Professional Development 201: From Basic to Dynamic

4: Before the Webinar - Visuals

Developing the Presentation

Creating engaging visuals is an important part of the preparations for a webinar. PowerPoint ^® and Keynote ^® are popular tools to create visuals. As with an in-person presentation or training, there are some important rules to remember when designing slides.

Slides should guide your presentation. Sometimes the content on slides can creep into the "nice to know" area and then there are too many slides or too much content on each slide. Keep the content on a slide to essential information. Send digital handouts with all the "extra" information to participants prior to the webinar. Handouts provide a greater level of detail to help participants gain a better understanding of the topic.

Here are some best practices when developing your presentations slides.

• Don't use too much text. Too much text can be overwhelming to try to read.
• Use contrasting colors that are easy to read, keep text large with brief statements, and limit the amount of text per slide.
• Don't crowd the slide. It will be more difficult for the audience to read and know what to focus on.
• Add negative space. Again, this will help with the slides' readability.
• Don't make the slide difficult to read. Small changes can make a big difference.
• Make text easy to read. Pay attention to backgrounds and fonts.

 
As alluded to, the choice of text fonts can help with the readability of slides. Here are some tips on how to effectively use fonts in your visuals:

• Follow the 2 x 2 rule. Don't use more than two types of font per slide or more than two sizes of font per slide. The types of fonts used should be complementary, such as Arial and Arial Bold. Anything more can prove distracting.
• Use sans serif fonts for online presentations. A serif is a small line or slight projection at the end of a stroke in a letter. A serif only exists in certain typefaces such as Times New Roman or Courier New. Those fonts are referred to as serif fonts. Serif fonts were designed to make it easier to read printed documents like newspapers that are filled with text. Sans Serif fonts, such as Arial or Helvetica, are better for presentations because minimal text is shown on slides, and the font size will be much larger than the typical printed document.

Follow these best practices and your audience will be able to visually follow along with your webinar content.