How to make slides pretty?
Title covers it. Genuinely get baffled at how I can make slides better, very analyst grunt work type task but still need to know how to do it. Would appreciate actual, actionable methods and tips
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Ask your team for good examples of pages, excel backups, etc. that they liked and conform your formatting to them. Lift pages when you can otherwise try to modify / replicate
Add a child, and the pedo boss will find it pretty
trying too hard to be funny, just terrible
Ask for examples for some inspiration, but you get a lot better over time
Boxes, icons, shadows all help. When in doubt make an icon list. Flywheels / circular graphics with the company’s icon in the middle.
Two quadrants on the left side with data and a “scholar box” on the right side for commentary for explaining trends
Show instead of tell. If there’s a process (e.g., customer onboarding) show it with icons and pics instead of text
Make all body text on the slide the same size -- including chart titles, excel outputs, captions, etc. This isn't in reference to footnotes or titles or deliberate call-out boxes.
But often when you look at a slide and think "gee, something is off", it's because you have font 11 size on half the page, and an excel output on the right half of the page that is size 11 in excel but blown up to size 20 or down to 9 in the actual powerpoint. Makes a huge difference, and very few people realize it.
The honest answer is that it depends on whatever your MD wants. You could make the perfect slide for MD 1, turn around and re-use it for MD 2 on another deal, and have him rip you to shreds over it. Hell, I had this one MD who was wildly obsessed with The Smurfs, and if you didn’t use his preferred shades of blue, you ended up bottom bucket. Yet that slide could be a 10/10 for someone not quite as eccentric. Moral of the story here is simply: know your audience.
What is this smurf loving MD bro, first the tie now the hex code on the pitchbook??
can confirm - got SA’d by SmurfD
We've all been there. The best thing you can do is recycle. Find some solid decks and copy as much as you can and don't overthink it, stick to similar and simple formats. Don't try to overengineer things, because you'll struggle to keep the quality consistent throughout the whole presentation. You'll get better over time. Copy, copy, copy. Some juniors try to stand out by inventing new formats. That can help you improve, but the time you invest relative to the impact of the output is low. In the end you will get a intuition for creating pretty enough but time saving slides
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