Presentation Design Tips (For Non-Designers)
You don't need a design degree to stop your slides from looking like a Word document.
Most bad presentation slides don't fail because of bad ideas. They fail because of inconsistency. One slide has a bulleted list, the next has a screenshot dropped in at a weird size, the next has three different fonts because someone copy-pasted from an email. None of that requires design taste to fix, just a few consistent rules applied slide after slide.
Pick two fonts, max, for the whole deck
One for headings, one for body text. That's it. Switching fonts slide-to-slide (even accidentally, because you pasted from somewhere else) is one of the fastest ways to make a deck look unplanned.
One idea per slide
If you're explaining three things, that's three slides, not one slide with three bullet points crammed under a tiny heading. Audiences remember the slide they can summarize in one sentence; they tune out the slide that needed four.
Give numbers their own moment
If your deck has a "here's our traction" or "here's the result" slide, the actual numbers deserve to be large, bold, and isolated from paragraph text, not buried in a sentence. A simple row of big numbers with a short label under each (users, retention, revenue, whatever's relevant) reads instantly, even from the back of a room. Our KPI Bar Generator is built for exactly this kind of slide.
Show the team like you mean it
A "meet the team" slide with photos at five different crops and sizes looks thrown together at the last minute, because it usually was. Cropping every photo to the same shape and size takes a few minutes with a tool like our Team Bar Generator, and it's one of the cheapest ways to make an early-stage deck look more finished than it is.
Leave more empty space than feels natural
If a slide feels a little empty to you while you're making it, it's probably about right. The instinct to fill every inch of a slide is exactly what makes decks feel cluttered. Audiences read cluttered slides slower, not more thoroughly.