Why you should care about making great PowerPoint presentations?
Here’s our answer. Designing great PowerPoint presentation slides will skyrocket your chances to stand out.
Nobody’s listening
Nobody’s listening anymore. People are too busy, and to get their attention, you just have to stand out. And guess what, the major problem of communication is actually to get people’s attention! Some people have the authority to demand attention (like our parents). But in many other cases, we can’t beg for attention, we just have to attract it. Because yes, folks we want or have to talk to, partners, clients, prospects, are more and more busy. That just means they have much less time available for us. So how can we grab their attention if we’re just standard and look like the others? Well we can’t. Today, we need to be different, we need to stand out.
Great presentations of all kinds shine in two areas: form and content excellence
Our PowerPoint slides are like our brains, they have two “sides”. While one focuses on rational and logic (yes, that’s content we’re talking about) the other digs into emotions and feelings (form).
The key rules of success
Before starting, I’d like to share with you several rules of success. These rules are extracted from a fascinating book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions and reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier. Shortly, the book explains what makes an idea or concept memorable or interesting. Chip and Dan Heath believe that sticky ideas (and I would say, by extension, sticky presentations!) have 6 SUCCESS principles:
– Simplicity
– Unexpected
– Concreteness
– Credibility
– Emotions
– Stories
The reason why I’m mentioning you the SUCCESS principles is that 3 of these principles are actually at the core of our strategy to maximize PowerPoint presentations impact. Keeping them in mind will be your best asset to design Killer PPTs. Here there are:
1) Simplicity
None of your PowerPoints will stand out if the content is complicate and unclear. Because it will either bore people or mislead them. And in both cases, you’d have failed to connect with them. Simple means to find the core of your idea: you should strip your idea down to its most presentation design services critical essence. And weed out all superfluous, boring and insignificant elements.If you say many things, you don’t say anything. So, don’t say everything, say what matters.
2) Concreteness
How to make ideas and messages clear? The more you’ll type down on your PPT slides, the more time people will spend reading them. And guess what, if they read you, they don’t listen to you. That means you’re useless. Concreteness is the only true way to ensure that your idea, message, content will mean the same thing to everyone in your audience. People have to get it.