This time we'll show you the best approach to choosing colors for your presentation layouts and introduce you to some of the most well-known design rules for appealing slide designs. You can find Part 1 here .

1. Find suitable colors

Learn how to harmonize different colors on your presentation slides. There are numerous websites offering color design tips, such as which shadows ideally complement certain hues. These sites often include tools that allow you to generate color swatches and experiment with saturation, brightness, contrast, and more to get an idea of ​​how the colors will look on your slides.

2. Create a color palette

Before you start designing your presentation, define a palette of background and accent colors that you will use consistently across all slides. Limit yourself to 3–5 colors to ensure you don't clutter your slides with too many different shades.

Take tip 1 to heart and search online for color combinations that harmonize with each other and are suitable for your content.

3. Add accents – with accent colors

There's a risk of creating a bland design if you focus too much on conservative, serious, and objective presentation design. For example, if you only use a few of your brand colors, the ones found on your website or in your logo, your slides can quickly appear color-bland.

Therefore, make use of the accent colors you have chosen. Whether red, yellow, neon green… even the slightest use of these colors can highlight important points on the slides and breathe life into an otherwise dry design style.

4. Apply the rule of thirds

If you want to capture your audience's attention, it's best to apply the rule of thirds to your slides. This rule, borrowed from photography, states that one-third of the image should show what you want your audience to focus on. The remaining two-thirds fill the surrounding space, creating a kind of frame. The secret to this trick is that the majority of the slide is kept simple, allowing the important part to stand out more effectively.

5. Lessig Method

American law professor Lawrence Lessig developed a method for fluent presentations that also impacts slide design. The principle is simple: instead of creating one slide with four points and speaking for 60 seconds, it's better to use four different slides, each with only one relevant point. This results in more slides, but they are simpler in design.

6. Takahashi Method

Masayoshi Takahashi's method is very similar to Lessig's principle. On each slide with a clear white background, place only one word in bold black lettering. To implement this, you need to select the most important word for your content on each slide – a radical reduction that guarantees simplicity in your presentation.

7. Kawasaki method

If you want to apply Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule of thumb (presenting 10 slides in 20 minutes with a minimum font size of 30pt) to your presentation, you need to prepare your slides so that they can be digested by the audience in just under a minute. Their design should be adapted to allow images to fit despite the large font size.

8. Godin Method

This presentation style, developed by entrepreneur Seth Godin, focuses heavily on the use of images. The slides should never repeat what you, as the speaker, say. Key words you utter are not included in the presentation; instead, graphics or photos support or visualize what you have said.

9. Think big

Presentations are usually projected onto walls using projectors or displayed on large screens. Therefore, your slides require special preparation, taking size into account. For example, enlarge your fonts and ensure that your images are high-resolution enough to be displayed clearly at a significantly larger size than on your small laptop screen.

In the last part of this series, we will discuss, among other things, various visualization tools such as icons and diagrams.