Use a colour palette

Maintaining an attractive and uniform colour scheme is important for ensuring your slides look professional. You can use websites such as ColorWizard and MaterialPalette to find exact #HEX colours that complement each other or work well with your brand’s colour(s).

Credit: DesignMantic

Keep your hashtag visible

It’s a good idea to come up with a hashtag for your webinar and encourage your audience to interact with your speakers through Twitter. Many presentations use a master slide that features the company logo, and by including the hashtag alongside it, you remind the audience that they can get involved via social.

Credit: Jeffrey Stevens

Spread points into multiple slides

Webinar audiences can become distracted if you stay on a certain slide for long periods of time, and a quick way to avoid is this is to simply split up slides that have multiple points on them into their own slides. So, rather than staying on a single slide that lists five reasons arguing your case, you could show this slide for a short time before moving onto a second slide for first reason as you start to discuss it, followed by another separate slide for reason two, and so on. Whilst having more slides with less information on them may seem counterintuitive, the movement from slide to slide is much more engaging for a webinar audience than looking at a static slide for long periods of time.

Credit: Sven Peters

Avoid extensive animations and think twice about video

Over-animating your slides has always looked a bit awkward - less is definitely more. Avoiding extensive animations is even more important in webinars, as they often don’t look as smooth when viewed remotely via screencast, distracting your audience away from the arguments in your presentation.

The same goes for video: If you are considering incorporating video into your webinar, make sure to check that your webinar platform is capable of effectively displaying video.

Some quick text tips

• You want to use text sparingly in presentation slides - avoid long sentences, as you could end up simply regurgitating what’s already written on your slide.
• Follow the 6x6 guide - no more than 6 bullet points per slide, no more than 6 words per bullet point.
• Don’t use less than 20pt font size.
• Use sans serif fonts, such as Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana, as they are easier to read on screens.

Credit: Sven Peters

Why not try out some alternatives to Powerpoint

Powerpoint is still the most commonly used software when it comes to presentations, but this isn’t to say that it isn’t worth investigating what else is available. There are many programs that offer a similar “Powerpoint” experience, such as OpenOffice or Google Slides, which - if nothing else - will have some different themes for you to use if you’ve gotten sick of Powerpoint’s offerings.

If you want to try something a little different, however, Prezi is certainly something to check out - Chris Anderson, CEO of TED Talks, says that “Prezi is helping to reinvent the art of presentation.”. Rather than using multiple different slides, with Prezi you can create a large canvas with numerous focus points which you can zoom in on, allowing you to create a more free-flowing and less linear presentation. You can try it out for free, so experiment and see if it works for you.

While a webinar cannot purely rely on a well-designed slide deck, it can work wonders for audience engagement. These quick tips will help you create slides that are clear, concise and appealing, which will help hold your audience’s focus.