Complete Guide to Creating an Effective Presentation

The various stages of designing your slides are explained step by step by someone with years of experience in the field

How do you build an effective presentation from A to Z, capable of engaging the audience and persuading them?

This is the question I am asked most often, a question that requires as comprehensive an answer as possible. For this reason, I decided to write the following article.

Here you will find everything you need to know to design your presentation, from beginning to end, ensuring it has the maximum possible impact and leads you to achieve the result you wish to reach.

The design phase of an effective presentation: it all starts long before turning on the PC

Before you dive into using PowerPoint, I strongly advise you to start with the basics: take paper and pen and dedicate yourself to designing your presentation.

It all begins with organizing the content and selecting the themes to cover, and, even more importantly, those to omit. This latter point can be particularly challenging, especially when you find yourself presenting a project or an idea that you are particularly attached to and would like to illustrate in its entirety.

In this phase, it is important to focus only on what really matters: keep in mind that the main goal of any presentation is to persuasively share information capable of convincing the audience to make the decision we desire.

Naturally, achieving this result is crucial to understanding our audience: depending on its nature, the way we communicate our message changes radically.

This is why the design phase of our presentation necessarily starts with a deep understanding of the audience’s level of awareness regarding the topic we want to address. And, at the same time, the level of awareness we want to bring them to.

What are their current thoughts on the topic we want to address? What idea do we want them to have about this topic at the end of the presentation?

The answers to these questions allow us to understand how to structure the ‘journey’ of our presentation. A journey that should aim towards a final goal.

And here we come to another crucial point: what is the goal we want to achieve with the presentation? Do we want to convince the audience to invest in a startup? Or, perhaps, we wish to obtain funding for our project?

Whatever this goal may be, it must be clear from the start because it will act as a ‘compass’ for the journey you want to take your audience on: a journey that will have our goal as its destination.

How to Organize a Presentation to Capture the Audience’s Attention

Ok, we have defined the starting point (the audience’s level of awareness) and the destination (the goal).

However, the organization of the journey itself is missing: how do we convince the audience to undertake this journey to the end? What do we offer in exchange for their attention and time?

We offer them a solution to their problem.

And here is the starting point from which to begin our storytelling: talk about their problem better than they could, and you will convince them that you have the ideal solution. At this point, they will want to know more about your proposal.

The goal is to create such interest that the audience desires the proposed solution, rather than feeling forced to accept it. It’s a mistake to try to gain attention aggressively, as this often leads to a decrease in interest from the early stages of the presentation.

To guide you in this process of creating the storyline, I would like to share with you an extremely useful tool that we also use for our presentations: the Lean Presentation Strategy Canvas.

As you will see yourself, this tool allows you to:

• define the audience
• specify the goal
• identify any objections
• define the engagement strategy
• build a narrative based on the problem-solution dynamic
• indicate the reasons to leverage to persuade the audience
• insert a Call to Action.

In short, it guides you through all the stages of building the structure of an effective presentation, helping you in the design process.

Does preparing your presentation take too much time? Try using AI

Designing a tailor-made narrative structure for your presentation can be quite time-consuming and mentally demanding, but nowadays we have the opportunity to leverage the potential of artificial intelligence.

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Gemini, and Copilot can help you create a solid and engaging narrative structure in minutes. They are capable of understanding your topic and generating various options for the structure of your presentation, developing problem-solution dynamics, proposing specific engagement strategies, and much more.

If you want to learn more about this topic, I leave you a dedicated video below that we published on YouTube. It will be useful as a guide to building a storyline for your presentation through generative artificial intelligence.

How to choose the ideal style for your presentation

Well, having put our presentation project in writing, the next step is choosing the style, i.e., the right combination of fonts and colors.

As for fonts, they can basically be divided based on the presence or absence of serifs, those small lines or additional extensions that finish the main strokes of letters, as in the classic Times New Roman.

Sans serif fonts stimulate skim reading, or a very rapid reading of the text, to the maximum. Serif fonts, on the other hand, tend to encourage the audience to read the text in full.

My advice is to always prefer sans-serif fonts. The goal is for the audience to focus mainly on the speaker, that is, on us, glancing only briefly at the slides. Using sans serif fonts helps reduce the tendency of people to focus too much on the slides, losing attention to the speaker.

