PowerPoint Presentations are ubiquitous in today’s world. Chances are you’ve already created a ton of them yourself. So why hire a professional presentation designer? We've outlined some of the biggest reasons that customers come to us for professional presentation design.
1. There is a science to great presentations
Creativity and design cannot be mastered overnight; there is a science to excellent design, and to be a competent presentation designer, you must spend endless hours going through the studies and research that illustrate what works for design and why. Professional designers not only know how to make great designs, but they also understand why they work.
For example, many people understand at a surface level that colors influence behavior and decisions. However, do you know how to use the persuasive power of colors to make an impactful presentation? Unless you want to be a professional designer there is likely no need for you to study the psychology of colors. Professional presentation designers, however, do know what colors would work best for your presentation, and that is one reason why their services are so valuable. The science doesn’t end there. Presentation experts also understand:
– The Serial Position Effect
– The Von Restorff Effect
– Cognitive Load Theory
– The Science Of Storytelling
– The Picture Superiority Effect
– And so much more.
Unless you wish to devote your time to mastering the science of presentation design, you should work with a professional presentation designer to ensure that your presentations employ the most effective design strategies, allowing you to meet or surpass your goals.
2. Gain a storytelling advantage
You can keep your audience engaged and interested by investing in a presentation that tells a good story. Once you have created a draft of your presentation content, you must transform your ideas into a slide outline. Communicating your ideas in a presentation is different from communicating your ideas in a research paper, a newspaper article, or a casual conversation. This step alone demands significant thought and effort to complete. After your slide outline, you should create a mood board to ensure your slides have a cohesive style. For a mood board you will need to select an overall style, as well as fonts, a color scheme, and icons. Your mood board will then lead to a storyboard so you have a roadmap to follow as you turn your ideas into actual slides. Further, telling a story on a slide deck means being ruthless about what makes it on to a page, and sometimes we’re too close to our own content to notice when text and graphics detract from the narrative.
In addition to helping you to define your target audience and align your message to your brand, a pro will help transform a boring slide deck into a strong and interesting narrative.
3. Sometimes, you only get one chance
Not all presentations can make or break your career. Some presentations are simple, straightforward, and relatively unimportant. For example, your weekly staff meeting presentation might be helpful for your team, but most likely it will not have a significant impact on the overall success of your business.
Other presentations however can make or break your career as well as influence the overall success of your business. For instance, presenting at a big conference is not the same as presenting to your small team of employees during a casual meeting. Presenting at a conference can lead directly to increased sales, new partnership invitations, PR opportunities, and marketing magic. Presentations are also used to pitch to investors, recruit and train new talent, educate customers, introduce new products, develop personal platforms, and so much more. In all of these various scenarios the quality of your presentation matters because the objectives of your presentation matter, and the results will directly effect the success of your business.
Like a good book or an Oscar-worthy film, an expertly designed deck rich with insight and design will tell a story that sways emotions and influences decisions.
4. Presentations take time
When you create your own slides you will invest hours, days, and potentially weeks designing, editing, and tweaking your slides.
Creating an effective presentation means taking the time to strategically map out the content. How do you tell the best story you can in just a few slides? And how much time will you lose fiddling with the software, searching and buying images, streamlining fonts, lining up text, and tweaking each slide? There are dozens of style decisions to make for every single slide of your deck — not including the actual text.
– Should the image be cropped, or presented as is?
– How will the Rule of Thirds be utilized?
– How will the typography of the slide interact with the image on the slide?
– Should you use a color overlay to help the text stand out?
– Should you add a filter to the image so it fits with the overall style of your deck?
Designers do this for a living: they do it quickly and expertly, so it will resonate with your audience in the best possible way. You could save yourself hours and days by hiring someone who not only knows the ins and outs of the software, but also knows how to tell a powerful story—and can create your slide deck, fast.
The question is, can you really afford not to hire the right professional for your presentation?