I love the typeface “Helvetica” I love its simplicity, its clarity and the way it always looks modern. Anyone who has been a member of any of my audiences will know that most of my presentations are filled with slides using Helvetica.

One of the problems you may experience when you present in English is that you are probably not aware of of the many different fonts out there. I wrote recently on the different fonts I use and why and in what circumstances I use them, but when it comes to a straight forward presentation, where the goal is to present information in a simple, memorable way, then Helvetica wins all the time.

Helvetica, in my opinion, looks best black on white (as in the image above), but it also looks great white on black.

Helvetica is such an iconic font, that they even made a movie about it. Here’s the trailer for the movie

Here are some tips when using Helvetica:

• Keep words to a minimum (Helvetica looks great with only a few words)

• Combine big letters with small ones (see above illustration)

• Use simple colours with simple backgrounds

• Spread letters out in your big sized words

• Use the whole Helvetica family

So next time you are thinking about your presentation. I say … go with Helvetica

One of the biggest mistakes a presenter can make is in the planning stage.

After sitting down and writing a great outline, a great story, and gathering all the right images and data, the presenter then opens up his or her Powerpoint programme. Then without thinking, just starts writing their slides. No thought about colour schemes, fonts or layout.

One thing you need to know when you present to an English speaking audience, is that the very first few slides will determine whether you are able to keep your audience listening, or whether they will just go to sleep.

Designing your slides is a very important part of planning your presentation. Standard colours like a medium blue background is a definite no no, so is white. Standard fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial are also a definite no no. Your computer comes with a selection of fonts, and if you do not like the alternatives, you can download some free fonts from 1001 Free Fonts so use them.

The above slide is an example of a slide that has no thought given to the design, or for the audience. It has a very boring blue background, with a standard font (arial) It also has the company’s logo placed at the bottom, which just does not go very well with the background.

Together with the use of bullet points, this slide is not only bad, it is also guaranteed to have your audience sleeping within the first 3 minutes.

Here is an example of a much better slide. There are no bullet points, the background is interesting, and the font used is Helvetica. It also makes use of “blank space” (sometimes called “white space”) It gives the same information as the previous slide, but it does so in a much more interesting way. You could also add a little animation to the slide by moving the timeline forward as you speak.

This slide is a very common slide in most presentations. What is does is tells the audience what you are going to talk about. Whilst telling your audience what you are going to talk about, I personally choose to say this rather than make a slide for it. However, if you choose to put a slide up with what you are going to talk about, the above slide is not the way to do it.

Like the first slide, it is boring. No audience is going to be inspired to stay awake and listen to you with a slide like this.

Here is a much more interesting way to present the topic of your presentation. Again, like the previous example, you could animate it and have the coloured boxes moving forward as you tell you audience what you will be talking about.

Once again, this slide uses colour to make the slide more interesting. It is not busy and it links very well with the previous slide.

Taking a little time to think about design can be the difference between an outstanding presentation and just another boring presentation.

There are many resources on the internet that can help you with inspiration. One of the best resources for presentation inspiration is slideshare.net It is free and you can spend hours there just hunting around for some great ideas. – Go on have look, and release your creative talents. And remember, when designing your presentation, have fun!!