5 Presentation Hacks to Enhance Your Slides (Infographic)

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By Adam Noar

Do you ever find yourself yearning for some clever PowerPoint hacks to spice up your presentations?

If the answer is YES then you’re in luck because today we are going to be sharing some clever presentation tips and tricks that will help get your slide design off to a great start!

From knowing where to find awesome images to creating beautiful graphics, this visual guide of presentation design tips by PresentationPanda has got you covered!

Here’s a rundown of the 5 presentation tips:

#1 – Use Unsplash for Finding Images for your Presentations

You’ll often find that the best presentations are filled with beautiful images.

Not too long ago, it was much more difficult to find high-resolution images that you could use for free. Today it seems like there are new websites popping up every day that offer commercial free images to use. One of the best websites for images is Unsplash.

They have a huge library of 100% free high-res images that will look great in your next presentation.

#2 – Use FontSquirrel for Spicing Up your Slides with Custom Fonts

Another way to make your slides more visually appealing is by using custom fonts like the ones from Font Squirrel.

Font Squirrel offers a huge selection of free fonts to download. Some fonts you may want to check out include:

• Bebas Neue – Bebas Neue is a sans serif font. It has grown in popularity and become something like the “Helvetica of the free fonts.”
• Pacifico – Pacifico is an original and fun brush script handwriting font which was inspired by the 1950s American surf culture.
• Mathlete – Quirky, hand-drawn fonts are more popular than ever.

What’s also nice about Font Squirrel is that you can click on the “most popular” tab and be taken to a curated list of the most popular fonts based on what people are downloading.

There are thousands of fonts to choose from at Font Squirrel. Take a look at the various categories and choose a font that looks best for your presentation and brand.

#3 – Use PicMonkey to Create More Whitespace for Your Images

Sometimes you can find a great image for your presentation but realize that the image is too “busy” (which makes it difficult for any text you may add to stand out – not get drowned out by the noise of the image).

You can sometimes solve this issue by blurring the image.

PowerPoint has its own blurring tool but sometimes this tool blurs the entire image. Sometimes you may not want to blur the entire image because you want a particular part of your image to remain unblurred.

With PicMonkey (a free online image editor) you can use their “focal zoom” feature to blur out a specific part of the image.

It’s quick, easy, and will make your images look great for adding text.

#4 – Create Your Own Graphics Directly in PowerPoint

When it comes to nice-looking slides custom graphics can be key.

You can always hire a professional designer to help you create the graphics you need, but you’ll be surprised how the careful combination of shapes and lines can help you to create some awesome-looking graphics directly in PowerPoint. No Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop is needed!

PowerPoint has launched some nifty tools that allow you to create graphics out of basic shapes.

Here’s what you need to do to create your own custom graphic in PowerPoint:

1. Arrange some shapes however you want.
2. Select all the shapes you want to combine. The easiest way to select all the shapes is to lasso them with your mouse.
3. Click on the Shape Union tool.

With a little practice and patience, you can be creating awesome graphics for your slides in no time!

#5 – Use Freepik to Download “Ready-made” Graphics for Your Slides

You can save tons of time creating graphics for your slides by downloading some pre-made graphics from FreePik.

With FreePik, you can search from a huge library of premade graphics and then download them to your computer to insert them into your slides. Keep in mind that you do need to provide attribution when downloading the images. If you don’t want to deal with attribution, you can pay a monthly fee of $10 to skip the attribution altogether.

Conclusion

Creating awesome-looking slides can sometimes be a challenge but using the right tools and techniques will make the process much easier.

So, are you guys up for the challenge of trying out these different hacks? Which of these tips sounds most appealing?

  Adam Noar is the founder of Presentation Panda, a presentation design firm that specializes in creating and delivering professional presentations for startups, large businesses, and individuals. Adam has been designing professional presentations for 10 years, delivering hundreds along the way to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, and to large and diverse audiences at marketing events around the world.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.