As for the choice of a specific font, I leave you the freedom, based on what you think is ideal for the project.

Now let’s move on to colors, which play a central role in presentations.

You see, to convey an effective message, it’s important to choose combinations that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also have a strong visual impact and are able to improve the legibility of the slides.

Obviously, I can’t recommend a particular color combination that works for any presentation: what works in one case may not work in another, and vice versa.

What I suggest, however, is to start looking on the web, searching for predefined color palettes for presentations. You’ll find many, and among them, there might be one that suits your needs.

If, however, you wish to create your personalized palette, then I recommend exploiting the visual potential of complementary colors.

Have you ever heard of them?

These are shades that, on the color wheel, are opposite each other at 180° because of the contrast that emerges from the pairing.

In short, through this method, you can start with a color of your choice (for example, your brand’s color) and combine it with its complementary to create a good visual impact.

Whatever choice you make, think it through carefully: don’t make the mistake of choosing based on your aesthetic tastes, but study a palette that can give bite to the presentation to design the style effectively.

Below I leave you the video of a webinar on choosing colors.

Communicating a Clear Message Through a Presentation: The Role of Graphic Elements

Slides are a phenomenal tool in presentations because they allow you to literally bring to life the concepts you wish to convey and speak to the perceptive part of the brain.

It is often thought that people read slides to understand the message they contain.

Wrong!

In reality, most people read them to confirm what they have already perceived. Therefore, slides not only transmit information but also guide the perception and understanding of the message.

When you project them, people’s minds take only a quarter of a second to identify objects in space and create a semantic expectation.

If we see objects or an image, we don’t read or process the information in detail, but the set of colors and shapes prepares us for the expectation of meaning. For example, a slide with a color system of yellow, green, and red might evoke the idea of a traffic light, suggesting that some activities are ‘on track’, others ‘in progress’, and still others completely stopped.

What I’ve pointed out is a typical example of Project Management, useful for giving substance to the concept I’ve illustrated, but the possibilities are as many as the combinations of shades, images, and shapes you can use in your presentation: practically infinite.

In short, a huge potential that must be exploited properly with suitable visual tools.

Images, for example, must be of good resolution and, if necessary, cropped and inserted correctly.

Or Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), those icons supported by PowerPoint that allow you to easily change their colors, including those of the individual elements that make them up, playing with shades as I advised you earlier.

To facilitate the creation of your presentation, I suggest consulting the numerous online resources of graphic elements.

Here at mauriziolacava.com, for example, we have created an area rich in thousands of completely free graphic elements that you can download without even registering. You can find high-resolution images, vector icons, and even ready-to-use templates to apply to your slides, suitable for the most common types of slides: organizational charts, roadmaps, SWOT matrices, etc.

To access our collection, click on ‘Resources’ at the top and, in the dropdown menu, select ‘Graphic Resources’.

Or, to save even more time, click directly on this link!

What Everyone Forgets: Designing the Audience Experience

The management of graphic elements I talked about in the previous paragraph is a classic example of a feature of presentations to which everyone tends to pay a certain amount of attention.

Conversely, there’s another aspect that too many tend to neglect: the audience experience. The design of this experience strongly depends on the context in which the slides will be read.

In other words, to build an effective presentation, it is essential to ask how the audience will consume the content.

Nowadays, there are a plethora of possibilities: many presentations are consumed on mobile devices, for example on smartphones. This entails viewing through vertical scrolling, completely changing the logic to be applied to slides.

Then, there are the classic live events, or presentations performed in meeting rooms. Or, those conducted on video conferencing tools like Teams, Meet, and so on.

Consider this aspect carefully when you design your presentation and organize it in the best way so that it is easily accessible to your audience.

How to Manage the Insertion of Titles and Images in Slides

Once we have properly constructed the ‘frame’ of our presentation, all that remains is to fill it.

Start by limiting the content of each slide to a single title, in order to facilitate the maintenance of the audience’s attention and make everything more digestible.

Specifically, an effective title:

• must convey the key message of the slide clearly and immediately
• should not be too long or too short.

Regarding the second point, it is essential to find the right balance between the two extremes in order to construct a title capable of communicating the message at a glance.

