10 Design Principles to Create Impactful Presentations

1. Intro - Why this class is for you: Presentations, they can easily put us to sleep or blow on lines while presenting like Steve Jobs is an art form in itself. Building an amazing presentation can be mastered if you follow a few simple guidelines. And today I want to share with you the ten most important presentation design principles to instantly and easily improve your presentation. This practical advice help you nail your next presentation. No matter if you want to educate your audience, pitch them a crazy idea, win them over by entertaining them, or simply update them on a project. Or you want to do something entirely different, it's up to you. My name is Julian, this command. I'm a Berlin-based freelancer with over ten years of work experience and marketing. And I said through countless bad presentations. And I held so many horrendous presentations myself. I sometimes blush, thinking back on the presentations, I help. They were so bad. Nevertheless, I think I got a bit better. And so can you, at the end of this class, you can take the slides of your upcoming presentation, check them on what you will learn today or what you will learn now, and you can make them so much better nowadays, I only work with Google slides. I will try to give you some useful advice on this program as well. But in general, most tips go for any software no matter if you work with PowerPoint or Keynote or any other program. Okay, let's go. 2. Design for a Purpose: Design for purpose. This is completely overlooked as people jumped right in the link that presentations. But there are few things you should consider before you get started. You want to think about four things. First one being attention. Second one, you presentation skills. That one, the goals and the settings. So let me explain number one, attention. This is the most important thing to consider. You need to ask yourself, where do you want to direct the audience's attention to? Do you want to draw the attention to what you're saying? If so, then you don't want to distract them with fleshy animated charts, with heaps of texts. You rather want to use charts or slides to underline what you're saying. But not every presentation has actually presented. Most presentations are rather shed via email or upload it to some Internet. If this is the case, you want to give enough information on your slides that someone who doesn't hear what you were saying still understands the presentation in the past, I have often been in the situation and I'm usually solved it by making two versions of one presentation. One was the presentation I help, which had very little information so that the attention would be on what I was saying. And another version which was then shared afterwards to the people that couldn't make the presentation who couldn't come, who were sick. But usually you want both versions to look very good. Second thing to consider are your presentation skills. Chances are you're not a naturally gifted speaker. It often feels that your future, or at least your career depends on the next presentation you'd have to hold. Hence, there is a lot of pressure. And if you're not dealing well with pressure, you might want to add a little bit more text on your charts. This can help you ensure that you're not forgetting the key points you want to talk about. But please note, you should never, ever look back at, at the screen while you're presenting. If the screen is behind, you, always turned towards the audience and not to any other screen. Nevertheless, having your key points up on the big screen takes some of the pressure away. Edits, also big reminder of what you want to talk about. If you have a chart with only a single word on it, you might not remember what you wanted to say about that point. And you miss the context and it makes you really nervous. Nevertheless, if you're really confident, you might want to draw the attention away from the slides and towards what you are saying. Hence, you want to use less text. As a rule of thumb. Don't write a full sentence as this is too much. Neither, right? Just a single word or just a single number. Give go the middle way, and give just enough contexts for the audience to instantly grasp what you're saying. Or for people who can't hear what you were saying, to grasp the information on the chart. The third to think about before creating your presentation is the goal of the presentation. Do you want to educate people? Do you want to give colleagues and update on a certain project? I you doing a TED talk or do you want to pitch your startup idea to potential investor? What do you want to achieve with the presentation? This again determines you will present. If you want to win over an audience, you tell stories, hence, draw the attention to what you are saying and show facts or images that sparked the imagination. If you want to educate your audience, your colleagues, or your students, you want to give them facts and figures that they can remember and potentially look up after this presentation, you need to give them more contexts on the charts or slides designer presentation accordingly. If you show up to a project evaluation, have your talking points ready to show. Not only talk about, you don't need to win anybody over. Same goes for like workshop materials. However, if you want to pitch an idea or product, chances are you're selling yourself just as much as you're selling the product. Hence, you need to draw attention to yourself, meaning less text on the slides, as well as a larger, more confident design. Number four and final point before we properly get started, think about the devices and it's often overlooked and it's an embarrassing mistake. You need to know or at least anticipate how your presentation will be shown. How big is the screen and how big the room is most green in a big room means you will need to have bigger letters on the slides. The biggest screen in the small room allows you to work with much smaller text. Don't build a presentation that leaves people guessing what might be written on the wall. That would be super distracting. 