Presentation Design Choices: How To Design Slides That Work

Design Slides that Work

Your slides are the most visible part of your presentation — and, for many presenters, the most neglected. The assumption tends to be that slides are a secondary concern: get the content right first, then dress it up. In practice, poor slide design actively undermines good content. An audience that's straining to read dense text, squinting at low-contrast colours, or waiting for animations to finish is an audience that has mentally stepped out of your presentation.

Good presentation design isn't about making slides look impressive. It's about making your message clear. Every design decision you make — your choice of theme, colour, font, image and layout — either helps your audience absorb what you're saying or gets in the way of it. The best-designed slides are almost invisible: your audience pays attention to you and your message, not to your slide deck.

This guide covers the key design choices every presenter faces and explains how to make them well. Throughout, we draw on real presentation examples from our blog — both strong designs that demonstrate what good looks like, and weaker ones that illustrate what to avoid.

What Good Presentation Design Actually Achieves

The purpose of a slide is not to contain your presentation — it's to support it. That distinction matters enormously. A slide deck that contains your full content is essentially a document: it can exist without you, which means you become a voiceover rather than a presenter. A slide deck that supports your content is something quite different: it provides the visual element that your words alone cannot, and it draws your audience's attention to exactly where you want it.

Good design achieves this by being selective. It shows what needs to be shown and leaves out what doesn't. It uses space deliberately — both the space that's filled and the space that's left empty. It creates a visual hierarchy that tells your audience where to look first and what matters most. And it maintains consistency throughout, so that each slide feels like part of the same coherent whole rather than a collection of independently assembled pieces.

The clearest way to see what good design achieves is to look at it in practice. Our blog features regular reviews of real-world presentation slides — from corporate results decks to political briefings — with analysis of what works, what doesn't, and why. The examples referenced throughout this page all come from that presentation archive.

The Design Foundations: Theme, Colour and Font

Before you add a single piece of content, you make three foundational design decisions: your theme, your colour palette, and your typography. Get these right and everything that follows becomes easier. Get them wrong and no amount of good content will save the deck.

Theme: Build Your Own, or Use Your Corporate Identity

The single most common presentation design mistake is using a pre-built PowerPoint or Keynote theme unchanged. Pre-built themes are familiar to your audience — sometimes embarrassingly so — and they signal a lack of investment in the presentation. If your organisation has a corporate theme, use it: it provides consistency and professionalism. If it doesn't, build a simple custom theme of your own. It doesn't need to be elaborate — a clear background colour, a consistent font, and a simple layout can be enough to make your deck feel considered and distinctive.

Colour: Use It With Purpose

Colour is one of the most powerful and most misused design tools available to presenters. Strong, purposeful colour choices give a presentation energy, clarity, and visual identity. Weak or arbitrary choices create visual noise. The key principles: choose a palette of two or three colours that work together, ensure sufficient contrast between text and background, and use accent colours consistently to highlight what matters. Avoid the default colour palettes that come with presentation software — they are used by millions of presenters and give your deck an instantly generic look.

Font and Font Size: Readability Comes First

Your font choices should be governed by one principle above all others: readability at distance. Whatever looks clean and legible on your laptop screen may be very different when projected onto a large screen and viewed from the back of a room. Use sans-serif fonts — they project more cleanly than serif fonts in most presentation contexts. Restrict yourself to one or two fonts per deck. And make your text larger than you think you need to: a minimum of 30pt for body text is a useful rule of thumb. If your text needs to be smaller than that to fit on the slide, there is too much text on the slide.

Images, Charts and Visual Impact

The most powerful slides are often the ones with the least text and the most visual impact. A large, well-chosen image — one that captures the feeling or concept behind what you're saying — does something that words and bullet points cannot: it creates an immediate emotional or intellectual response in your audience. Use that.

Large Photographs

Most presentation slides benefit from larger images than presenters typically use. A photograph that fills the slide — or dominates it — has far more impact than a small image tucked into a corner next to a block of text. Source high-quality photographs from stock libraries (both free and paid options are widely available) and scale them up. The investment in a strong visual pays back in audience attention and slide memorability.

Charts and Graphs

Charts are most effective when they tell a clear, specific story. Before adding a chart, ask what point this chart makes — if you can't state it in a single sentence, the chart may be too complex for a slide. Use PowerPoint's build and transition features for charts where they genuinely help: revealing a graph progressively as you talk through its elements keeps your audience with you rather than reading ahead. Avoid using transitions on text or images, where they almost always feel like a distraction.

