Follow the best design practices

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Your presentation or pitch deck is not just about key numbers and critical text, it’s also about proper design and following a hierarchy of information. The design tricks you’ll find below will help you get your main message across, navigate viewers' attention and keep them interested.

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Adapt visuals to your audience

Emphasize the most important elements

Don’t create “slideuments”

Back up your message with visual imagery

Add interactive content

Design for the back seats

Adapt for mobile

Hold on to a consistent style

Choose your fonts wisely

Use forms for feedback

Revise when finished

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Adapt visuals to your audience

It’s always helpful to do some research before preparing a pitch. Try to determine who your direct viewers are and tailor visual decisions to their peculiarities. It’s not the only key to success, but a smart gesture that will help score extra points with your core audience.

We have some conservative clients, so we adapt our decks to make them easier to understand and closer to their visual tastes. On the other hand, for the younger generation we use more trendy imagery. If the audience is well-experienced, our graphic language will shift to more serious.—Tong Zhang, Graphic designer at Savills France

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Emphasize the most important elements

Evolutionary processes make us highly aware of differences: initially looking for dangers, our brain now constantly scans for the accents of the past. You can make this oddity work for you. When all elements are equal in weight, contrast or color, your viewer might need help to focus their attention properly. So, single out the main component and make it prominent for the audience. Manipulate the space and density, tweak the color schemes, and vary both your typefaces and the positions of visuals.

If a presentation has several different sections, we've found it useful to use color as a navigational marker. The user can always quickly tell where they are from anywhere on the page.

Photography or illustration can also be an extremely useful tool for helping divide up larger presentations. Nobody wants to scroll endlessly through blocks of text, the eyes need a break.—Ric Bell, Creative Director, and Christina Twigg, Designer at POST Studio

IDEO.org 10-year recap

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Don’t create “slideuments”

No one loves parsing bloated presentations, whether it’s on a big screen or small. In the world of pitches and presentations, those monsters are called ‘slideuments’. Help your readers understand the numbers, dynamics, or results—manage the quantity and use infographics instead of detailed spreadsheets. Besides, you can always add a link to supporting documents for the most demanding viewers.

Any slide can become a slideument, even with handpicked imagery, text and charts. Consider having secondary info load on hover or on click to ease visual perception. Here’s a set of video tutorials on how to set objects in motion with Readymag.

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Back up your message with visual imagery

Visualization is a powerful tool for supporting an idea, easing comprehension compared to plain structured text. When we see a picture or a video sequence, we analyze it in half a second, recognizing the meaning and indexing it for short-term storage. Reinforce your points with memorable illustrations, videos, photographs and icons to double the effectiveness of the whole pitch. It also can’t hurt to create an atmosphere and add a bit of fun for your viewers.

A good video can convey more than a hundred words. Readymag allows you to embed videos from different platforms, add them to the background, make loops and even play and pause videos with animation triggers.

Don't put too much text in your presentation. If you can visualize something in just three graphs and two shapes—do that. You can always design a button or a trigger to show this content instead of adding it in directly.—Tong Zhang, Graphic designer at Savills France

Depositphotos' presentation on yearly trends

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Add interactive content

Modern people have developed clip thinking. It means we are more likely to absorb and remember short, vivid and diverse content. So if you want your viewers to be engaged, consider incorporating several layers of interactivity. Scatter a few videos, GIFs, animated texts and maps, even folded galleries or music to draw in your audience.

Meet two aces up Readymag’s sleeve: Shots and Draggable features. Shots are frame-by-frame video sequences that launch on scroll or hover. You can make a 3D picture, for example, and easily animate it this way. A Draggable feature adds a bit of a game to any pitch, as visitors can drag its various parts around the screen. A small note: the Shots feature is available from the Personal plan and above.

The aim of any presentation is always to communicate content clearly and succinctly, while maintaining the reader's attention. We try to add as much value to the client's story as possible, embellishing the information where we can and creating an enjoyable user experience.

The presentations we create can be data-heavy, so we strive to make them visually engaging using interactive graphs, animations and image carousels.—Ric Bell, Creative Director, and Christina Twigg, Designer, POST Studio

GANNI Responsibility report

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Design for the back seats

If you plan to present your pitch to an audience live, make sure that people from the very last rows will see and understand your message. Don’t make them squint—fill the screen with clear elements and opt for big font sizes and high-resolution images. Good slides should serve as road signs, conveying your message in seconds without additional white noise.

The core element of our presentations (or lookbooks as we’re used to calling them) is imagery, so we need to make sure we can present photos in all their beauty and splendor. That means the ability to show full screen photos is super important for us. Flexible desktop and mobile layouts, photo arrangements, a little bit of animation and different fonts are also key.—Rafael Oliveira, Creative Director at Tracksmith

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Adapt for mobile

Most presentations are shown on big screens or opened on laptops. But your potential investor, stakeholder or team member might want to revise something from a mobile device. Make the reading process painless for them—create a mobile layout with info adapted for smaller screens, so they don’t have to zoom in and out.

Readymag allows you to adapt your deck to mobile devices automatically, and then polish the generated layout. More importantly, it’s totally free!

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Hold on to a consistent style

Your pitch is a part of your brand image, so keep it classy, neat and easy to follow. Determine key elements of format and style—logos, typefaces, color schemes, types of content or infographics—or use elements from your company’s brand book to flesh out your presentation.

Readymag users are able to turn pages into templates, which helps build visual consistency across various brand presentations.

A total ‘no’ for me is using aggressive colors in a presentation, given people may have to stare at them for a long time. Bold colors can surely capture attention, but viewers will feel uncomfortable after long exposure.—Tong Zhang, Graphic designer at Savills France

Visual handbook by Fever

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Choose your fonts wisely

While working on design, consider your typography decisions and try to narrow the number of fonts used to just two or three. If you are confident enough, opt for non-trivial, custom fonts. They won’t hold you back even in such a business-related task. Also, don’t forget to apply font styles. It may seem redundant at first, but it will save time if you come up with an entirely different typeface for the whole pitch.

Did you know that Readymag has a vast library of 5K+ fonts that are free on all plans? We bet you’ll find your match. Moreover, Readymag’s Text widget is highly tunable: you can always upload a custom font to your project and easily create and save text styles to speed up your workflow. Custom fonts can be shared with your pitch, so your clients or potential investors won’t have to install them separately.