3. How Consistency Works: Consistency by using a grid, same fonts and colors. Consistency is key, and I bet you've heard that a million times before now. And it is especially true to any good presentation the human mind likes if things are in order. It helps to process information much, much faster. The brain doesn't need to decide for each slide and sees if it likes it and where to find which type of information it, it just instantly knows. The brain can therefore relax. I can focus better on the content you are presenting. Consistency also makes it Presentation so much more professional. And let's just assume that professional is what you're after. So what is consistent design? It basically means deciding on a few things and then sticking through those decisions throughout the whole presentation. You want to use the same font, in the same font size, defined which fund of funds you want to use. And don't use more than a maximum of two font families, such as Open Sans and Times New Roman, use them consistently for the same purpose on each shot and define a maximum of four font sizes, which you stick to consistently. This is called defining the hierarchy. One font and size for the headline, one for a subhead, one for a text, one size for call-outs. Next thing you want to keep consistent are the colors don't go crazy on colors. Use only a few different ones and use them consistently. If you want your headlines to be blue, do it on archons. Defining your color palette beforehand helps. I usually go for a simple non-distracting gradient in the background. At a headline with big contrast, as well as texts that has very high contrast to the background. The greatest, often overlooked. And if you don't stick to read your presentation, we'll just look cheap. Use guidelines and make sure that your images and your texts snaps right to those. Consistent alignment is super important and it's really easy to do. Lastly, stay consistent with elements and images. If you use frames for textboxes, use them consistently. And if you use images with a certain filter, stay consistent with that felt. Oh, one thing that really helps with consistency is just duplicating slides. So let's now look at those tips in action and Google slides. Okay, welcome to Google Slides. We're looking at two different slides right now. But first of all, let me say those numbers and arguments you see appear a completely made up. I just drafted two slides very quickly. And the first one being a slide, which I think looks totally okay. Of course can be better, but I wouldn't be too embarrassed to show that a client meetings. While the second slide is, there are a few things out of tune. For example, we skipped between those two slides, we see that the headline is jumping. So this would be something that needs to be fixed. And over all it is not very consistent. So what we're going to do is we gotta work mainly on the second slide in order to make it look more professional. And we're going to start off by duplicating the slides so that we can see the before and after. So I'm just going to highlight on the left side of the slide, I'm going to press Control D. I'm going to right-click and it duplicates light, but I'd like to do use control D to duplicate it. And here we are. First thing I want to fix is the alignment. Headline and of this great big box. And also that there's no logo on this slide. While on this slide it says my logo. So first of all, I'm going to highlight the logo. I'm going to press control C to copy it. And I'm also going to introduce some guidelines. And so I'm going to click View and I'm going to add a vertical guide. Basing it here. I'm going to add another vertical guide. And here you can see that it sometimes turns red and this basically is telling us that it is aligned. So that is something we want to keep an eye out for. And I'm going to add a third guide. And this one is a horizontal guide. And I'm going to place it right about here. And now we have our headline pretty much cornered. So this helps us a lot on the second slide. So first of all, we're going to press Control in order to place our logo. And then we're going to adjust this great books just about sum. And we're going to place our headline directly here. So we're skipping between those two slides. We see the headline is perfectly aligned and the box matter. Obviously, there are a few other problems on this slide, so let's address those. First one is obviously the overlapping texts. So I'm just going to make this box a little bit smaller. And I also want to align it with this stats and the bottom corner. So I'm just going to drag this box, oops, until it shows me a red line that tells me it's aligned. And I'm going to add another horizontal guide, which is directly in the middle. I'm going to make this box a bit smaller so that this text is actually centered. We can also center it perfectly by hitting this little button. It is perfectly aligned now and now I'm going to use the arrow keys to move this box. And one press with an RP is basically five pixels. And if we hold down the Shift button, it is one pixel. So we can work much, much, much more precise. I think this is perfectly centered. Okay, great. Next thing, I want to adjust those colors and we have basically three different colors. White, blue, and we have this gray. And actually here is some black, but I don't want the next. So let's, let's look at the colors in the first slide. First of all, the blue, the blue is located right about here, loop three. And we also have a gray, which sits but here. Let's use those colors. So first of all, those big bucks, it's getting much darker. But double-clicking the word hoops. But double-clicking the word, I highlighted this word and use the blue. And obviously, I also need to make those boxes Doc, I'm holding down control while clicking with my mouse on those boxes in order to highlight them on. And to make it dark. And I'm making a new light. Working fine, looking much better there. Next thing we want to address is these black text needs to be also a dark gray. And