a
b
a
b
a
b
c
a
b
c
a
b
c
a
b
c
a
b
a
b
a
b
c
a
b
c

Craft your message

Strong opening

Gather data

Simple and easy-to-grasp text

Examples, facts and numbers

Edit

Whatever the design, your message comes first. So, figure out what you want to say from the beginning. To set out your intentions efficiently, use the points below.

Stick to a plan

1

2

3

4

5

Create an easy-to-follow structure

Create a strong opening to grab attention

Keep text simple and easy-to-grasp

Gather data to support your offer or idea

Two pitch decks: one to send and one to show


1

Create an easy-to-follow structure

When presenting your ideas, story is everything. What’s the difference between a story and a phrase? Framing. Every story has a plot, a beginning, and an end. A consistent and structured narrative is crucial for information delivery, regardless of the purpose behind your pitch deck.

Make a single point

Stick to a plan

Make a single point

To hold viewers’ attention is a tricky thing. One of the most effective tools you have is to make only a single significant statement at a time. There is an easy way to make sure your presentation isn’t trying to cover too much ground: the essence of everything you have to say can fit into one sentence without inconsistencies or contradictions.

Don’t bother your audience with things they already know. Keep content short and focused, entertaining but to the point.—Andreas Haase, Founder of Hello&Goodbye design studio

Stick to a plan

Even a weekly report can sound as fascinating as a Marvel movie when planned and structured well. Frame your information wisely, and make sure even your dog could understand why it starts and ends where it starts or ends. Deliver your message in the middle.


You might start by writing down all your key ideas in a text file. Group them by topic, begin with the most simple statement and build up to more complex ideas. Highlight important facts and get rid of what seems secondary. Your main points can eventually serve as subheadings, as they do here.

A clear and simple outline of a pitch deck from Argyle, a technology company that provides consumer-permissioned access to income data

Take a closer look at templates for a pitch deck, annual report, design agency presentation and educational slide deck.

2

Create a strong opening

The first 5 minutes of a presentation is your chance to win an audience's attention by setting the mood or highlighting the most important aspects of the project. That is why your introduction should be explanatory, clear, catchy and even slightly entertaining. Here are some ready-made solutions for quick decisions:

State a fact

Make a joke

Ask a question

State a fact

Or make a clear statement / provide statistics. Making a solid point gives a super universal opening for any narrative, but works best for presenting project results in business-related presentations.

Make a joke

Both topic-related and hilarious jokes are brutal to find or come up with. But if you do, consider your presentation a success; you nailed it. Two small tips though. 1. You don’t have to be self-destructive to be funny. 2. Memes and GIFs can also go a long way.

Ask a question

It goes back to the ancient Greek principles of rhetoric. If you ask the right question about the information you are planning to share, everything that follows is just an answer to the question on the first slide.

A good pitch should include a strong opening, powerful storytelling through design and images that support your content. The best presentations keep the viewer engaged throughout, so it's critical there are storytelling devices that can maintain momentum.—Tarik Fontenelle, Director, ON ROAD

An opening with a question used in IDEO.org 10-year impact report

3

Keep text simple and easy-to-grasp

The most important text in your presentation is typically the spoken portion. Keywords, phrases, and headings in the actual presentation only support, highlight or emphasize the point you’ve already made. For text that is required in the presentation, here is what you need to do:

Less is more

Edit

Stick to your chosen tone of voice

Less is more

Keep the text on each slide to a minimum—keywords and bullet points, not sentences. Images and infographics work better than words in slide decks.

A presentation of the Track & Field Collection celebrating the all-comers' spirit of track and field with masterful visuals

We prioritize consistency and simplicity by distilling the idea to its simplest form. It's important not to overload the reader with too many interactions and different styles. In other words, don't have too much going on. Less is more! Pick a few interactions and explore them fully, define your typographic styles and stick with them throughout.—Ric Bell, Creative Director, and Christina Twigg, Designer at POST Studio

Edit

To edit means sharpening your point by using the most suitable intonation, word choice, and syntax constructions. It is particularly important when working on the slide’s heading, which attracts the most attention. Check if the words correspond well with your visual content and if all headings work together as a system.


