POLS 240: Taylor, K. (Fall 2025): PowerPoint tips

video: "5 quick ways to improve your PowerPoint design" by Leila Garani. Standard YouTube license applies.

From PowerPoint and Presentation Tips, this video covers both basic design concepts and how to leverage Office 365 PowerPoint Designer for quick design boosts to both engage your audience and keep them focused. 

PowerPoint makeover!

It's easy to get lost in all of PowerPoint's design options, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should! Even some of the most basic design choices can overwhelm your slide and distract or even frustrate your audience.

Aside from graphic design considerations, there is one most fundamental question to yourself:

Will my audience benefit from reading during my presentation? (The answer is always "no.")

Compare the two PowerPoint slides on this page.

The first slide puts a lot of pressure on the audience to read. Even if the presenter is going to read it to them (they should not!), the audience still won't be listening; they are going to read at their natural speed, if they can see it at all, and ignore the speaker.

The second slide allows the audience to pay much more attention to the speaker.

Before

This is a lot of text for an audience, who is going to be struggling both to see the small print, and resist the urge to try to read while the presenter is talking (who is hopefully not going to be reading the text to them). This presenter needs to really think about whether the audience will benefit from having access to this text during the presentation. (They won't.) 

In addition to the large amount of small text, there is very little open ("white") space in this slide. The presenter fills it all with filled shapes, and a gradient color background that contributes to the feeling of fullness.

After

After watching the design video, and getting some basic ideas from Learning Innovation, they decided to keep the photo (adding a citation for it from Unsplash!). They also removed the text and instead decided to list only the main points from the website they used; the presenter can tell the audience some of the details for each. They also decided to make the title less design heavy and less specific: The presenter can tell the audience they are Washington state incentives after all. In this slide there is more white space, and far less text for the audience to get distracted by. This presenter is not a PowerPoint or design expert, but was able to create more space, and fewer distractions, for their audience.

Always cite your images on the slide itself. See the tab for "Images."

You can also briefly cite where information on your slide comes from. I would recommend you do this similar to  in-text citation (see APA tab) with authors' last names and year of publication, or agency name, and year if available.

If you are making your slides available to your audience, including your teacher, use your last slide for a list of all the sources you used, your References page (see APA tab).