How to prepare presentation slides

A good slide deck is the foundation of an informative and engaging presentation. That’s because without well-designed slides, the audience has no visual way to connect the dots in a speech. 

Unfortunately, many presenters treat their slides as speaking notes. Worse, they stuff them with irrelevant visuals and make painfully inconsistent formatting choices. All of these gaffes detract from the substance of the presentation and shorten viewers’ already fleeting attention spans. 

Creating a slide deck that supports information delivery during the speech demands two actions on your part. First, you need to draft slide content and map it to the deck, so that each slide delivers a key chunk of information. Second, you must use proven design principles to make the slides legible, captivating, and memorable. Below, we’ll walk you through every part of this process — and show you an effective way to prepare presentation-ready slides quickly with AI. 

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Get your content ready and map it out to the slide deck

Before you start working with a presentation maker like Google Slides or PowerPoint, it’s a good idea to prepare your content and distribute it strategically between the slides. 

Creating slide content is a 2-step process: 

1. Outlining: Draft an outline of the key ideas and takeaways your presentation should convey.

2. Slide mapping: Transposing the outline onto a slide deck. 

1. Create an outline of the key ideas and takeaways for the presentation 

An outline helps you organize your presentation. Start by jotting down all the key ideas you want to communicate in your presentation. These are the new concepts you want to share with your viewers. Once you know what these concepts are, arrange them in logical order from start to finish. If you can, structure the presentation narrative like a story. Doing so will smooth out the contextual flow between ideas, give your presentation a powerful overarching message, and help keep viewers’ attention. 

The ideas you wrote down earlier are the “Whats” of the presentation. Now, you need to substantiate these with “Whys” and “Hows” — the takeaways, or practical implications each of the main ideas should impart on the audience. Jot these down, too.

2. Map the content to the slide deck 

Now that you have a content outline, consider how it will line up with the slide deck. The 3-2-1 method offers this helpful guidance for planning slides based on a content outline:

• 3 takeaways: Each slide should leave the spectators with 3 important takeaways.
• 2 minutes: You should not spend more than 2 minutes on a single slide. 
• 1 idea: Each slide should communicate a single concept or idea. 

Using the 3-2-1 method, you can transpose the content outline onto the slides. At this point, you’ll know how many slides are in the presentation. Following the “2 minutes” guideline, you can also calculate how much time the entire presentation will take. This is a good time to gauge whether 2 minutes is enough — or too much — for the ideas and takeaways you will cover in each slide, and adjust the content accordingly.

You can use an AI slide maker to speed up slide content creation

Outlining, creating, and mapping slide content manually can be a bit tedious, but the time and effort are worth it if you know in detail what ideas the presentation should deliver. Manual preparation also gives you ample room to customize each slide in the deck to your liking. 

But if you want to save time, or you’re not sure where to get started, consider using an AI-powered presentation maker like Plus AI. Plus AI lets you produce slide content — starting from an outline — with a single prompt: 

You can then review and edit the outline as needed before PlusAI generates the slide deck: 

You can still edit the slide content as necessary when the auto-generated presentation is ready. 

Design slides that convey content with clarity and promote engagement 

Slide content embodies the key message of your presentation. But slide design is equally paramount, as it helps deliver this message to the audience. Even an inattentive spectator should be able to grasp the slide’s main concept at a glance — even if they’re not paying attention to your speech or reading every single bullet point. 

Two vital steps will ensure that the slide layouts, backgrounds, and graphics communicate your ideas instead of detracting from them: 

1. Avoid information overload: Packing the slides with sizable chunks of data and long text passages will cost you your viewers’ attention. 
2. Format the slides properly: The color palette, fonts, sizes, layouts, and margins should be consistent throughout the slide deck. 
3. Choose appropriate graphics: The graphics should be relevant to the slide subject matter and help you tell your story.

Don’t overload the slides with information

We’ve gone over the 3:2:1 rule above, but there’s a bit more nuance to actually adding content to slides. You may be tempted to write out as much detail as possible to explain each of the ideas and key takeaways. But know this: Nobody in your audience will read long walls of text. 

