Design advice for presentations tends to fall into two camps. Either it's too vague ("make it look good") or it assumes you've studied graphic design. This guide is neither.
These are specific, actionable tips. Most of them take five minutes or less to apply. Together, they'll make a bigger difference than any template you've ever downloaded.
Tip 1: Understand CARP (The Four Design Principles)
Before the specific tips, there's a framework worth knowing. Almost every design principle falls under one of four categories, commonly called CARP:
- Contrast — Make different things look different. Make similar things look similar.
- Alignment — Every element should be visually connected to something on the page.
- Repetition — Use the same visual elements consistently throughout.
- Proximity — Group related items together. Separate unrelated items.
When a slide looks "off" and you're not sure why, run through this checklist. Usually one of these four things is wrong. Fix it and the slide suddenly works.
Tip 2: Make Contrast Work Harder
Contrast doesn't just mean dark text on light background (though that's the most important application). It means visual difference that creates hierarchy.
On a well-designed slide, you should be able to identify the most important element within half a second, even without reading the text. If everything looks equally important, nothing stands out.
Practical ways to increase contrast:
- Make your heading noticeably larger than body text — at least 1.5x the size
- Use your accent color only on the most important element per slide
- Try reversing a section: white text on a dark slide background makes it stand out from adjacent slides
- Bold one key phrase in a paragraph — but only one. If everything's bold, nothing's bold.
Tip 3: Align Everything to an Invisible Grid
Randomly placed elements look amateurish even when each element looks fine on its own. The solution is alignment.
Pick a consistent left margin, right margin, and top margin. Every element snaps to those invisible lines. In PowerPoint, turn on the grid (View → Grid and Guides) and enable "Snap to grid." In Google Slides, use View → Guides.
The "align" tools are your friends. Select two or more objects and use Format → Align to line them up perfectly. This takes two seconds and makes a slide look ten times more polished.
The Center Alignment Trap
Center-aligning everything is a common beginner mistake. It looks balanced, but it's actually the hardest alignment to pull off well because the eye has no consistent reference point to follow.
Left-align your text in most cases. Use center alignment only for titles, short labels, or decorative elements. Right-align only for numbers in tables or specific design purposes.
Tip 4: Use Repetition to Create Visual Identity
Repetition is what makes a presentation feel like a cohesive deck rather than a collection of random slides.
Repeated elements to use consistently:
- The same heading font and size on every slide
- The same position for your logo or company name
- The same accent color for headings or highlights
- The same slide number position (if you use them)
- The same icon style throughout (all flat, or all outline, or all filled — not mixed)
Repetition is also what makes Master Slides worth setting up. Define your repeating elements once, apply them everywhere, change them everywhere at once. This is how professional designers work.
Tip 5: Use Proximity to Show Relationships
Things that are close together look related. Things that are far apart look separate. This sounds obvious, but most slides ignore it.
If you have a caption for an image, put it directly below the image — not floating somewhere else on the slide. If you have a label for a chart element, place it adjacent to that element, not in a separate legend that requires the viewer to hunt back and forth.
The practical test: cover up the text on your slide and ask if the layout suggests the right groupings. Related things should be visually close. Unrelated things should have breathing room between them.
Tip 6: Pair Fonts Intentionally
You need two fonts: one for headings, one for body text. They should contrast with each other — not compete, and not match so closely they look the same.
Classic pairings that always work:
- A sans-serif heading with a serif body (or vice versa)
- A bold geometric font with a neutral humanist font
- Different weights from the same typeface family (Roboto Bold + Roboto Light)
What to avoid:
- Two decorative fonts together — they fight each other
- Two similar-looking fonts — too subtle to read as intentional
- More than two font families in a single presentation
- Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Curlz in professional contexts — ever
Tip 7: Apply Color Psychology Deliberately
Colors create emotional responses. This isn't superstition — it's how the visual system works. When your slide color scheme conflicts with your content tone, audiences sense something is wrong even if they can't name it.
- Blue — calm, trustworthy, professional. Good for finance, healthcare, technology, corporate presentations.
- Green — growth, health, nature, money. Good for sustainability, wellness, investment topics.
- Red — urgency, danger, importance, passion. Use as an accent for warnings or key callouts — not as your main background color.
- Orange — energy, enthusiasm, friendliness. Good for consumer brands, creative topics, call-to-action highlights.
- Purple — creativity, luxury, wisdom. Works for premium brands, creative agencies, educational content.
- Black/Dark gray — sophistication, authority. Strong choice for tech and design presentations.
The most important rule: whatever colors you choose, make sure you have enough contrast between text and background. Aim for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 — use the WebAIM contrast checker to verify.
Tip 8: Visualize Data, Don't Just Show It
A table of numbers is data. A chart that shows the pattern in those numbers is a visualization. The difference matters.
Before adding any chart or table, ask: what's the one thing I want the audience to understand from this data? Then design the visual to make that one thing impossible to miss.