also we notice that the font is not correct. This is while we are using rubato on this one. So let's adjust the color and the font. I'm going to drag and drop with my mouse of those and hold down control in order to highlight those two boxes to change it to bottom 14 was correct. And the color, you can see it's black. We're going to switch to dark gray. This looks much, much better. Next thing I want to adjust is this box on the top. And I don't really like that. One size is the same, such as Hamburg and burden, because this is just to give a bit more context, but not really to draw the attention to. So I'm going to make the text much smaller. I think ten works good. I think this needs to be like maybe it's time to down singles for this. And now I'm going to highlight it. Going to de-select headline. And now we're moving to the bottom corner. Just about so that looks pretty good. The placement there, maybe we can align it steps as well. The more consistent. I think that looks pretty good to me and obviously needs to go a bit more to the center to draw more attention to them. Okay, last thing I think we need to do on those slides is to align those two boxes. First of all, I'm going to make the middle so that the text is centered in those boxes. And then I'm going to move boxes just at this little friend up here is in the center. And I'm going to do the same. Place it real. And I'm going to highlight both boxes in order to see if they aligned. Okay, that's about it. I think those two slides look much, much better than before. They have very consistent to the first slide now color wise. And it looks much more professional, especially if we compare it to the slide that we had in the beginning. So this was the slide we had in the beginning. We made a few little changes, took us five minutes. And it looks much more professional. And I wouldn't be too embarrassed again at us showed this slide at a client presentation or pitch presentation or any other presentation. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you learn something and yeah, keep it consistent. 4. How to Find Matching Colors: Use matching colors. Colors have a huge impact, especially if you use them in the wrong way. Law. This is just fully for once. The colors don't fit and it's just a very poor contrast, meaning it can be hard to read. If you match colors correctly. It can make your presentations so much better. There's a science behind it and it's called color theory. We won't go into detail here, but I will show you a neat little trick that I like to use to find the best colors for my presentation. Let's go. Let's say you have, for example, logo and he wanted to find colors that match your logo really well. Or you're holding a presentation on social media and you want to use famous colors from social media icons. How did you do that? Like, how do you find matching colors to this color? So first of all, you need to distinguish which color this is exactly. And therefore, you need to find out the so-called hex code. And you do this by either using Photoshop or any other colored tool, or you go to like a free website, for example, image color picker.com. I think there are heaps of those websites and you upload the image or you want to sample the color and then you just hover your mouse over certain parts. You can, you can see it's all the same blue, so nothing changes if I click here. So we have this one blue, and it is exactly this one. So I'm copying it. And then I go back to my presentation and I'm creating a little shape. Let's say we create a little circle. I'm getting rid of order n. I'm going to fill it with this custom hex code. So I'm just pasting this Xcode which I copied from the other website in here. And you can see it is blue. And if we hold it over here, you can see the blue is perfectly matched. And that's exactly the color that we want to use. So we can use this color now in our presentation, but we still need those matching colors. How do we find them as a super, super cool website? It's called kudos dot c o. And it has a generator which uses color theory in order to find matching colors. So we can start generator and we can hit the space bar, and it gets us really cool. Color combinations. Let's get rid of these ads here. We don't want to see ads. So you can press space and get inspired by really cool colors. Or you can enter your hex code again and then press this little lock icon in order to lock it and then hit space and coolers, find colors that match really, really well to your presentation. And actually I'm already liking this bright red and I'm liking this light blue. So I'm going to lock those two colors. And I'm hitting Space-bar again. And boom, there you have it. You have like five will equal colors, which you can use for your presentation. All you need to do is go back to your presentation and save those colors that they don't get lost. So how do you do that? You again copy the hex code. You go back to your presentation. And what I like to do is while I'm designing, I just like to save this colors by like I'm holding down the control key. I'm making five nice little circles here. And then I'm changing the color of those semi-colons, clicking this little custom plus. And I'm changing the hex code. I'm going back to my color picker, copying this hex code as well, changing it once more. And that I have five really cool matching colors, which I can now use for my design. 