Presentation Tips: Killer Graphics for PowerPoint
One of the best presentations I have seen in my life was delivered by Stephan A. Cone, a wise man who works in Citibank, lectures at Harvard, and writes bestsellers.
Years after his presentation, I still remember his presentation and the messages so clearly because his PowerPoint was constructed with lots of killer graphics and images.
Cone uses lots of graphics to demonstrate his ideas in his PowerPoint presentation. For instance, Cone showed one of his competitors’ posters that uses tiny fonts. Clearly, no one in the crowd could read the poster. Here, Cone wanted to demonstrate how tiny fonts do not work for posters.
Cone then went on and showed the classic iPod advertisement. Cone was able to explain clearly how personalized, exciting user experience could be created with a product like iPod.
Finally, Cone presented the Coca Cola ad that shows the Colar Bear holding the Coca Cola bottle. After getting some feedback from the audience, he explained how Coca Cola has successfully leveraged off its brand power from the classic Coca Cola bottle.
As a presenter, I have learnt two important things from Cone’s presentation:
- Killer graphics significantly enhance speakers’ abilities to explain their ideas
- Killer graphics could effectively assist audience to remember the presented information.
Thus, I personally use quite a lot of graphics in my presentations. Of course, there are some key things to watch out for when using graphics in a PowerPoint Presentation:
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Don’t use pictures from the clip art library:
First of all, they do not look that good. They usually do not have much color and most of them look kind of old school! Secondly, these clip arts are available to anyone who has Microsoft Office. They won’t help you personalize your PowerPoint presentation. -
Take pictures of your own employees:
This is a very good way to personalize your PowerPoint presentation. Your clients and employees will be impressed with this move. -
Draw some comic pictures related to your company and the presenting idea:
My colleague loves to get our in-house graphic designer to draw comic pictures. We normally use our company characters to demonstrate our ideas. The audience was usually very amazed with the efforts we put in to construct the comics. Furthermore, it is very personalized. -
Purchase photos from professional websites:
When all else fail. You can always purchase photos from websites like istockphoto.com or dreamstimes.com. There are thousands of pictures to choose from and each photo costs as low as US$.20. There is no need to steal copyright pictures from other people’s websites.
Try to delete your bullet points and replace them with graphics today! If you do it correctly, you will reward yourself by making your PowerPoint presentation funny and personalized. You will also be amazed with how much time you will be able to save to explain your ideas.
