Apply This Simple Framework to Produce High-Quality PowerPoint Slides

Learn how to create a meaningful slide deck by implementing a few simple tips.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

All of us, at one point of our career, need to present our ideas to a wider audience. The traditional slide deck is still the most popular way to inform or persuade your audience. It works well for online meetings and it is the medium of choice for face to face meetings.

But how to create a compelling slide deck for your presentation? The good news is: You don’t need to be a full-time slide guru to produce good looking slides. Everybody can create executive level business presentations by following a few simple techniques. Throughout my career in consulting, I sticked to a few basic rules that I would like to share with you in this article.

The Framework

Let’s explore the three building blocks that I advise you to follow:

• Storyboard: The first building block provides the necessary techniques to build up a seamless storyline connecting all slides with each other. A good storyboard grabs your audience’s attention and keeps them engaged throughout the presentation. This is also referred to as the horizontal logic of your slide deck.
• Slide Content: The second building block provides guidance on how to structure and visualize the content per slide. Every slide in your presentation must serve a purpose and must support the overall storyline. This is referred to as the vertical logic of your slides.
• Slide Formatting and Foundation: Your presentation must be based on a solid foundation. It ensures that all slides within your deck follow a certain set of quality standards for a consistent and professional look. This is described in the third building block of the framework.

Presentation framework

First Layer — Storyboard

You should not create a slide deck that feels like a loosely coupled collection of random thoughts. Instead, you want to create a seamless story that is woven into each slide of your presentation. To achieve this, you must take care of the following:

• Understand the context: You must understand who your audience is. Are they decision makers? Are they implementors? What is their intention? Why are they attending the meeting? What is the purpose of your presentation? Do you want to inform your audience or do you want to persuade your audience? A clear understanding of the context is the first step to create a compelling presentation.
• Define an overriding question: The overriding question is the overall theme of your presentation. It is a thoughtful description of the problem or situation you are trying to solve and what success will look like for your audience.
• Structure your solution: With your overriding question defined, it is now time to break down the problem into distinct topics. Topic trees or mind maps are good tools for a divide-and-conquer approach to complex problems. It is important to follow the MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) principle. MECE means that with each level of segmentation, you cover all aspects (collectively exhaustive) and the aspects do not overlap each other (mutually exclusive). It is a great concept that ensures that your solution to the overriding question is well structured.
• Create a storyline: You need to engage with your audience. Like a good book, you need to have a well-crafted storyline for your presentation. In your presentation, you should use action titles on every slide. An action title is a full sentence at the top of your page. All action titles read out sequentially form the storyline of your presentation. For more information on action titles, take a look at this article.

Nerd Alert: Adhering to the MECE principle is a fundamental consulting skill that you must understand and apply to your work (not only presentations). It is a simple tool that allows you to check if a solution is complete and coherent.

Second Layer — Slide Content

Every slide in your presentation must be well crafted. It can be achieved by the following:

• Create slide content: Good content requires deep research and expertise in the field relevant to the problem. Once you have collected all necessary input, you must down-select the most important aspects. Eventually, the content must add value for your audience and directly support your storyline.
• Visualize the content: Depending on the content for your slide, you must choose the best-fitting visualization. Are you presenting a roadmap? Use a simple sequence of milestones. Do you want to show a project plan? Well, then use a Gantt chart. Do you want to compare different options along various dimensions? Maybe you could provide a simple table with Harvey balls representing each dimension subject to comparison.
• Reduce the complexity: Less is more — the most common mistake during a presentation is that you are cramming too much information on a single slide. As a rule of thumb, try to limit the number of categories or topics you want to present on your slide to three or four. For more complex topics, use overview and drill-down slides. Complex concepts such as a system landscape can be approached in layers, start with the top layer and then subsequently drill down into the underlying details.
• Write an opening and closing: A strong opening is paramount to the success of your presentation. Remember that your audience’s attention is at its highest in the beginning. Likewise, reinforce your key messages at the end when attention rises again.

Example slide

Third Layer — Slide Formatting and Foundation

The greatest content in the world does not speak for itself. You must invest significant time to polish every slide to achieve a harmonious and consistent look. By following a few simple rules, you will be able to create consistent and good-looking slides:

• Layout: Every slide must use the same layout. Ideally, you define the basic layout components in your slide master. Basic components are the header section, the main content section and the footer section.
• Alignment: It is advisable to define horizontal and vertical guides. Elements on your slide should be aligned to those guides. Make sure that you always use equal width and height as well as equal distance between related elements such as text boxes or images.
• Fonts and colors: Consistency is king! Do not mix different font styles in the deck. Stick to a set of two to four different font sizes. Do not make excessive use of color, less is more. Make sure that text is readable by providing enough contrast, stick to white and black for the text color.
• Consistency check: You should apply a few simple checks to ensure that there is consistency across the complete slide deck. This will allow your audience to follow the presentation much easier. Checks are for instance: a spell and grammar check, consistent use of terminology, decent image quality and logical ordering of elements.

Basic slide layout

Do you want to learn how to create a compelling slide deck from scratch or polish an existing slide deck? Then check out this comprehensive guide.