Getting visual
You definitely don’t need to be a designer to get more visual with your presentations and help the audience remember more. Here is a step by step guide on how I would convert a typical bullet point into a much more visually appealing piece of content.
Let’s use the following examples that have been stolen from an old PowerPoint deck sent to me a while ago:
- High quality of life attracting professionals from around the world
- Internationally recognised standards
- Average 17{0106baaaa8600498575ad431aa642880bb5c0c89b7277e6a8411bde3837afeb1} increase over recent years
Here is how I would change each of them into something much more visually appealing.
Step 1 – Trimming the fat
First of all lets look at the key words from each that we could represent as visuals instead of words. I have highlighted these in bold below for each point.
- High quality of life attracting professionals from around the world
- Internationally recognised standards
- Average 17{0106baaaa8600498575ad431aa642880bb5c0c89b7277e6a8411bde3837afeb1} increase over recent years
I have highlighted these words because they are the key points. We can find visuals for them quite easily, and the rest of the sentence doesn’t actually need to be on the screen at all.
Don’t forget that there is another element to your presentation aside form the visuals………….Guessed it yet? It’s YOU!
You will be the one presenting this, and it’s you that can fill in the gaps and actually say the words that I haven’t highlighted above.
Step 2 – Finding the visuals
As you may know I am a huge advocate of using Prezi rather than PowerPoint, and one of the great features I love about it is called Symbols & Shapes. This is a big library of custom icons, all in different styles and colours, and available right there in the software for all users to take advantage of.
Some other resources for you to use outside of Prezi would be:
www.flaticon.com
www.freepik.com
And trust me there are tonnes more I could of listed. Searching for ‘Free Vector Icons’ will bring up some great results.
All of the icon sets mentioned above can be dropped into any presentation software. And of course if you work for a large organisation, call your design or marketing team and ask if there are any branded icons you can use.
Step 3 – Putting them together
I’m going to stick with Prezi for building my visuals but the process is essentially the same in any software.
Again you don’t need to be a designer to do this!
First of all try to avoid just placing icons next to each other. Try to give them an interesting layout, and of course if one icon or message is more important than the other then give it more emphasis by simply making it larger.
Below is my first attempt at converting the bullet point ‘High quality of life attracting professionals from around the world’. You can see I have already removed most of the wording.
I wasn’t that satisfied with the above image so continued to play around with it a little more until I got to the below result:
So you can now see that I have combined the icons together and added the simple tag line ‘Attracting Professionals’. I also used two different fonts just for a little extra flair. The icons used are from Prezis Symbols & Shapes and look great when placed together. I would of liked to have used an icon of a Magnet to represent ATTRACTING but that wasn’t in the list. I’ll live 😉
So here’s what I was able to do with the other bullet points by just using Prezis Symbols & Shapes feature. The old boring bullets are on the left, and the new visuals on the right:
