How to Design Slides for Oral Presentations
This Resource Page will help you:
- Understand the main principles of slide design
- Learn how to design effective presentation slides
Design Tips
Most oral presentations are supported by slides. You will see a lot of differing advice about creating slides. Here are the two main principles that should guide your slide design:
- your slides should support your presentation – not replace it
- the audience’s attention should be on you – not on your slides.
So, how can you apply these guiding principles in practice? Here are a few key tips to consider as you draft and edit your slides:
- Conciseness—make every word count.*
- Clear and informative graphics—remove non-essential information.
- Easily readable text—be mindful of font type, font size, colors, animations.
- Perfect grammar, spelling, and punctuation—edit your slides carefully.
- Citations and references—your professors will expect you to provide citations and references, just as you would for a written assignment. Don’t forget to also cite your visuals; if you didn’t create them, then you need to cite them. You can include a slide at the end of your presentation that lists all of your references.
*There may be times when information-dense detailed slides are appropriate—for example, if you are a course instructor, or if a conference organizer requests it. In these situations, consider making a more concise presenter version for yourself and a detailed version that the audience can download and keep.
Now let’s see some slide examples!
Example 1
The slide below from an oral presentation about vocabulary learning shows several design issues. Click on the red icons and check our feedback:
Example 2
The slide below from an oral presentation about vocabulary learning features an effective design. Click on the green icons and check our feedback:
Example 3
The slide below is from a presentation that leads to a class discussion and features an effective design. Click on the green icons and check our feedback:
Next Steps
Once you have designed your presentation slides, your next step is to focus on your presentation delivery. Check our resource page on how to deliver effective presentations for details.