Follow the best design practices

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

Readymag

Google Slides

PowerPoint

Keynote

There are separate viewer settings for each of the layouts. For example, navigation arrows can be toggled on for the mobile version without being activated for desktop.

There are even more sleek and sophisticated interactions to consider: you can turn video into a sequence of stills that plays on scroll or on hover; create video backgrounds and play on scroll; replace the standard cursor with whatever graphic object you want.

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.

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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

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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

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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

Mobile view of Tracksmith presentation

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Create interactive pitches, treatments & business presentations with Readymag