Stick to your chosen tone of voice

The vocabulary and style you choose depend on your audience, which is true on many levels. While editing, look for inconsistencies in the stylistic register and word choice. Remember, even the need to be extra formal doesn’t mean you have to be boring as well.

Content exists to serve your business.

First of all, content should serve your audience.

Tone of voice plays a crucial part in telling a story and can have a big influence on the way in which content is received by the reader, so spending time developing this at the start of the project is extremely valuable.—Ric Bell, Creative Director, and Christina Twigg, Designer at POST Studio

Super ergonomic and concise tone of voice

A good quality pitch deck should have a format that’s easy to use, that helps everyone create elements of communication that are coherent with the brand’s visual identity.—Helena Álvarez Fernández, Graphic Designer at Fever

4

Gather data to support your offer or idea

When the message is sharp and you have a killer starting point, it may be time to contextualize. In that case, it’s better to talk numbers and use examples your reader can relate to. Stick to the following types of content:

Examples, facts and numbers

Benchmarking

Examples, facts and numbers

When talking about abstract concepts, it’s better to nail them down with specific facts or down-to-earth analogies, which are more accessible and thus easier to remember. On the other hand, when presenting numbers or particular solutions, it is better to generalize to help see the bigger picture.


When creating a sales presentation, you need to show how the product transforms your target audience's needs. So, examples should work as a problem-solution duo. When working on a report, be specific: instead of ‘our team did well’ try ‘we did X% of our planned revenue’. Same with pitch decks: not ‘the best start-up in the world’, but ‘the demand for X has grown over the past 5 years from A to B — and according to the estimates of both, it will continue to grow’.

8 tips

!

on presentation design you’ve already looked through

Keep going—there’s more to come

Presentations that break down deliverables don’t show real value. Clients and recipients need assurance on outcomes, i.e, growth, customer loyalty, etc. and not deliverables, i.e., a website, a logo, etc. Such things can go into documentation like a statement of work, but it’s important to re-articulate what deliverables mean in terms of outcomes. The more successful you are at that, the better performing your presentations will be.—Abb-d Taiyo, Co-founder, Design&Production Director at Driftime

Benchmarking

You can use benchmarking as a structural solution for the whole presentation, especially when discussing business propositions. Nota bene: highlight your own ideas, thoughts and statements to distinguish them from the projects developed by others.

Benchmarking requires a more complex design solution. These can be used as templates.

5

Two pitch decks: one to send and one to show

When you are giving a talk and your slides support your idea, limit text in the presentation to a minimum: only headings and keywords are necessary most of the time. However, when the presentation goes solo, it is important to add a simple comment to visual material, so the reader will know how to approach the images. Other things you need to check, before hitting the ‘Send’ button:

Links and copyright

Video and animation

Updates

Links and copyright

The presentation you send is more like a publishing project than a set of slides. It’s important to use open-source content when possible and check your country’s copyright law. To increase the time the reader spends on your pitch deck, make links to your projects and social network profiles clickable and use UTM.


Video and animation

Presentations with the talk following are supposed to be shown within a limited timeframe, which is why video footage is not always an option. However, you do not have to put up with the time limitation when sending. Check that the file plays inside the presentation, not in the new browser’s window.

Updates

It’s more convenient to publish your project on a platform you can instantly update, even if it’s already been set. Sometimes, you may only need to correct a misspelling; sometimes, the data you use requires constant updates.

We traditionally would write up a long-form report, review and then finesse it before adding it to a deck for clients that prefer to read (or won't be in the room when we present). We'll then create a shorter, presentable version so we can debrief in the room with our immediate clients. These will be more visual and more compelling to absorb.

We do both because we've learned how hard it is to create a presentation that can act as a long-form deck that you can read, and a presentable deck that's still interesting to absorb.—Tarik Fontenelle, Director, ON ROAD

Presentations created in Readymag work perfectly when shown and when sent. Only one link (with a perfect domain name) goes both ways and you can make any tweaks instantly.

Book a free demo to learn more about how Readymag can fit your business.

Book a free demo

Follow the best design practices

Aa

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.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

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

1

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

2

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

3

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.

4

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

5

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

6

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

7

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!

8

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

9

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.

