In this day and age almost everybody has seen a presentation using a standard template. Most of the time people tend to use the default templates provided by the software due to a lack of time. They want to create presentations which are simple in nature and easy to understand. To achieve this they use the one presentation they know pretty well and, you guessed it, bullet points!
Most of us encounter these sort of presentations while attending high school and college while introducing students to each other. As a result you’ll get around 20 or 30 presentations using the exact same style and they are DULL! In my experience (and I’m sure lots of others) I stop paying attention after the first couple of slides with the exception of my friends 😉 and move on to other stuff like playing with my phone, looking around, talking to other people etc.
People, myself included lack the time and resources to create a Steve Jobsian presentation. Here are a couple of simple pointers to create a better presentation as you’ll see by the image demonstrated below (the complete file is included at the end of this post for you to download).
The slides are very simple to set up. All you need is a good quality background picture, a gradient for contrast and some bold colored text. If you are using a smaller image you can remove the background of the image using the remove alpha included in Keynote Simplicity is key! Use animations where needed and use them sparingly but most importantly, keep it consistent. Since the audience can’t read the whole slide and divert attention this is your chance to present a presentation which will stand out.
This is where improvisation comes in, Keynote offers a presenter view which you can use to keep some notes. Keep these short and practice your presentation a couple of times in advance. More often then not you will think of some anecdote while presenting and you can include it in the presentation without disrupting the flow.
I hope this has been informative for you and I would like to thank you for reading. If you would like to leave some feedback you can use the comment section to do so.
Guus Beckers is an avid Keynote enthusiast who likes to create presentations. In his spare time he likes to read books, watch movies and going out. During the day he studies Computer Forensics.