The Strategic Value of Presentation Structure in Professional Slide Design
A great presentation designer will give you a PowerPoint presentation that ticks all the boxes. Even boxes you didn’t know needed to be ticked. Presentations might look similar at first glance. After all, a professionally designed presentation should be visually superior to one that isn’t. But the difference between a good presentation and a great presentation isn’t just about the graphics or layout. It’s all about the structure.
Presentations are used because it matters. It could be a contract worth millions or investment funding making the difference between success and failure. It could be an internal financial report or presentation to employees. Whether or not cold hard cash could be changing hands, it’s about proving you care and how you’re passing on information. It all matters.
Structure is the unsung hero. Most people are too consumed with their content to think about how it’s organised. Make it digestible for the reader – and more fun than a chore. (Need a properly structured PowerPoint presentation? Get in touch.)
Presentation structure is more than just layout
Poorly structured presentations can cost opportunities. They are business tools, first and foremost. Treat them with the respect they deserve, and they will be worth their weight in gold.
A poorly structured presentation leaves people lost and wondering what they’ve learned or why it matters. They’ll be confused at best, annoyed or have failed to understand the points you wanted to get across at worst. If your competitors are doing it better, they are more likely to be getting the contracts, securing the funding – even attracting and retaining the best personnel.
Structure as a strategic asset
A great presentation designer will use structure as a strategic asset and view it as the ‘backbone’ of your slides. They will:
Align your presentations with your business goals
Guide your audience through complex information
Make key points memorable
Help presenters move easily between sections or points
Answer the questions that are being asked
Do it all within brand guidelines
In-house marketing departments and graphic designers might be great at their jobs, but advanced presentation design is unlikely to be one of their main skillsets. They can be good at branding, but not necessarily experts in PowerPoint and understand its true potential. They may not recognise story flow within a presentation or how audience psychology applies here.
Skilled presentation designers are not just moving things around a page and giving you back what you gave them with some added graphics. They are trained to combine storytelling, navigation, narrative, and design to serve a specific purpose.
The strategic role of a presentation designer
A professional Powerpoint presentation designer will take the information you give them and:
Translate it to create a structure with a logical flow
Anticipate or answer already-asked questions and make the answers easy to find
Structure the information according to whether it will be presented live or on screen (or both)
It’s relatively easy to take information and turn it into a good-looking presentation. It’s not so easy to take information and turn it into a document that also sells, gives the information clearly, and has easy and obvious navigation for both the presenter and the audience.
Businesses are often too focused on the message they want to get across - and are too close to it. A presentation designer will look at your presentation from the outside. They will often need to take all the information apart before rebuilding it around the story or business purpose.
PowerPoint presentations should have a strong narrative backbone
At power your point, we start with our client’s brief, as you would expect. However, we don’t just work our magic on the graphics and layout. We use our storytelling power to bring it all to life. Being ‘visual’ isn’t about overloading slides with images. A professional PowerPoint presentation designer won’t ‘overdesign’ your slides. We look for the story or message and pull it out – and then start designing.
Firstly, we don’t just take your information and hand it back as a presentation. We’ll ask questions to understand what you want to achieve. If your deck is in response to client questions that need answering, for example, we use this as the starting point. There are likely to be sub questions too, so getting the structure right makes all the difference. We need to find the narrative arc to turn your deck into a compelling, easily navigable story.
We will break down main questions and sub questions into separate, clearly signposted sections. During investor pitches, funding rounds, and client reports – even in-house presentations – it’s common to ‘jump around’ as queries come up. A properly designed presentation will have anticipated this and made it easy for the presenter to move around. How everything ties together should also be obvious to the audience via the design, even if only on sub-conscious level.
Designing navigation that helps when you’re presenting or watching
There are ways to use cues that help with comprehension and navigation of a presentation. For example, we can use images, colours, numbers, icons – whatever works best in the specific circumstances - to make the section you’re in and any related elements obvious.
This means that whether it’s an RFI (request for information) or a final-stage pitch and you have questions to answer, we won’t just block everything together. This is what tends to happen with many presentations. We’ll go in and break up the content and highlight what section the reader is in using one of our visual aids.
Many decks also neglect the use of hyperlinks and linked menus when PowerPoint presentations are being sent out as PDFs. These allow sections to be accessed instantly and without losing the thread. This is particularly useful whether you’re sending out a sales deck to prospective clients or internal documents. It saves having to click through every page to get to the bit you want or to get back to the main menu.
Presentations without structure risk these problems:
The content is accurate but it’s hard to navigate
The important details get buried
Stakeholders lose track or disengage
Branding is inconsistent
When your presentation matters, you don’t want any avoidable problems.
At power your point, our creative director, Sarah, is highly skilled and used to pulling out the story of a presentation to really ensure it does its job. Based in London but able to work remotely, she’s used to working with companies from start ups to large corporations to help them achieve their business goals. Why not get in touch to find out how she can help you with yours?