So instead, try to distill all the necessary information into bite-sized pieces. An easy way to do this is to state each idea in the slide header, then present the takeaways as succinct bullet points or text columns:  

As for the supporting details? Well, your speech should expound these — they don’t belong on the slides themselves (although you can tuck them into the speaking notes — more on this below). 

Slide formatting should be clear and consistent

Even concise, compelling slide content can be lost on viewers if it’s formatted poorly and inconsistently throughout the deck. To avoid designing chaotic slides that distract viewers from the presentation, use consistent fonts, sizes, and colors for different written elements. The formatting should depict the hierarchy of information clearly — your viewers must be able to discern a slide’s header, subheaders, bullet lists, and captions at a single glance:

At the same time, pay attention to the padding between the various elements as well as the slide’s margins. The spacing, including margins, should be even, centered, and uniform from one slide to the next. 

The slide deck’s visual design will help you tell your story

Slide background and typography colors communicate a sentiment to the viewers, and contribute to viewer engagement — especially when the subject matter gets a bit dry. 

Start by assembling the slideshow’s color scheme. Pick several colors that align with the frame of mind your presentation should evoke — you’ll use them consistently — but in different combinations if you like — in the slide deck. 

Make sure that the colors promote legibility through strong contrast — the text should stand out clearly on the slide’s background. It’s best to avoid particularly vibrant colors, such as bright red, green, blue, or yellow, as these make text more difficult to discern. Instead, opt for neutral tones or pastel shades of primary and secondary colors. 

Note that the background doesn’t need to be the same in every single slide. As long as you stick to the palette, you can change backgrounds from slide to slide. For example, note the lively yet consistent color palette in the presentation below: 

You can even use different color gradients in your slides. Gradients give the presentation a sleek, professional feel and they’re more eye-catching than solid-colored backgrounds. Here’s an example: 

Add relevant graphics to the slides 

Even with masterfully coordinated colors, the slides will fall flat if they rely on text alone to tell the story. That’s why you should sprinkle relevant graphics throughout the presentation (sparingly). Images, videos, and other graphic assets not only aid information delivery, they also inject a bit of fun into the slideshow. 

Likewise, GIFs and memes provide much needed comic relief — especially in info-rich slide decks that are approaching the cognitive overload territory (a death sentence for viewers’ attention spans). 

That said, the graphics you add to a slide should be highly relevant to the content. Otherwise, they’ll detract from your message and fail at their task of invigorating the presentation. If using comedic elements like GIFs, insert them strategically into parts of the deck where they’ll capture the sentiment built up by your speech. 

Use templates to make slide design less of a chore 

If the visual design aspect of slide creation seems like too much work, opt for a pre-built template instead of starting from scratch. Templates — like those you’ll find in Plus AI’s library — come with curated fonts, color palettes, and slide layouts to match a variety of moods and aesthetic preferences: 

You can use Plus AI templates for free to make Google Slides and PowerPoint slide decks. All you need to do is choose a template you like while prompt Plus AI on the presentation, and it will quickly generate a professional-looking deck that’s ready to use in a presentation: 

Prepare presentation notes for yourself 

As we’ve said above, reading the slide content during the speech is a good way to bore your spectators to death. But while this is a big no-no, nothing precludes you from jotting down your talking points for each slide — these will appear only on your computer screen only, and the audience will not see them. 

In Google Slides, you can add the notes by selecting a slide, then adding jotting down your speaking points in the field below: 

You can then pull the notes window up on the presenter’s screen: 

Adding speaker’s notes works the same way in Microsoft PowerPoint, but you need to use the scroll bar to pull the notes up: 

As with slide content, you don’t want to write out walls of text in your presentation notes. If you do, your eyes will be glued to the computer for the duration of the speech. Instead, write out succinct bullet points that expound each takeaway, and these will help guide your speech while letting you interact with the viewers. 

With the notes written, practice presenting the deck and see if they are helpful enough in keeping your speech on track. 

Ask for a peer review of the slide deck before you present

You may think that you’ve put together a compelling slide deck, but your proximity to the slideshow may obscure certain nuances or ways to make the slides more effective. Since two heads are usually better than one, consider getting a colleague or friend to review the slides. Ask them to glance at each slide quickly and tell you what the main idea and key takeaways are — if they’re absorbing the information well, then you’ve done a great job preparing the deck.