Here are some no-nos for digital visual aids (a.k.a. “PowerPoints”). These are sure-fire ways to make your presentation look less professional.
Remember, when in doubt, ask your teachers to check your work with you.
- Text overload.
Say it with me: “Phrases, not sentences.” Your audience is there to learn from you, not to read sentences on PowerPoint slides. Phrases (that prompt you to speak in sentences) are perfect for you presentation. - Goofy images.
A sense of humor can be helpful in any presentation situation, but most student presentations are meant to show a professional style. Be careful with humorous or “cartoonish” images. They could be too immature looking and there is potential that they could be inappropriate! - Neon colors.
Your favorite colors may be hot pink and day-glo orange, but your presentation visual aid is not for you; it’s for your audience. When people prepare to sell their homes, they repaint the walls white or neutral colors, so that their “favorite colors” don’t offend and turn-off any potential buyers. Use this same idea with your visual aids. They might not be your favorite colors, but at least nobody will hate them. - Invisible ink.
It is important that your text is easy to read. If the color or brightness of your text is too close to the color or brightness of its background elements, your text might be difficult to read. Since we always want to consider our audience, move items, change text colors, or change background themes to avoid the invisible ink dilemma. - Flashy backgrounds.
It’s hard to make a blanket statement about which background themes are “good” and which are “bad.” You have find your “Goldilocks” theme: not too dull, not too busy. If you are adding images or charts to your visual aid, you probably want to choose an interesting theme that has images or colors that relate to your topic and look professional, but doesn’t take away space from the middle of the slides. See The Collage Effect … - The Collage Effect.
Items in your visual aid should not overlap or be smooshed together. It looks sloppy and, when projected on a screen, makes it difficult to read and/or discern what is on the slide. This applies to overlapping images and prominent background features: it’s a no-no. - Tiny/Blurry/Uncropped/etc. images.
Images can do so much to make a presentation more interesting and content-rich, but the wrong images can do so much to make a presentation appear less professional. Choose images wisely, and don’t expand images to larger then their natural sizes. Also, if the image has a “watermark” on it, you should not use it. - Bleeding pages. There are extremely few situations when it is appropriate for your images or text to come close to, or run off, the edges of your slides. As suggested in The Collage Effect, space each item on your slides away from the edges, and other items.
- Unbalanced slides.
Each slide in your presentation needs balance. This means that the viewer’s eyes are drawn to different parts of the slide, somewhat evenly. Do not put all of the dominant visual elements on one side of the slide. Use the middle of the slide to keep things balanced. - Nonparallel Lists. If you’re following directions and considering your audience, you’re probably avoiding large blocks of text in your visual aid. Using bullets instead is great, but you still need to employ strong writing techniques, especially parallel structure. Basically, this means that you are structuring each of your bullet items in a given list the same way. Here’s an example of nonparallel items in a bullet list about going to bed.
- Brushing teeth
- Vitamins
- Book reading
- Sleepy time
Here’s the same information, now parallel.
- Brush teeth
- Take vitamins
- Read a book
- Go to sleep
In the second list, the listed items each begins with a present tense verb. Not all lists need present tense verbs to be parallel. The exact grammatical doesn’t matter, as long as it’s parallel in each bullet of the list.
Similarly, make sure you are using consistent capitalization after bullets. It’s usually appropriate to capitalize the first word after each bullet.
- Other issues. Avoid these like your grade depends on it (because your grade probably does depend on it).
- Multiple background colors/themes … stick with just one theme or background color throughout your presentation.
- Small text … nothing should be smaller than 24 points. No exceptions!
- Inconsistent capitalization … always capitalize the first letter after a bullet, but do not then continue to capitalize the first letter of each word. Whatever you do with capital letters, be consistent.
- Phantom space after bullet … each of your bullet-list items should line up neatly.