There’s a delicate balance to strike when selecting font size for a presentation. We’d recommend not using anything below size 14 as it will be too small for your audience to read. And if your text needs to be size 10 or 9 to fit on your slide – you’ve got too much content on the slide!
However, some people go too far the other sample telephone number way and have ginormous text that completely dominates their slides. You want to make sure that your text enhances and supports the visuals you’re using, rather than completely overpowering them. To pick the right font size for your screen and room set up – head to this super helpful guide from Dave Paradi.
Using very large fonts also makes it more difficult to create levels of hierarchy in your text-based content. Bigger objects demand more attention, so your audience will interpret bigger text as being more important. If all the text is huge, the audience will spend so long trying to determine the relationships and order between the information that they won’t take much of it in.
Read more about using text and fonts effectively in presentations.
Deleting and/or moving placeholders
If your template is set up properly, it will be constructed around guides (not sure what they are? Read more here!), and all the placeholders set in a specific place to look balanced and professional.
When you start to move these elements around, particularly if you’re not paying attention to the guides, your slide elements can easily look awkward and haphazard.
If the changes are made well and consistently within one deck for a one-off presentation, it’s probably not a big deal. However, if you copy and paste slides from a deck with edited placeholders into one using the original template, they will stick out like a sore thumb! This can distract your audience and make you look unprofessional.
Things like titles, page numbers, logos and footers are best left where they are.
Removing animations
Contrary to popular opinion, animations (done well) actually make a presentation easier to present.