Practical data visualization rules:
- Use bar charts for comparisons between categories
- Use line charts for trends over time
- Use pie charts only for simple part-to-whole relationships (and limit to 4-5 segments max)
- Remove gridlines, legends, and labels that don't support the main point
- Highlight the key data point with a different color
- Put your conclusion in the chart title, not just a description ("Revenue grew 40% in Q3" not "Q3 Revenue Chart")
Tip 9: Choose Images That Add Meaning
The wrong image is worse than no image. A generic stock photo of a handshake on a slide about "partnerships" adds nothing and makes the slide look like it was made in five minutes.
Use images when they:
- Show something that's hard to describe in words
- Create an emotional connection to the content
- Provide a concrete example of an abstract concept
- Give the eye a place to rest on a text-heavy slide
When selecting stock photos, look for images that feel candid rather than staged. Real-looking people in real-looking situations. Avoid anything that looks like an advertisement.
For icons instead of photos, keep the style consistent. All outline icons, or all filled icons. All the same visual weight. Never mix different icon sets on the same slide.
Tip 10: Less Animation, More Impact
Animations are the design equivalent of exclamation points. One or two in the right places has impact. When everything animates, nothing does.
Use animations when:
- You're building up a complex diagram piece by piece
- You want to reveal information sequentially to guide the audience
- You're demonstrating a process that happens in steps
Avoid animations when:
- You just want things to look more dynamic (they won't)
- You're putting slides on the web or sharing as PDF (animations don't work)
- The animation takes longer than the point it's supporting
And please, never use spinning, bouncing, or typewriter effect animations in a business presentation. They were barely acceptable in 2003. They're not acceptable now.
Slide Transitions
The same rule applies. One consistent transition style throughout. Or no transitions at all — instant slides look more professional than mismatched effects. If you use transitions, use "Fade" or "Push." Nothing that spins, bounces, or makes a whoosh noise.
Tip 11: Set Up Master Slides Before You Start
This tip saves the most time. Most people build their slides first, then try to make them consistent afterward. That's backwards.
Before you add a single slide, go into the Slide Master view and set:
- Background color
- Heading font, size, and color
- Body font, size, and color
- Margins and text box positions
- Any logo or repeated elements
Then when you add slides, they inherit these settings automatically. Changing the heading color later takes two clicks, not thirty.
In PowerPoint: View → Slide Master. In Google Slides: Slide → Edit Master.
Tip 12: Use Templates as Starting Points, Not Final Answers
Templates are useful — they give you a color scheme, font choices, and layout structures that someone else has already balanced. But the mistake is treating a template as finished design.
When you use a template, customize at minimum:
- Colors to match your brand or topic
- Fonts if the defaults don't fit your content
- Remove any placeholder elements you won't use (decorative lines, logos, etc.)
The goal is slides that reflect your content, not slides that look like everyone else who downloaded the same template.
Tip 13: Create Visual Hierarchy on Every Slide
Hierarchy means some things are more important than others, and the design makes that obvious. A slide with no hierarchy asks the audience to decide what's important — and they'll decide wrong, or give up.
On any slide, you should have:
- One primary element (the most important thing — usually a headline or key data point)
- One or two secondary elements (supporting details)
- Background elements (images, decorative items that set the stage)
Make the primary element the biggest, boldest, or most colorful thing on the slide. Everything else is supporting cast.
Tip 14: Test Your Slides at Presentation Size
This sounds obvious, but most people design slides at normal zoom and never see how they actually look when projected.
Press F5 (or the present button in Google Slides) and walk through your deck at full screen. Check:
- Is text readable from where your audience will sit?
- Do colors look right on your specific display/projector?
- Do animations work the way you expected?
- Does anything overflow off the edges?
If you're presenting in a room with a projector, test on the projector. Projectors wash out colors and reduce contrast compared to your laptop screen. What looks vivid on screen often looks muddy when projected.
Tip 15: Design for the Back of the Room
This is the single test that catches the most problems. Look at your slide and ask: can someone sitting in the last row of the room read this comfortably?
Rules for the back-of-room test:
- Nothing smaller than 18pt on a slide that will be projected
- High contrast between text and background — no light gray text on white backgrounds
- Charts and graphs need labels big enough to read at a distance
- Decorative elements that look fine up close may look cluttered from far away — remove them
If you can read your slides from six feet away from your laptop screen, you're probably fine for a typical meeting room. For larger venues, test by stepping back further.
Putting It Together
You don't need to apply all 15 tips at once. Start with the high-impact ones:
- Set up Master Slides first (Tip 11)
- Apply CARP to every slide (Tip 1)
- Use contrast to create hierarchy (Tips 2 and 13)
- Align everything deliberately (Tip 3)
- Test at presentation size (Tip 14)
Those five will get you 80% of the way there.
Looking for reference material? Some of the best-designed presentations in the world are on SlideShare. Use SaveSlide to download ones you want to study — it's free. And if you need to convert your finished presentation to PDF for sharing, or compress it before emailing, our free tools handle both.