Effective Presentations

Presentation is used to summarize, defend or even argue important ideas to an audience. Thus, the beginning of the presentation gains the attention of audiences and establishes its purpose. Selecting the context, designing the learning experience and producing efficient, effective and appealing presentation can be easy though it is the hardest part (Courses & Surveys, 1977).

To produce an appealing presentation, one should keep the design short and simple in order to produce effective design. The color should be used to emphasize a word or use a transition to disclose the answer to a question.

The designer should evade the confusion. It is better off to have extra white space than having irrelevant piece of clipart that can be distracting. Fewer words should be chosen rather than more words and use closely cropped photographs than cluttered distance shot (Courses & Surveys, 1977). The viewers should be kept focused and interested. This can be done by using key phrases and including only essential information.

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The word should be limited and simplified and avoid using of much bullets per slides. The presentation should be easy to follow by keeping the important information visible.

The punctuation and font case should be considered. For instance, use of all caps makes the statements more difficult to read. The font size and type used should be simple and easy to read. Thus the designer should avoid using fancy and script fonts as they are hard to read on the screen. The font type and size should be visible to the audience and uniform throughout the presentation (Courses & Surveys, 1977). Consequently, the background colors and that of the text should be contrasting. It is preferred to use dark text on a light background.

Color should be toned down to make the light colors easy on the eyes. Patterned or textured backgrounds reduce readability of the text. The color scheme used should remain consistent throughout the presentation. In addition to that, when using a theme or template for a design, it should be appropriate to the audience. Therefore, a layout should be straightforward and clean if the design is aimed for business and if aimed the audience to be young children, it should be full of colors and variety of shapes (Courses & Surveys, 1977).

The number of slides should be limited to ensure that the presentation will not be too long and drawn out. This prevents the problem of continually changing the slides during the presentation which can be a distraction to the audience or viewers. For the presentation to be effective and more attracting there should be a combination of photos, charts, graphs and even embedded digitalized video with text to add variety and keep the presentation interested to the viewers.

In addition, excessive use of animation and transition should be avoided. This is because the audience can be distracted by too much of the transitions and animation bearing in mind that slide shows is meant to be a visual aid but not a focus of the presentation. Also animation should be consistent in the presentation by using of animation schemes and the same transitions should be used throughout the presentation (Courses & Surveys, 1977).

Finally, the designer or rather the presenter should make sure that his/her presentation can run on any computers. This can be done by using PowerPoint’s package for CD or Pack and Go features when burning the presentation to CD. This will facilitate the presentation to be viewed by much audience. Summarily therefore, an effective and efficient presentation is usually planned, organized, and tailored to a specific audience to help facilitate the behavior change, desired by the presenter.

Presentations always engage face-to-face communication and can be made on a one-to-one basis or can be given to a very large group (Courses & Surveys, 1977).

References

1. Courses, E. & Surveys, T. (1977) The Computer for the Professional: Effective Presentations Microsoft® PowerPoint® tutorial, Preparing Presentation Slides Tutorial, Presenting Effective Charts and Graphs Tutorial, and 8 Secrets to a Knockout Business Presentation, New York: Prentice Hall.