After all, we know what happens during presentations: the audience will read the title of the slide first and, only if interested, will delve into the details. If this text fails to transmit the concept we wish to communicate, then the message is likely lost.

After the title, the element of a slide that most captures attention is the images.

How do we choose them?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, graphic elements, such as images, are able to convey concepts with surprising speed because, like text, they can have a semantic function, i.e., transmit meaning.

Based on this feature, they must be chosen and inserted in a way that resonates with the textual content.

For the message to effectively reach the audience, the text and images themselves must combine in a balance, communicating in the shortest possible time without straining the audience.

And here we enter one of my favorite topics: best practices for balancing text with graphics.

The Rule of Thirds: The Best Visual Balancing Technique Ever

There are many rules of visual composition, some of which have a powerful effect on the effectiveness of the slide.

One of the most effective, for example, is the rule of thirds, which I discussed in this article.

Essentially, it involves using a visual design grid to balance the graphic content of the slide so that it is proportional to the golden ratio.

“And what is this golden ratio?”

It is a particular mathematical ratio often found in art, architecture, and even nature. In short, it is a proportion where a whole is divided into two parts, so that the ratio between the larger and the smaller is the same as the ratio between the whole and the larger. Its numerical value is about 1.618.

But why is it so relevant?

Because it is considered to be a proportion that is innately pleasing from an aesthetic viewpoint. Therefore, when applied to graphic elements, it is capable of having a huge impact on the viewer.

Here, the rule of thirds exploits the power of the golden ratio to harmonize the content of the slides and, interestingly, it is based on the identification of focal points called power points!

Now you know why the most used software for presentations is called that!

Other Visual Composition Rules to Apply to Your Presentation

Previously, when I discussed the text to include in slides, I focused mainly on titles, but, obviously, your presentation is likely to contain body text sections.

Regarding reading levels, these two types belong to different ‘moments’: titles, of course, will be read first and the actual text afterward. As a result, it’s necessary to differentiate them visually to create contrast between them and ‘accompany’ the audience’s natural reading process.

In practical terms, this means that titles should have a larger size than the body text and, perhaps, also have different graphic characteristics.

In addition, textual parts should never be excessively long.

Remember what I explained earlier, that if your slides require too much reading effort from the audience, they might focus too much on these and not pay enough attention to what you’re saying?

Well, the reason why the body text should not be too long is exactly this.

To find an optimal length, I recommend using the tweet technique: think about the message you want to convey and try to synthesize it within a maximum of 140 characters.

Sure, in some cases, this might seem impossible! But with trial and error, it’s not so difficult to come to an acceptable solution.

Of course, you can also seek help from artificial intelligence for this task, asking GPT-4 or other similar tools to optimize the text for you, making it concise and impactful.

Continuing with the ‘less is more’ theme, another valuable tip is to learn to appreciate not only the information included in the slide but also the empty spaces, a precious ally in presentation design.

Lastly, if you use data from external sources, it’s important to cite them. However, citations can be inserted discreetly and in modest sizes, as they often serve more as a reference than as the main element of the slide.

The Decisive Moment: Delivering the Presentation

Now that our presentation is ready, it’s not over yet: we must present it to the audience in an engaging way, aiming to capture and maintain their attention as much as possible from start to finish.

The main goal is to build an emotional connection with the people in front of us. In other words, to create empathy, a key element that makes the difference between an effective presentation and one that doesn’t work.

First, prepare for the roller coaster: during a presentation, it’s normal for attention to fluctuate between highs and lows, with peak moments interspersed with downtimes. To not be dominated by the situation, but instead to dominate it yourself, you’ll need to be ready to react to these situations using attention-recapturing techniques.

A simple example is breaking patterns, doing something unexpected, like taking a long pause. What might seem endless and embarrassing to you, standing in front of those people, actually gives the audience a moment to recover and triggers a series of questions that re-establish attention, like: “What’s happening now? Why has he stopped? Is he waiting for me to say something?”.

This simple stratagem can have a significant impact on attracting attention.

Another effective technique is to ask questions to the audience, perhaps to confirm their attention, like: “Is everything clear so far? Are there any questions about this last point? What do you think of this section?”.

Your Eyes Are Weapons: Use Them

Properly managing eye contact is absolutely necessary to maintain people’s attention.