Video and Audio

Multimedia used well gives your audience a moment of variety that refreshes their attention. A short video clip, a piece of audio, or an animated graphic can make a point more effectively than a static slide — particularly for case studies, product demonstrations, or anything that benefits from motion. Keep multimedia clips short, ensure the quality is high, and test everything thoroughly before the presentation. A video that fails to load mid-presentation is among the most damaging technical failures a presenter can experience.

Simplicity: The Hardest and Most Important Design Choice

Every piece of design guidance points in the same direction: simpler is better. And yet the instinct to add more — more text, more points, more slides — is almost universal. Understanding why simplicity is so hard to achieve is the first step towards achieving it.

Eliminate Bullet Points

Bullet points are the default format for presentation slides because they are the default format for notes. That's the problem: a slide built from bullet points is a notes page, not a visual aid. Your audience will read the bullets faster than you speak them, arrive at the end of the list before you do, and switch off while they wait for you to catch up. Replace bullet points with a single key word, a number, a statistic, or a short quote. Let your spoken words carry the explanation. Your slides become a backdrop that reinforces your message rather than a script your audience is reading along with.

Use Space

White space — or coloured space, if your background isn't white — is not wasted space. It is one of the most effective design tools available to you. A slide with a single strong image and four words of text, surrounded by space, directs your audience's attention precisely. A slide crammed to its edges with content directs their attention nowhere in particular. Every slide should have room to breathe. If adding an element to a slide means removing space to fit it, consider whether the element is necessary.

One Idea Per Slide

The discipline of one idea per slide feels constraining at first and liberating in practice. When each slide carries a single point, you can make that point visually and verbally without compromise. Your audience knows exactly where they are in your argument at all times. And the transition between slides marks the transition between ideas — which gives your presentation a rhythm and clarity that a densely packed deck can never achieve.

What Happens When Design Goes Wrong: Real Examples

The Classic Template Problem

Using an unmodified default PowerPoint template in a professional context signals one of two things: either the presenter didn't have time to design something appropriate, or they didn't consider design worth the effort. Neither impression serves you well. Default templates are also visually familiar to your audience in the worst possible way — they have seen this deck, or something very like it, many times before. It makes everything that follows feel generic, regardless of the quality of the content.

Death by PowerPoint

'Death by PowerPoint' is a phrase so widely used it has almost lost its meaning — but the phenomenon it describes is very real and very common. It refers to the cumulative effect of slides that are too numerous, too text-heavy, too uniform in format, and too disconnected from a speaker who is reading them rather than presenting from them. The result is an audience that has checked out long before the final slide. The antidote is not fewer slides per se, but slides that are designed to work with the speaker rather than to carry the entire presentation independently.

Slides That Send Audiences to Sleep

Some decks fail not because of any single egregious design error but because of accumulated monotony: the same layout on every slide, the same colour, the same density of text, the same structure repeated without variation. An audience's attention requires stimulation and variety. A deck with no visual surprise, no moments of contrast, and no change of pace is an audience engagement problem — and it's a design problem as much as a content one.

Organise Your Slide Deck With the Same Care as Your Speech

A well-designed individual slide can still belong to a poorly organised deck. The structure of your slide deck should mirror the structure of your speech: a clear opening section that establishes your purpose and context, a middle that develops your argument or information logically, and a close that lands your key message and tells the audience what comes next.

Use PowerPoint's Slide Sorter view as a structural tool, not just a navigational one. Viewing your entire deck as a grid of thumbnails reveals structural problems that are invisible when you're building slide by slide: sections that go on too long, transitions between topics that aren't clearly signalled, or closing slides that don't feel like an arrival. Be prepared to reorder, combine or remove slides at this stage — the discipline of reviewing the deck as a whole is as important as the care you put into individual slides.

Finally, test every transition and animation in the actual presentation environment before the day. What looks smooth on your laptop may behave differently through a venue's AV system. Transitions that work are invisible to your audience. Transitions that don't work are all they remember.

Make Better Design Choices on Your Next Presentation

The design choices you make for your slides are part of your presentation, not a finishing touch. They shape how your audience experiences your content before you've said a word, and they either reinforce or undermine everything you say. Investing in them is investing in your overall effectiveness as a presenter.

For more presentation design examples — good and bad — explore the presentations archive on our blog. And for help developing your full range of presentation skills, browse our complete tips library or get in touch to discuss training options.