Creating a custom Power Point presentation is about more than just nice colors and great layout. While these are certainly important, branding also plays a crucial role. Whether your PowerPoint presentation is personal or for your company, it’s important to remember that it represents an opportunity to display your brand. Here are some tips on how to do just that.
1) Master the Master Slide
With its Slide Master (View> Slide Master), PowerPoint offers a perfect opportunity to ensure consistency throughout your presentation. Including the logo and tag line throughout your slides may be common sense, but where should you place them? In most cases, you’ll want your audience to remember the brand that the presentation came from, so it makes sense to place the logo where most eyes goes first.
Multiple eye-tracking studies have revealed that viewers will look at most content in an F-shaped pattern; reading the first two lines across before moving down the page horizontally. You can take advantage of this trend by placing your logo and tagline in the top left corner, maximizing exposure. Contrary to what some believe, this does not take away from the presentation; a prominent headline in the same vicinity will still be read.
2) Use the Right Colors the Right Way
Similarly to the logo and tag line, color is closely associated with your brand. Using the exact colors of your brand in your PowerPoint presentation is a must, but how should you incorporate them? Too often, slides can seem busy, hampered by a plethora of brand-appropriate colors.
So while you should stick to your brand colors in the general scheme, consider using them as accent colors. White space is an important design tool, and can work both in the background and throughout the slide. Your brand colors, on the other hand, are a great tool to distinguish charts, links, bullets, and words designed to stand out. By utilizing your brand colors not as primary but as accent colors, you ensure consistency and brand recognition without diminishing the effectiveness of your slides.
3) Watch the Language
Consistency in branding goes beyond your logo, tag line and color. Your brand, whether it be personal or from your company, has a very distinct voice. Depending on its target audience, it will vary in professionalism, industry or consumer speak, casualness, expertise and more.
If you’re unsure about your brand’s voice, talk to your marketing department – their job is to make sure every communication from the company is created in that voice. By incorporating it into your PowerPoint, you ensure consistency across the spectrum and avoid confusion in your audience.
With its plethora of options, PowerPoint offers a temptation to play around with designs, colors and layouts. But in most cases, sticking to the ‘look and feel’ of your brand is your best choice in creating an effective custom PowerPoint presentation.