Keeping up Appearances: Be Consistent in How Your Presentation Looks
By Kathy Villella
To unify your message and imprint your brand, all your marketing materials should reflect a common style and “look.” This includes your proposals, brochures, web site, and your presentations. Consistency conveys professionalism.
A consistent look for your materials is as important as a standardized writing style. Both aspects require a deliberate and thoughtful strategy—beyond the simple application of templates and default preferences. The following tips present a few examples of what you need to think about to develop a consistent look for your presentations.
Shapes
Take a stand and decide on all the details about shapes, objects, and other graphic elements, and then use them consistently.
When using arrows, for example, be sure that you use horizontal flows with the arrows at the same angle. This may seem like a minor point, but attention to such detail makes for a very nice looking presentation.
Do you prefer to use photographs or clip art in your presentations or both? Whatever you decide, be sure that what you use is consistent in style. Mixing different styles of clipart will scream “unprofessional.” Photographs also need careful scrutiny, but they aren’t as difficult to mix and match.
Color Choices and Fill Effects
You may already have a color palette for your web site and materials. If not, develop one that fits the culture of your business.
For presentations, color choices should be dictated by the presentation type. If it is to be printed out, then it’s smart to stay away from large fields of dark colors due to printing issues. If you are developing an on-screen presentation, choose colors that provide the most contrast against the background and with overlaying text.
Make these choices from colors within your palette, but make them carefully. Develop guidelines about color decisions for each type of presentation use.
Below is an example of a color palette that can applied to your presentation, web site or other communications.
There are many variations and combinations possible from such a pallette. However, you don’t necessarily want all of those variations within your presentation(s). When you use your pallette colors for filling graphical elements, for example, it’s smart to choose a fill color and effect and stay with it until there is a good reason to add another variation.
Formatting
When developing presentations and documents, set up and adhere to specific formatting techniques. Spend time prior to the production process formatting content so that edits are easy at the end of the process (near the deadline).
For example, what happens if you decide early on to use a non-editable schematic (maybe a jpg) instead of redrawing it so that it is editable? If the jpg ends up standing as is and no one wants changes, then no unnecessary effort was expended and the deadline is not impacted. But if one of the reviewers wants to change colors or layout at a point close to the deadline, there may be a problem.
If time is spent at the beginning of the process making sure that you can edit all elements and fields within the presentation, any last-minute changes can be accommodated. Anticipating possible “surprises” may create work on the front end, but will save time and stress when deadlines loom.
Layout
Settling on layout preferences for slides before production also saves time and makes it easier to maintain consistency. Look for ways to bring consistency into slide layouts, especially when presenting similar or associated information.
Choose Your Words Carefully
Of course, you need to choose specific reference resources—dictionary, thesaurus, and grammar/usage guides—and keep them readily available to your team members. If you are presenting to a particular industry, you need to use the terminology for that industry correctly to underscore your credibility. The Barron’s Guides are great resources for business lingo, but make sure you update them with most the recent versions.
Even though these resources may be in place, you still need to remain aware of the changing preferences for word usages and spellings. For example, “e” words are now considered correct without a hyphen, for example, email and ecommerce.
Also, there is a tendency these days to rely solely on the spell checker in PowerPoint to make all word usage choices. Spell checkers are fine for preliminary scans for misspelled/misused words, but they should never be the last word (no pun intended). They overlook too many errors.
For instance, one error that PowerPoint’s dictionary makes is hyphenating words that don’t always need to be, such as those that contain a prefix (pre, post, pro, etc.). Use the standard resources established by your company to make the calls on word usage and punctuation.
Consistency Encourages Creativity
Contrary to what you might be thinking, consistency is not the opposite of creativity. Creativity can live and thrive in a consistent presentation. In fact, following establishing guidelines for presentations can free up your mind to focus on the message itself.
And the inconsistencies that can arise from multiple team members contributing to a presentation cease to be a problem when the calls about styles and preferences are made in advance. Not only does the company gain stature from publishing consistently written documents and presentations, but leveraging pages from other materials becomes much easier and less time consuming since the writing styles and preferences are the same.
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Kathy Villella is cofounder of PowerFrameworks. She has provided presentation development support for twenty years. For nearly fifteen years, she supported client engagement teams and supervised and trained others at McKinsey & Company. Visit www.powerframeworks.net to find out more.
You might also be interested in these articles by Kathy Villella:
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