5. Leave Space! How Whitespace Works: Of space. For some weird reasons, people are often scared to leave some free space on their slides. Maybe they just fear it makes them look lazy. They don't cover each and every bit of a slight with information. But you should not fear free space, spaces, your best friend. And it is for many different reasons. First of all, make sure to save space on the borders and never put any text in there. I like to put some guidelines there. And this has two reasons. When printed out, the text might get cut off. And the second reason it looks very unprofessional, move the text away from the border and the presentation will look so much better. Okay, we have a slide here and you can see there is only very little space on the left and on the right side. And this makes this slide a little bit cluttered. And we want to get rid of this problem by introducing guides that protect the border. And here's how you do it. You're going to introduce a box about the size you want your borders to be like. This is fairly big essay, let's make it a little bit smaller. And you hold down the Shift key in order to make it a perfect square. And you get rid of the border. And then you hold control and place it in the bottom right corner as well. So you have the same size square once in the left upper corner and once in the right bottom corner. And now you're going to introduce your guides. And you're going to go and view guides, show guides, and then you can move those guides right here, placed them up here. And that's not perfect. Perfect. Yep, this is perfect. And now we're going to hold down control and this will copy the guides. And we're going to place them here and here. And now we have perfect guide. So now we can also get rid of those two squares. And I'm going to duplicate slide real quick so that we can see it before and after. And on the second slide, I am going to change the bottom to get rid of this. And obviously it looks a little bit not perfect. So we're placing it a little bit more to the side. And we're going to make this look identical. And I think this is already a good improvement. So let's check them full-screen. This was the before and the after. And I think this already looks much, much better. When using images. Also look for free space in the image. This is called Copy space. This is where you can put your text if you want to use it as a full-screen image. Another thing I sometimes like doing is to use cutout images with a transparent background. Here. I intentionally put it towards the border to make them appear out of the site. There are multiple things you can do. As I said, sometimes I like to place things outside the frame. For example, this Twitter bird might be fun to place it here outside of the slide a little bit so that only parts of the bird ART inside and that gives us heaps of room for space. We can put our text year. And let's say we can bump this up to 70 and we make it bold. And here we have already pretty nice design. Another thing I sometimes like to do, as I said earlier, I sometimes like to use gradients. Very simple way of doing so is you lazy. One box here. You again get rid of the bottom. And then you introduce your gradient by clicking here. This could be our starting point. I'm going to customize it a little bit. I'm going to go for radial one and we placed the light in the top center. I don't really like to go for all white. And I don't like this great so much. Let's go for it. It's probably but light, but nevertheless, yeah, that looks pretty good to me. We need to obviously make sure that we cover the whole whole slide. What I like to do next is I'm going to copy and paste it. And then I'm making it a little bit smaller. It doesn't have to be perfect yet. Turn it around in 180 degrees. And then I'm placing it in our frame. And then we have a very subtle, nice design. And we can use this frame actually to place more things in. I'm just going to place a PNG file. It's important that it is a PNG file so that it has a transparent background. So we can see background is fairly nice and here we can make it smaller. And we also going to turn it hold down shift in order to make it perfect rotation, in this case, 90 degrees. We're placing it here and it looks like the leaves are coming from outside. This frame. And this shows again that we have this water can be quite a nice effect obviously at it a little bit sloppy, but play around with it a bit to find your designs. And you might have some good results. Space also defines if items are related to each other, you can group them together by reducing the space or increased the space to signal that they are from a different group. Don't be afraid to give your groups or contents some room to breed so-called white space or negative space can make your layout looks so much cleaner and more professional. If you don't leave enough space, you might end up looking very cluttered. Make sure to draw the viewer's eye to what you want them to see first and last. But I'd like to do is let the finished presentation sit for a day or so. If I do have the luxury of time. And then I come back the next day and I tried to analyze where my eyes are going first when I look at a slide and then I obviously try to fix it. 6. Give Structure With a Progress Bar: Guide the people through the presentation by showing them where they are. As I said earlier, the brain likes to know where this ad telling the viewer by showing a little progress bar on the side or on the bottom, we helped them to relax. And when they are relaxed, they can focus more on understanding what you're actually saying and process that information. It is also super helpful for you when you're presenting, you know how far along you are and if you're Russian or if you're too slow, that might show. It also helps you like a little reminder what you want to say on each specific chart cried out in your next presentation and see if you or your audience benefit from using the progress bar. Okay? And this is how you can install a progress bar, such as this one, which you see on the left side, what you're looking at is a completely made up presentation. I just quickly build this presentation with images from the internet. So those guards certainly ain't called Sara Lee's n step. This is just to illustrate what we are going to talk about. And here we have the same slide, two slides, and the second slide doesn't have a progress bar. And I wanted to show you how you can easily create such a progress bar. First thing you want to decide on which kind of shape you want. I went for it circle because circles are kind of nice, everybody like circles. And we are starting off by getting rid of the water column. This is little pen tool here and we are selecting a color which we want to