10

Use forms for feedback

Whether you present your pitch or send it digitally, you’ll have follow-up to handle. Maybe you’ll ask for feedback, contact information or receive questions you want to address. The most painless option is adding a form. Ask your audience for something, give them a chance to speak their mind or throw in a question in specially tailored lines connected to your mailbox or corporate knowledge base.

Save time and effort with the Readymag Forms widget. It’s flexible, so you can create anything and tweak it to your needs. This feature is active on paid plans only, but you can always upgrade for additional value.

Techstack company presentation

11

Revise when finished

As soon as your deck is ready, try to forget that you’re the one who crafted it and take an unbiased look at the result. Ask yourself a few questions: What should each page tell the audience? How will your visual decisions help them see the point? Are there any non-essential elements? If you can remove something without compromising the message, style and a reasonable sense of fun, get rid of it.

Too much design clutter, like arrows, bullets, boxes and animations, can be confusing. When designing a presentation we need to remember that the main goal is to convey information to the reader.—Sonia Dauer, Senior Marketing designer at Mindspace

Learn how Readymag can help you win over customers and showcase your ideas faster—join a free 30-minute demo.

Readymag
Google Slides
PowerPoint
Keynote

Choose your tool

Below, we compare four popular presentation packages: PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides and Readymag. Learn about the pros and cons of each package to help find the one that best meets your needs and streamlines the process of creation so you can start turning slide decks into captivating interactive experiences.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

OS compatibility

Responsive design for different screen sizes

Workflow and collaboration

Animation options

Publishing presentations

Sharing presentations with selected audiences

Updating presentations after publication

Tracking and boosting presentation performance


1

OS compatibility

First off, you need to decide which device you’re going to use to make your presentation— since some of the most popular tools are fully compatible only with their native environments (and you need to upload program updates manually). Web applications are independent from this condition: they are cloud-based, which means that you can run them right in the browser, regardless of your operating system.

PowerPoint

Part of the Microsoft Office suite, PowerPoint is available for both Windows and Mac, though the Windows version is more robust.

Keynote

A native Mac app, Keynote doesn’t play nicely with other operating systems.

Google Slides

A cloud-based web application that runs in any browser, regardless of the operating system.

Readymag

An online design tool that runs in most web browsers, except Internet Explorer.

We don't build presentations, we build microsites. Our microsites are built for our international clients and we use them to share our research or strategy projects in granular detail.

I hate the fact that so much B2B work is hidden, poorly shared and rarely seen beyond immediate project teams. Our microsites make the minutiae of our work shareable, while walking clients through the key components of the project.—Tarik Fontenelle, Director, ON ROAD

2

Responsive design for different screen sizes

There are space limitations on devices with smaller screen sizes: whether your presentation will be shown on a desktop, mobile or tablet, you need to ensure correct slide proportions and properly place key design elements. Before you start your presentation, you should always know where and how it is going to be seen in the end. Responsive design options can make your life a lot easier.

PowerPoint

Currently provides the same options as Keynote.

Keynote

No responsive design option. There are only several slide proportions to choose from: Standard (4:3) or Widescreen (16:9).

They do not ensure an optimal viewing experience for mobile devices.

Google Slides

Choose from Standard (4:3), or two options that favor horizontal measurements: Widescreen (16:9) or Widescreen (16:10).

Readymag

Offers three layout formats: Desktop, Mobile and Tablet. Height is fully adjustable in all three. First, create the desktop version of your presentation, then rework it for the other two formats.

A strong argument for the mobile experience is important for obvious reasons: there are more chances that people will check a pitch deck on a mobile device than a desktop.—Ric Bell, Creative Director, and Christina Twigg, Designer at POST Studio

3

Workflow and collaboration

Whether you plan to share your slides later, or you just want to collaborate with a coworker, it should be easy to share presentations and collaborate in real-time. However, your workflow can get quite cumbersome in software-based tools. That’s because synchronization occurs through third-party cloud storage, adding an extra step for your device to process.

Keynote

You can invite other people to edit your presentation in real time, so everyone working can see changes as they’re made.

You can’t leave comments.

When you aren’t connected to the internet, you can continue to work—changes are uploaded to iCloud automatically the next time you’re online.

Google Slides

The app allows multiple people to edit the same file, making instant changes easy and building a collaborative, real-time workflow.

Readymag

You can invite collaborators and iterate faster with the help of Comments mode.

