Thursday 2 March 2017

Tools for stunning visual presentations


I've written before about the importance of engaging your audience visually during a presentation, and I wanted to share a great way that makes it easy to include stunning visuals in your next PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides presentation.

When I taught presentation skills to groups of 17-year-old high school students, I realised that these kids were never taught the importance of having a visual aid that helps to enhance the message you're trying to get across. Their first instinct was to include a lot of words in their slides, which of course means everyone was reading rather than listening.

I wish I had known then about the two platforms I want to mention today - Canva and Visme. I have used both of these recently with great success, and I think teachers and anyone looking to deliver a visually stunning presentation should look into what these products have to offer. Both offer a free service, with some added benefits when upgrading to the paid tier. Both offer a simple drag and drop interface and make it very easy to customize your elements by changing size, colour or font.



Visme allows up to three designs at one time on the free tier, and some of the more elaborate templates or elements can only be unlocked once you upgrade. A very nice feature is the ability to embed interactive content in a blog or webpage and upgrading to the "Complete" package also gives you access to download interactive content as HTML5.


I have not yet reached a limit to the number of designs I can have on Canva, which is nice as it means I do not have to delete previous projects to make room for new ones. They also have a slightly different way of monetising their product, with some elements or templates coming with individual price tags (often $1). Most users will be happy to work with the free options though, as you can generally get the look you're after with some tweaking. Download options are similar to the free option in Visme, as you can only get designs in image or pdf format.

Visme founder, Payman Taei, does a great job explaining why it is SO important to create engaging visual content. Have a look below to see what I mean.


So, why not have a play with these two fantastic tools and see if you could use them in your next presentation? I am sure you'll have your audience eating out of your hand!

'till next time.

TTT

No comments:

Post a Comment