In this case, today, with the many tools available for conducting video conferences, it’s necessary to distinguish between online and (for lack of a better term) offline presentations.

In the former, it’s simple: the best thing to do is to look at the camera lens, within the limits of what feels natural. This doesn’t mean always staring directly at the camera, but rather giving the people following us the impression that we are looking at them.

In live situations, however, the usual rule of distributing your attention bit by bit to different parts of the audience applies.

Moreover, regarding this last point, I have advice for recapturing attention. If you notice someone getting distracted, approach them, and while continuing with your presentation, focus your gaze on them. In these situations, your eyes are like spotlights that catalyze focus on the person you’re observing.

Soon, someone else will start focusing on that person, and I can assure you that this will change their tune, paying attention to you for the rest of the presentation.

The Chat: A Powerful Tool to Keep Attention High and Empathic Connection

Returning to the topic of online presentations, another excellent tool for keeping the audience’s attention alive is chat, an ideal bridge between you and those listening to your words.

There’s a big caveat, though: as you might have noticed in your past experiences, participants in a video conference can often feel uncomfortable using the chat before someone else breaks the ice.

Well, to encourage them to chat, you have to break the ice yourself!

At the beginning of your presentation, make sure to ask everyone to start using it for any excuse, for example, asking participants to tell you where they are connecting from, or what the main problems they are encountering in relation to the topic you are discussing. This way, you’ll encourage them to answer your questions and break the initial inhibition, making using the chat a natural action for them and they will not hesitate to use it during the remaining time.

Naturally, leveraging this method of attracting attention implies that you frequently check the chat, so you can respond promptly to any comments sent by the audience.

Don’t Forget to Use Presenter Mode on PowerPoint!

Sure, there are really so many aspects to consider during your presentation, right? And throughout all this, you must always stay on point regarding the logical thread of the storyline you designed.

Quite the effort…

Luckily, you can use PowerPoint’s presenter mode, invaluable support on these occasions: it’s a powerful feature that allows you to manage your presentation with greater confidence, enabling you to view notes and control slides without the audience seeing them and getting distracted from what you are explaining.

Not very familiar with it?

No problem. I’ve recorded a detailed video tutorial that will guide you step-by-step in using presenter mode. You can find it below!

Post-Presentation Document: What Everyone Gets Wrong

You know the post-presentation document that is often handed out to participants at the end of it?

Well, know that it can be an excellent tool to solidify the opinion that the audience has formed about your presentation, but if managed incorrectly, it can compromise the effectiveness of your project.

Let me explain.

Many think that if they will share this document, then the slides must be super-rich in information. Otherwise, those who receive it will not be able to follow the discourse properly, right?

This is a big, huge mistake, because it leads you to overcrowd your slides and negate your persuasive potential. If you remember what I explained a little above, indeed, exceeding with text is the best way to lose your audience’s attention in an instant.

Here’s a method to combine the need for lean and convincing slides with that of having a document ready to be handed out after the presentation: use notes!

Write in PowerPoint, in the notes, all the information you want people to read in the post-presentation document, then print everything. By doing this, you’ll organize a presentation that will be effective during your speech, without depriving yourself of the opportunity to create a nice PDF to distribute at the end.

What NOT to Do in Designing Your Presentation

Up to this point, I’ve given you many indications of what you should do to make your presentation effective. Now, however, let’s dedicate a little time to the ‘don’ts’, the most frequent mistakes in this field.

From what I’ve seen in years of experience, I’ve realized that most of them are committed in a technical context. A typical example is the insertion of an excessive number of animations and transitions.

The problem is that those who go wild with these effects really complicate the workflow, especially when the presentation, perhaps, passes into the hands of a colleague who finds slides on which it is complex to intervene.

Moreover, by doing so, the effectiveness of the slides is compromised, without adding any value to the presentation. Once again, less is more: let’s avoid overcrowding our slides with a lot of unnecessary content.

Another important aspect is the choice of language and the way we address the audience, a detail that is often mishandled, especially by exceeding in the use of technical jargon.

Such a choice can be acceptable when the audience consists exclusively of experts on the topic, but in most cases, the audience is mixed, made up of both true technicians and people interested but without high-level competencies.

In these cases, the ideal choice is to use a language understandable to all: any technical details can be addressed during the question and answer session, thus ensuring that the entire audience is engaged from beginning to end.

Q&A

If we were at the end of a presentation, this would be the most appropriate time to dedicate to the audience’s questions.

Well, why not do something similar?

I’ve collected some of the most frequently asked questions on the topic of presentations, and you’ll find them below, along with their answers. Among these, there might be the solution to any questions you have!

How do you create an effective presentation?

This is a bit of the question I’ve tried to answer with this article. Let’s review in summary what we’ve learned.

To succeed, you need to carefully manage 3 fundamental components:

• The storyline, or the content setup. So decide what to say and what not to say, what to say first and what to say later
• The graphic and visual characteristics, such as the style used for the slides and, in general, all those factors that contribute to shaping the way you communicate through the same slides
• Public speaking, that is, the way you will present your work, with the goal of creating the empathic connection I talked about in the article, capable of making a difference in the final result.

How many slides should I put in a 5-minute presentation?

In this case, we cannot help but mention Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule, currently a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and among the best employees in Apple’s history.

The rule works like this: use 10 slides for a 20-minute pitch and set the text size to at least 30 pt, otherwise, the audience will have difficulty reading and will end up getting distracted.

However, my advice is not to focus too much on the number of slides, but on the time available to you: the number of slides will be a direct and natural consequence of this.

Moreover, while the ability to limit the number of slides to those essential for effectively communicating the message is a sign of a good speaker, it is also true that one should not exceed in this direction.

To be clear, let’s avoid creating presentations where, perhaps due to force majeure, we are forced to concentrate everything we will say within one or two slides, or just a little more. We would end up with slides that are too ‘dense’, compromising our ability to effectively communicate with the audience.

In short, it doesn’t matter how many slides your presentation has. What matters is how they are perceived.

How to organize a schematic presentation that works?

Focus on 3 key components:

• What?
• So What?
• Now What?

What involves introducing the reference context of your presentation.

So What is the moment when you explain to the audience why they should pay attention to you and your message.

Now What comes at the end of the presentation and is your final Call to Action. After all, if with your intervention you wanted to convince the people who listened to you to do something, you must explicitly push them, clearly stating what you would like them to do.

What to Say at the Beginning of a Presentation to Engage the Audience Immediately?

The initial hook plays a crucial role in capturing the audience’s attention. It’s the key to ensuring that your message is not only heard but also remembered.

That’s why I’ve identified the most effective and famous engagement strategies in the world, compiling them into a complete guide to help you start your presentations in the most impactful way possible.

These strategies, which we call hooking techniques, are phenomenal for their versatility and effectiveness. They range from creating something unexpected, such as asking a provocative question or introducing a surprising element, to clearly communicating to the audience the value they will gain from your presentation. Other techniques include the use of shocking statistics or unexpected facts to immediately grab attention.

These tactics can be used in various contexts and adapted based on the nature of your presentation.

Moreover, if you think of using this guide, you might integrate it with an artificial intelligence tool. This would allow you to apply the strategies to your specific reference context. Imagine being able to create hundreds, if not thousands, of engagement strategies with a single click, thanks to the power of artificial intelligence!

What Should Be Written on the Last Slide of a Presentation?

As often is the case, there isn’t one correct answer for every situation.

It depends.

Some will tell you that the last slide should always be used to thank the audience, leveraging the recognition of the time and attention people have dedicated to the presentation. Indeed, a simple “Thank You” can be an effective way to conclude on a positive note, showing appreciation towards the audience.

Others argue that the last slide should be used to provide useful information to the audience so they can make informed decisions. This can include contact information, key summaries, or specific calls to action. In this case, the last slide becomes a strategic tool to influence the audience or to leave a lasting impression.

The truth is that the choice of the last slide strongly depends on the context and goals of the presentation. For example, if you are explaining why listeners should fund a startup, it would be counterproductive to end with a “Thank You.”

Instead, the audience expects a slide with contacts or references to allow them to reach out to you later.

In some circumstances, the last slide can also be designed to stimulate conversation and interaction with the audience. For example, it can initiate a question and answer (Q&A) session or present a topic that invites debate. This approach turns the end of the presentation into a starting point for a broader discussion, engaging the audience in a more active manner.