gradient fill.
2.Use ‘reflection’ to make your slide objects pop out
Take a look at the following slide:
Doesn’t the slide look interesting?
All we did was to vary the position of the three text boxes, add a light gray rectangle at the bottom to serve as the base and use ‘reflection’ feature to give the slide a 3D look.
The routine doesn’t take more than 5 seconds to perform, but the result is usually stunning.
Related: PowerPoint 3D Arrows Tutorials
3. Use interesting ‘call outs’
Here are two text box call outs. Which one looks interesting?
The one on the right makes you want to read the information. The boring text box on the left puts you to sleep.
It doesn’t take much time to create interesting text boxes and call outs for your slides. Once you make them, you can use them multiple times in your various presentations. The impact made by these text boxes is definitely worth the time invested.
4. Use restricted color range
Take a look at the following two slides:
The color palette used for the first slide doesn’t give a professional feel to the presentation. However, the second one is more subtle and sophisticated.
A simple way to ensure that you don’t mess up with the color selection is to use one of the standard color palette themes inbuilt in PowerPoint. Even when you use a standard palette, use a limited range for color intensity. Here is a simple guide to follow to create beautiful PowerPoint slides:
Limited color palette automatically makes your slides look beautiful and professional.
5. Vary the formats in SmartArt diagrams
Here are two versions of the same SmartArt diagram:
Instead of settling for the ‘default’ style built into a SmartArt diagram, spend a few more seconds to explore the variations. The result will be far more interesting than the ‘usual’ look.
Related: 5 PowerPoint SmartArt Features You Never Knew
Conclusion about Creating Beautiful PowerPoint Slides:
Improving the look and feel of your PowerPoint slide deck doesn’t take much time if you explore the various options available in the software. There are a number of useful articles in this site that help you enhance the quality of your slide design.
Related: See our 750+ PowerPoint Charts and Diagrams for CEOs Pack
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