use. It obviously has to match your presentation. So make sure to watch the session before in order to know how to match colors. And what you want to do now is either copy by pressing Control C and then pasting it with pressing Control V, Or you just hold Control or Command if you're on a Mac and draw with your mouse. A second circle. Ok, this already looks good. In this presentation, we are having six talking points. So this could be definitely more than six slides, but definitely six points and you want to show the audience in which part they are. So we need six circles. And what you can see if you draw this, it shows you if the distances between the circles is correct. So and obviously we want to have the correct distance if you are not sure, you can also draw like shape, which helps like a guiding shape, which you could use. And then you can fit, fitted using those guiding shapes. This is something designers often do, but in general, it works really well with this snappy thing from Google. So let's see, 1-2-3, 4-5-6. We have our sixth circuits. Okay? The next thing we want to do is highlight this circle where we are at. So to look at this once again, we add number four at the slides that we want to highlight the fourth circle in order to show, okay, this is where we are. And I suggest doing this by selecting a darker color. So let's select this color. It's pretty bright, but I think this works pretty well. And the next thing we want to do is add some text. And the text is basically just a number where we are and unfortunately doesn't really work if we start typing into those boxes. Because it just, it just doesn't work really well. So this is not a solution for us. The thing, what we want to do actually is we want to create textboxes. And we type into those textboxes. Obviously, we use the fund which we selected before. Let's say in this case, I think it might be rubato. And we are going very small. Let's say like a seven. Looks fine to me. It's probably get rid of that, but I don't think we need that dot. Yeah, maybe we can even get away with tonight. What we want to do is we want to align the typing into the center. And now we're moving it into the middle. And then we have the first box. Or we can do now is we can copy and paste it. If you use the arrow keys. You can have you have to go left twice and up twice, and then you're exactly at the same position. Now you can just go down and if it doesn't work perfectly, then hold down the Shift key and place it perfectly. That looks pretty good. And I'm just gonna speed run it here a little bit. Okay, with the highlighted dot, I always suggest you use a different color in order to make it even more clear that it is something specific so that this point really stands out. And here we have it, that is our progress bar. And what you can do now is you can select everything. So you make sure that you don't select the background with the image, but you just select those numbers and those circles and you can group them together, group, and then once you click on it, everything will be selected. So if you create a new slide and you also want to have this this progress bar on that slide as well. You can just copy it over and it will be exactly at the same place. And obviously you can change the numbers and the colors. 7. Subtle yet effective Animations: Transitions and animations. Transitions and animations are tricky one, you need to be very, very careful when using them. It's a little bit like sweets. Have a little choppy here and there, and it's amazing. Eat chocolate non-stop. And the effects will be bad, which is a shame as short as pricking. Amazing. Anyway, be careful about transitions and when using them, less is better, especially if they, especially as they don't work in PDFs and when printed hence in the formula presentation might end up in. However, there are two things I often like doing and presentations. First, I animate key messages. This helps building suspense as i can control exactly when that method shows up on the screen. And it helps me to get people more excited for what's to come. And you could use this, for example, to highlight your main idea or the Big Bang number that you want to present. And here's how you do it. Welcome back to Google slides. This is the animation I want to show you. Obviously this presentation is again completely made up, but let's say we want to present some goals and we want to have them show up after one and another. With its animation, I can determine that they only appear when I click. And this is a neat little feature because I don't want to, people read about growth while I'm still talking about reliability. And hence, I am using this animation. So there are multiple ways to achieve this effect. One way would be to duplicate this like a couple of times and then delete, delete those boxes so that you have basically slides, each slide showing a bit more information. That would be one way, but I think sleeker and nicer way would be to select all three boxes you want to animate. And you do this by holding down the control key and then clicking on them. And then click either here on animate or an insert animation. And you can see this little three circuits pop up. And the default animation that will appear is you click once and all those three boxes you had selected will appear. But this is not what we want. We want them to appear on a click. So we have to change each individual, individual by clicking on this little arrow key and then selecting on click. And then we can double-check if everything worked as planned. And we see I'm pressing the arrow keys now, but you can also click with a mouse. And just as we wanted. So this neat little animation, they run with it. And you will discover a few little features that can really help your presentation to stand out. Second thing I like doing as TNC image transitions. This is something I use very rarely as, because as I said, too much can look very cheap and also distract from your message. But here it is. I like to show one image on two slides and set a transition between those two slides. It can have a really cool effect. The next animation I sometimes like using looks like this. You have a car that's lights from one slide to the next and some new text appears. And functionally Google just change that animation a little bit. It used to be that the previous chart was being pushed out and now the new chances just overlaying over it. But I think this animation still looks fun and you can still use it from time to time. So we start off by putting an image on our chart and then we place it where we want to place it. Let's say we want to place it right about here. Maybe lower. Let's say we want to fix it here for the text. I'm just going to copy over this text. And now we need to crop the image. We need to crop it in order to place the cab perfectly on the second slide. And I'm going to show you just how to do that. So we cropping it until this red line appears that indicates that the, that we are at the bottom of the slide. And now we can hit control D if we select the slide and we press Control D, And we're going to duplicate this slide. And now what we can do is we are selecting the car wants more or whatever you want to animate could be anything. And we wrote down the arrow key to the left arrow key so that it's perfectly on the same axis. We don't want to go up or down. We want to stay in the same height. And therefore we just use the left arrow key and we place it perfectly. We can actually zoom in a little bit. In order to be perfect. He plays it perfectly on the border. And I think this actually looks pretty good. So we zoom out again. And what we're going to do next is we, um, crop the image. So for car is SPECT and full. And we obviously also have to place the text at a better angle. Think about here, looks pretty good. So it's perfectly aligned to the middle center. And we can check what we already have. One tube. Obviously that is jumping quite a bit. So what we need to do is we click on this light we want to add the transition to so that it is highlighted on the left side. And then we go either to transition, all we are going to slide transition. And here we can add this transition. And we want the slide to push in from the right side. And we can hit play and see how it looks. And we can already see that the KM is going from one side to the next. Let's look at it and present mode. And you can see it is not perfect because we have this car is a PNG file. It kind of shows what is happening below it. And we don't really want this. And there's a simple fix. It used to be different before Google changed it, but there's, luckily there is a fixed. Oops, we zoom out to 50% and then we are going to draw a white box. And let's draw right about here. We again have to get rid of the outline. I don't know why they always add outline. I hate outlines. And we up filling it with perfect white colour. Or if this light would have background color, we would use the same background-color and know we send this to back. And now we can look what happens if we go back to present. And the car is driving perfectly from one side to the next goal. I hope this transition helps you a little bit to spice up your next presentation. There are more animations to play around with, but it's important that you don't overdo them. Keep it simple, keep it clean, and it will look professional. 8. Don't Overuse Bullet Points: Use of bullet points, just like transitions and animations, bullet points can be amazing, but they can also ruin a good presentation. Thing is all brains like structure and the list, especially a numbered list, is like for painful or brain. It just cannot resist. It sees a list and it wants to consume it. And this is why BuzzFeed is pumping out all these articles such as ten terrible decision of or ten things you didn't know about our brain for some very weird reason, just tells us to look at those lists. So what happens if your brain sees a list? It starts reading top to bottom. This means the attention is on the list and people probably won't hear what you have to say. We lose our audience. On the other hand, we lose them to the information we want to bring across. So again, what is the purpose of your presentation? If you want to pitch an idea, be careful with bullet points. If you want to summarize or educate the bullet point lists, might just what you need. Here. Animation can also come in handy, say your point with all the attention on you. And then use animations to show the point on screen to confirm what you just said. Make sure to focus on a few points only. If you show more than six points, you might overload the brain, rather go for a, for a maximum of five points. If this isn't possible, split them up into charts or find another way to structure them. Another good reason why you would want to use a bullet point list. It helps you to ensure that you don't forget to say anything. They don't only give structure to your audience, but they also give structure to you, especially when you are nervous in the beginning of a presentation, you can share the attention with a neat little bullet point lists and get some room to breathe, they can really be your best friend. But as I said, if you want the spotlight on you and you don't want your audience to start reading, avoid them. 9. How to Work with Images: It's just that don't distract. Avoid moving images such as gifts. Images can make your presentation stand out. But as everything else, they can also district majorly from what you are saying. Here's what you need to know about images. Use clean images that support what you're saying. But that are very easy to understand that the viewers don't spend too much time looking at them. This is an example for a bad image. There's just too much going on. The eyes need to scan the image. And while doing so, there's very little attention to what you're actually saying. This, on the other hand, can work just fine. For some weird reason, pigs are the international symbol for saving money. And the image is very easy to understand and the audience won't be very distracted because it doesn't need to look at it so much. In other example, let's just