Present to Succeed 2023 Recap: How to Level Up your Public Speaking (and more highlights)

Here's a recap of the best presentation tips from the conference:

Moodboards are great for presentation design

One of the first things Katya Kovalenko said when she hit the stage was: "90% of design work happens before you open a presentation software." What she wanted to highlight with this was probably one of the most challenging parts of presentation design, which is knowing where to start. Often times we are quick to open up PowerPoint, Keynote (or whatever software you use), and we get met by a blank white slide.

This is not an ideal place to start your inspiration for presentation design. So how should you go about with it? Follow these three steps:

1. Gather inspiration from Pinterest and other visual sources. You simply search with relevant keywords, e.g. "futuristic design", "luxuruious design", and collect visuals that align with where you want to take your presentation slides. You can include everything from general design direction, to color palettes, typography inspiration, and more.
   
   

2. Once you have a collage of visuals, it's time to put them into a moodboard. A moodboard is a visual system that helps you communicate your design concepts and ideas. It's a curated collection of images, materials, color palettes, text, and other elements that are arranged to reflect the style direction of your project.

Once you have this set, it is much easier to continue with your own slides and use the moodboard as visual guideline.

Drive conversations with interactive presentations

How do you create presentations that are more conversational, rather than one-direction talks? This is a question Frauke Havinga asked her audience. And she shared a brilliant structure to create more conversational presentations.

1. Frame the meeting

Decide the purpose of your presentation. Is it informational? Is it an inspirational pitch? Have one key message in mind. Don't confuse with multiple messages.

2. Shift the focus to the audience

This is where your presentation becomes a conversation. Ask questions to your audience. Invite them for a dialogue. What are their problems in their business? What solutions do they expect? The goal is to connect and come to a mutual understanding.

3. Drive the conversation

Now that you know what's important to your audience, you can drive the conversation. This is where you have prepared multiple story lines, to guide the presentation driven by the conversation you had with your audience.

The outcome is that the audience will feel relevant and heard.

Importance of good typography in your slides

"Typography is what gives words a voice" said Ihor Hulyahrodskyy. He highlighted the importance of using good fonts and how to combine fonts to make your slides both effective and visual. Here are some of the tips he shared:

Where can we find good fonts?

There are many open-source libraries online where you can download fonts. Google Fonts is probably the biggest one, and has some great fonts to pick from. Adobe Fonts is another one. Open Foundry is a good one too.

Contrast is king

Guide the attention of your audience by using contrast in your typography. Some examples of contrast in typography are: (1) Use the size of your text to distinguish what is more important, e.g. a bigger text grabs more attention. (2) Use bold and light weights in your text, to highlight key words in your text. (3) Pair different types of fonts together, to create harmonious designs.

Just by applying these two tips, choosing a good font and using contrast in your typography, you can create much stronger slide designs with clear visual hierarchy throughout your deck.

Using AI tools to create presentations more efficiently

Robin Dohmen talked about how AI can help you in preparing your story and slides. His two main highlights were:

When it comes to nailing your story, tools like ChatGPT can help you with brainstorming your content, your subjects and their order of importance. It can also help you with the overall direction of your script and the tone of voice. Imagine you want a certain tone of voice for your messaging, AI tools can help you rewrite your content to express that tone.

And when it comes to the design, AI can help you with slide design inspiration and improving your images (removing backgrounds and such). You can also use tools like Midjourney and Dall-E to create unique visuals or backgrounds. In our Nike project you can see images of running models created with Midjourney, using simple prompts to describe what we were looking for.

Empathize with your audience

"If you are not able to create a connection with your audience and to show your audience that you see them, no matter how great your message is it is not going to go anywhere." These are the words of Margreet Jacobs. She spoke about the importance of making everyone in the audience feel seen, no matter if you're speaking to a small or big group of people. She raised many good points on how you can empathize with your audience and get your message across easier. Here are two of those points:

Representation

Every person is different. They learn in different ways. It can be visual. It can be through sound. Or it can be through feelings. You've probably heard this before: "I need to see it to understand it". That's the words of a visual person. The same way some people learn to listening to podcasts or audiobooks. They don't need the visual aspect to learn. They learn via sound. And then we have the emotional people, who learn through their feelings.

So when you tell a story or give a presentation to a big group of people, you need to include all of these elements to be sure that you reach the most people. If you only talk without any visuals or stories, you might only reach the sound people. If you on the other hand only tell stories, without any visuals or images, you might not reach the visual people. Makes sense?

Everyone does not exist

We often view audiences as a big group of people. This can be dangerous. Because if you make assumptions about everyone, you might miss out on some important aspects. It's impossible to make assumptions about a big group of people. You will most likely have people disconnect from your talk, that don't feel identified. Empathize with your audience by considering the different backgrounds and where people are coming from. What experience do they have? What differentiates them? Get to know your audience.