Common mistakes when creating presentations

Common mistakes when creating presentations

Many students actively use PowerPoint to create presentation. But few people know what requirements should be met in this case, what mistakes should be avoided. Let’s consider the main mistakes that a user makes when creating a presentation.

Mistakes when creating a presentation

Mixing cold and warm colors. 

As you know, all colors of the spectrum are subdivided into cold and warm colors. Cold include blue, blue. To warm – yellow, red, green. There is also a neutral color – purple.

The rule is not to mix cold and warm colors on the same slide. For example, do not write in red on a blue background. When designing your slides, use only warm colors or only cool colors depending on the theme of your presentation.

For example, if the presentation contains material about Antarctica or the ocean, then cold colors will look more advantageous. On the other hand, if you are preparing a presentation about environmental protection, building houses, breeding pets, then, most likely, it is better to use the warm colors of the spectrum.

Presentation dark background. 

Of course, there are situations where a dark background is fine. For example, presentations about space exploration, caves, the construction of the subway, of course, it is better to do it against a dark background.

However, most presentations look best on a light background. A light background gives great opportunities for using different colors in the design of the text (on a white background, red and blue and dark green and brown and purple and other dark colors look good).

Light backgrounds and dark text read better from a distance than light text on dark backgrounds. No wonder the numbers of the cars were changed in due time and now they contain dark letters on a white background.

Lack of margins and frames in the slide design.

If the text starts at the very edge of the slide and ends at the other edge, then it looks sloppy. No wonder there are fields in notebooks and books. It would be very appropriate to frame your presentation slides. In this case, the slide looks complete, holistic, harmonious.

Use only capital letters in the slide design. 

This trend is rooted in the distant past, when there were still no computers and all printed materials were prepared on typewriters. At that time, there was no other way to highlight the text, how to fill it with only capital letters.

Many presentation creators use this method to this day. Moreover, they design this way not only the headings, but the entire text. It is very inconvenient to read such inscriptions.

Overload the slide with text. 

If you are preparing a presentation for a large screen, then its slides should contain a minimum of text. You will say all the text during your speech, and the slides in the presentation should contain illustrations to make your speech more spectacular and clearer.

Very often, the presenter puts on the slide all the text he is about to say and simply reads it from the screen. Such speeches most closely resemble a synchronous reading session. The lecturer reads his speech to the audience, and the audience follows the text on the slide so that the lecturer speaks exactly what is written.

Unfortunately, viewers in the back rows cannot see the text on the slides. Over time, they begin to get bored at such a “lecture” and can leave without waiting for its end.

Oversaturation of the slide with pictures. 

If you have several pictures, it is better to place them on different slides and show them one after the other than to shrink them, trying to put it all on one slide.

Using Times and Italics in slide designs. 

The main goal of the presentation creator is to ensure that viewers, even those sitting in the back rows, can easily read all the inscriptions on the slides. This is possible only when using fonts of the Arial family (such fonts are also called “chopped” fonts). The use of fonts of the Times family, and even in italics, leads to the fact that even those sitting in the front rows will find it difficult to read the text.

Incorrect presentation slides composition. 

And in painting, and in photography, and in cinematography, the same laws of frame construction operate. They come from the peculiarities of a person’s perception of the picture at which he is looking.

Place images to the edge or corner of the presentation slide. 

Placing photographs close to the edges, and even more so in the corner of the warehouse, is considered a gross mistake in the design of presentation materials. Psychologically, this placement makes the viewer think that the picture may continue outside the slide, but the viewer himself does not see this continuation. The feeling of isolation and completeness of the slide disappears. Optimally, it would be to place the image some distance from the edge of the slide. If the image is placed in the corner of the slide, then the distances to the closest edges of the slide should be the same.