assume you want to say why Berlin is the best place for your business. You can take a fancy night image of Berlin. Or you could take this image which is less distracting and transports the message just as well. Another important thing to consider is using images with transparency, especially if you work with multiple layers, such as a background gradient or background color, you might want to use images that don't have a background. These are typical PNG files. Jpegs always have a background if the image is empty, this format will fill that space with white overlay, removing background and saving it as a PNG allows you to use it without a white background. Here's how you do it. I'm going to quickly demonstrate how you can remove the background in images and saved them as a PNG which allows us to have a transparent background. We, you don't even need to have Photoshop in order to get it done. I have to admit Photoshop is in my opinion, the best tool to get the job done. But there's a really cool free tool which anybody can use. It's called pixlr.com. It has almost the same functions and it'll actually almost looks the same like Photoshop. So if you go to their website, you can select different languages. So it works also in, in many, many different languages. And you have advanced options or you have playful options. For today. Let's go for the advanced one. You land on this page and you can upload an image by clicking on open image. And I'm just going to select one. And then next thing you can select, if you want to work with full HD image or like an ultra HD image, and you always want to work with the maximum. This gives you the most freedom. And therefore select this one and the image pops open. If you are familiar with Photoshop, it looks pretty much the same. Our task now is to remove this whitish gray background from his phone so that we can use only the phone in presentation. First step for almost any image alterations you're going to do is to duplicate the background basis. So we're heading over to the right side to the layers. And we are going to right click and hit duplicate layer. And then we're going to disable the layer in the background. This is just if we screw up, we have it there. This is our fallback solution in case something goes wrong. Now, we have to remove the background. And there are multiple different ways of doing so. As the background has a very high contrast to the object, we want to single out the phone. We can work with the magic wand tool. This is this little tool on the left side, one select tool, and it's called him. And we have to find the right settings. So we have to play around with tolerance and with feathers. Tolerance basically means, for example, if we have a low tolerance and we click on a white pixel, it will select all the pixels until it hits the border of darker pixels. And if we have a high tolerance, tolerance obviously is much higher. So if we select 233, it will basically select the whole image. And if we go to very low, let's say we go to six, it will only select a very small corner. Actually quite a big corner, but you can see our selection is not perfect. They're like little pixels which were too dark, which were excluded from all selection. So the tolerant six is too small. I think best would be to go with value for this image, maybe around 27. Let's try this one out. We're just going to click into the image. Give, give them a second to figure everything out. Anything that's worked pretty well. We have quite a good selection here. I'm just not sure if we need to add a little bit of feather. Let's add like a tiny bit of, tiny amount of feather like five or 88 is good, I think. Clicking again once more, give the system a second to adjust everything. And you can see that this little dots which we were seeing before, everyone, here's one left. But in general, it is a much cleaner selection which we can now build upon. So next thing I want to do, we can either start isolating this image now by hitting delete, but I want to make it better. I'm selecting the marquee select tool and I'm going to change the mode, I'm going to go to Add to selection mode because otherwise our previous selection would be deleted. But now we're going to just add to our selection. And I'm going to draw a box over these highlighted points. And you can see they are added. They are added to our selection. And we can just go over here, make sure that our whole selection is perfect. Okay, I think this election should be pretty good. Next step is deleting the background. We just hit delete, and that's it. We're going to get rid of this election by just clicking outside of the image. And now we can zoom in. And I have to say, it looks pretty good to me. This is probably not perfect for a catalog, but for a presentation where the image will be much, much smaller, it is, it is actually pretty, pretty good. We can definitely work with it. So the last step is just to go to File, Save, select PNG, name, your file accordingly. Iphone, transparent, and hit download. And that's it. Thanks so much for watching. Please note, it is not always so easy to remove the background if there's like a low contrast or high detail on the image, the software might struggle a little bit and you need to adjust manually. Needs actually experience. But you can also Google for images without a background. And let's say we are looking for the Facebook logo. We visit Google, type in Facebook logo PNG. And because we want to have a PNG file, that's why we look for it. Then we select the Images Tab and German scope beta. And then we hop over to search filters. And here we can select, if we go to color and German father, we can even select transparent. And this will give us some logos that usually have the term PNG and that have a transparent background. Let's select the first one is from Wikipedia. Usually very good source for downloading logos. So we right-click it and we say, save the image and we see it as a PNG file. I'm just going to save it. And here we have the logo. We can right-click it, see once more it is a PNG file. I'm just going to create a new slide real quick. Pop this graphic in and to see if it works, I'm going to create a shape. And I put this into the bag by clicking order center bag. And here we can see there is no border around it is transparent. Never starting image. I've seen this so many times and it really identifies unprofessionalism. Always keep the margins of an image. If something doesn't fit, crop, never distort the image. It's bad, very bad. Here's how you do it correctly. We have two images on this slide. And we want both images to have the size and dimension of the right one image, this landscape photograph. So one thing you should never do is stretch an image or distorted image to make it fit. That means like grabbing it like so and then pulling it like this. This looks upon professional. They have the same size now, but it looks horrible. This is something you don't want to do. The much better way of doing it to ensure that they have the same size is by transforming them, grabbing the handles on the right side. And to ensure that the ratio of the imaged stays the same, it is a high-quality image. That's why we can make it a little bit bigger. It doesn't lose quality yet. And then now they have the same width. Then we're going to double-click this image in order to activate crop mode. You see this little black things appeared. And now we can make it much smaller. And Google gives us some nice guiding lines. And we can see the picture underneath so we can make sure that it's exactly the same size. Now I don't really like to shut this. Let's say it's about coffee. And obviously we want the coffee to be in the middle so we can click on the image itself and drag it upwards and ensure that the coffee is in the frame. We click outside of the image to deactivate crop mode. And there you have it. We have two images of the same size and no distortion. That's how you do it. Never use pixelated images. Don't have professional high-resolution images. You can use US sites such as unspliced or other stock image sides. Make sure you have the rights for that picture, especially if it will be a public presentation. I'd like to use Flickr or ans pledged to search for images where I'll have free rights. Make sure to find really good matching images for your presentation. Dedicate heaps of time into finding the best image is possible or even better produce them. If you cannot produce any and you have unprofessional images, ask yourself, do you really need those images? Sometimes a simple shape element, such as aligner circle helps you to emphasize your point even better than any image could do. 10. The Importance of the Last Slide: Your last chart for your main message. The last chart is often used for two things, saying thank you and to show contact details while saying thank you is in general pretty lame. And waste is one of the most valuable spaces in the entire presentation. The contact details make much more sense. However, consider that this chart might be the one that is up on the big screen for the longest time. Because usually when a presentation is done, the Q and a session starts, or your audience wants to cut something, it is much better to use the last slide for your key message and bring home your pitch or stress the one key takeaway the audience should remember, I like to use last chart or last light for a call to action and I tell the audience what has to happen next. I tell them to contact me or to follow me on social media. Or if I would be pitching something, I would tell them to invest into this idea. And I will present the key takeaways of this presentation once more on the last chart, if you have been presenting a prototype, shown again on the last slide, if you presented numbers, show the key learnings. Really put some thought into what you want to show on the last slide, the beginning and the end of the presentation is well, you will have the attention of your audience, use it. 11. Show, Don't Tell: Show, don't tell. Last tip. And this is what separates the amateurs from the pros. By far, the most powerful thing you can do in any presentation is not to talk about something, but to show it. It's like hear me talking about presentations is not as catchy as me showing what it's actually like to create a presentation. Show. Don't tell, especially if you need to win over your audience. For example, in a pitch, show your prototype. If it is a digital product, great, Put it on the screen, navigate through the prototype, interact with the product, and what it can actually do if it is a proper haptic item, bring it to the presentation, give it to the audience. Everybody will want to hold it in their hands and feel it. It will make the presentation stand out so much more and will make it so much memorable. Specs and facts are interesting, but they just cannot compete with the real deal, the product. Even if you're only presenting the company's numbers to evaluate last year success, print out the most important slide and show it. Spice up a boring presentation by introducing a second medium. Show don't tell is also the reason why Elon Musk is smashing car windows onstage. Refer program. It is the key to be remembered. And delivering information that is being remembered is the key to almost any presentation. 12. Class Project: That's it. Those were the design principles which you should have in mind to create better presentations. I hope you had some learnings and you can use them right away. Let's lay, I would also like you to ask to participate in the class project shows light from a presentation you were working on before and after listening to this class, what did you change? You can then discuss your design with others and probably learn even more from their feedback. And I will also answer to each project being submitted and give my feedback if you liked this class. Also do me a favor and brighter review for this class and subscribe for more content and marketing. Lastly, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Here's, here's my LinkedIn. Thanks so much for listening. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next class.