Slidesharing sites like Slideshare and Slideboom are a great place to get inspiration on PowerPoint slide design. You can see different ideas and adapt them for your own presentations. Slideshare is currently running the World’s Best Presentation Contest (see footnote) which has some great examples of PowerPoint slide design. To save you time I’ve picked two sample slides from the 5 most popular entries. They’ll offer you inspiration for the design of your own slides.
(To see the whole slideshow click on the link I’ve provided for each set of slides).
1. Play with text
Non-designers (like me) tend to assume that text has to be all the same size, the same colour, left or centre-justified.
Here are examples of playing with text from Ethos3’s entry into the competition.
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2. Illustrate statistics
Here’s an interesting way of showing statistics – zoom in on the trend lines. Note also the use of different coloured text to highlight the increase. This is from jbrenman:
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3. Use pictures instead of words
This next example by pdharam is from the “Creative/Offbeat” category – but offers a possibility for business presentations. Use a picture that says it all – no words from you or the screen.
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4. A fantastic metaphor
This slide deck by grahairs uses the metaphor of an elevator for the seven levels of love. Between each level, there’s a slide with the lift going up. What could you use this metaphor for?
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5. Creative masking
This set of slides about the destruction of the Amazon by gauperes uses creative masking techniques. The mask is the semi-transparent circle underlying the text, allowing the text to stand out from the background. Normally the mask is simply a rectangle and is only there to ensure the text is legible. However, in this case, the mask also represents size:
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Footnote
It’s not really the World’s Best Presentation Contest, because these are slide decks not live presentations. The slide decks have been designed to be self-explanatory without any narration. It should be called the World’s Best SlideDeck Contest.
Thanks for sharing this it really helped with my project. And i noticed u spelled stuff the non-american way xD good list though, i made my text rainbow color! 😀
Great tips. If you want to see all these in action, you need to take a peek at some of the coolest presentations on SlideShare:
Check for presentations from Sudio Sudarsan or JWT Intelligence who regularly post insightful and creative slide decks.