There’s also a Layout locked mode that enables you and your collaborators to edit content without the chance of accidentally disrupting the overall design.

All changes appear instantly for all members, which comes in handy when you make edits right before meeting with a client (or during).

PowerPoint

Collaboration works the same way as Keynote, except that you need to connect the software with OneDrive instead of iCloud.

Comments are also unavailable.

4

Animation options

No matter how brilliant your ideas are, you probably won’t get the response you’re looking for if you can’t present them in an engaging way. You need to guide attention with care, especially in our media-rich, fast-paced world. The best way to do that is animation, as the human eye and brain is programmed to respond to movement.

PowerPoint

There are about 50 animation and transition options. Videos and GIFs can be uploaded from your computer. You can also embed videos from YouTube and other online sources. However, this feature is only available to Windows users.

Keynote

Slides and objects can be animated in a number of ways, including path creation, scaling, bounce or jiggle—all in all, you have over 30 animations and 40 transition effects. Videos can be embedded only with the help of a plug-in. GIFs can be added. You can enable objects to act as links that viewers click to jump from one slide to another.

Google Slides

Offers 15 animations and slide transition effects.

Readymag

You can animate objects on load, on hover, on click and on scroll. Add movement, transparency, rotation and size change effects—or combine all these to create a multi-step, triggered motion (the number of customizable animations are limited only by your creativity).

Presentation of identity for Litkovskaya brand

5

Publishing presentations

There are two basic options of sharing a finished presentation: downloading it to your computer as a digital file in any of the popular visual formats (PDF, PPTX etc.) or publishing the presentation online and getting a link that opens in any browser. It’s much easier to send your clients or teammates a link, compared to emailing a presentation as an attachment (if it’s heavy, you’ll have to zip it first too).

PowerPoint

Currently provides the same options as Keynote.

Keynote

Download your presentations in PDF, PPTX, PPT, HTML, image and video formats. File sizes can easily exceed 10 or 20MB, a major pain to share.

Google Slides

Share your presentations via email or link. Google Slides can be viewed offline with a Chrome extension and the use of Backup and Sync.

Readymag

Instantly publish projects on the web, so you can send your clients or teammates a link (you can also map a specific domain). You can also download your presentation as a PDF.

6

Sharing presentations with selected audiences

Do you need to share your presentation (be it a digital file or an online project) with a selected audience?

PowerPoint

Currently provides the same options as Keynote.

Keynote

Presentations are private until shared, with no password protection capabilities.

Google Slides

Presentations can be shared privately, but there are no password capabilities—only invitations.

Readymag

You can restrict access to your entire Readymag presentation or just certain pages. Set a password and customize the look of your login pages. Information on password-protected pages is not indexed by Google and other search engines.

7

Updating presentations after publication

Notice some mistakes or typos in your presentation? Well, the nature of your long-term workflow depends on the tool you choose. It’s no problem to alter presentations published online on the go without most users detecting the change. Yet, with digital files the process is not so easy: you’ll have to create a new file and repeat your delivery process.

PowerPoint

Similar functionality compared with Keynote.

Keynote

No chance to alter a ready digital file, you just create a new version of the presentation with the proper changes.

Google Slides

Automatically saves your presentation in the cloud, so it’s always current and up-to-date.

Readymag

Any change or edit you make to a Readymag presentation is saved instantly, with options to reverse or restore any edits that you may have made. Don’t worry if you’ve accidentally sent your client a presentation with typos or other small flaws. You can make edits at any time and republish—changes take effect in one click.

8

Tracking and boosting presentation performance

Do you need to measure and amplify the performance of your presentation: see its open rate, visualize viewer behavior or retarget audiences after they have checked out your work?

Keynote, PowerPoint and Google Slides offer no such options.

Readymag

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are available for presentations by default. All kinds of Pixels (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.) can be integrated either from presentation settings or with code. Google Search Console, Hubspot, Matomo and Hotjar can be integrated with code.

Book a free demo

Pre-made templates to start out

Save your time using pre-designed Readymag templates that fit well for start-up pitch decks, educational presentations, reports as well as business offers. Free to use. Downloadable as PDFs.


All you need is a Readymag account. Sign up or sign in, open the template and click ‘Open in Editor’. Then start personalizing.