Keep Your Slides Clean and Organized

It probably goes without saying that clarity should be the ultimate goal for your presentation. You want your audience to understand the information you are presenting as easily as possible, and the way to achieve that is to present one idea or topic at a time. Just as you were taught that a proper sentence should never contain more than one statement, you should never cram too many topic items into a single slide. Doing so will create confusion - not only for your audience, but for yourself as well.

Don’t write a story – all text should be in bullet point format

The real benefit to using bullet points is that your template slides will look much cleaner and visually organized. But there are other advantages to keeping your layout very thin.

First of all, it’s considered bad form to read your slide word for word when giving an oral presentation. No matter how tempted you are to write out your information in complete sentences, you must resist the urge. It will sound much more professional if you talk through your bullet points in a free-form manner. Second, you don’t want your audience to be focused on reading your slides. All of their attention should be on you and the words you are speaking. You are the expert – and they want to hear you speak about the topic at hand. Don’t make them work by reading your slides.

Use images wherever possible

It’s perfectly okay to include images to support your text, and as a matter of fact, it can be an extremely beneficial thing to do for several reasons. First, since images take up a lot of space, it will force you to use less text on your slide. This is a good thing. Second, images are sometimes much more descriptive than text – many people understand things quicker with some sort of visual aid to guide them.

The sad truth is that most people, no matter how well their intentions are, have very short attention spans. Even simple images can hold someone’s attention much longer than blocks of text can. As long as your images support the text you have on your slide, your presentation template will be much more interesting – and informative - by including them.
Alignment of all your elements

Just as we described in our section about Principles of Good Design, consistent alignment of all your elements (text, titles, images, etc) will help to make things very organized. You should never float your elements randomly on a page.