Be Purposeful with Your Animation

Some of the most basic elements of PowerPoint slide design can help you get the greatest impact from your business presentations. Choosing the correct font, for example, makes your slides more readable. Using a high percentage of graphic slides rather than a lot of text helps your audience focus better and allows you to speak more spontaneously rather than reading your slides word for word.

A third element of slide design that you can use effectively is animation.

When designing your slides, you can animate your textual bullet points and you can animate your graphics.

Bullet points are animated when you display them one at a time rather than showing them all at once when you change your slides. If your audience sees just one bullet at a time, it’s clear to them exactly which idea you’re speaking about, and they can’t read ahead, which might result in their losing focus.

When you animate your bullet points, use the same effect for each one that you display. You may think that a variety of effects, such as fly-ins, fade-ins and crawl-ins, make your presentation more interesting, but actually, using the same effect each time develops consistency in your presentation and makes your animation less distracting.

The best effects you can use for your bullet points are fly-ins and wipes from left to right. This is because your audience reads them from left to right. Using these effects, therefore, helps your audience absorb the textual information more quickly.

In addition to bullet points, you can also animate your graphics. Graphics are animated just like your bullet points, and you can choose from a variety of effects to bring them onto your screen. Like your bullet points, however, consistency is key. Using the same effects for each graphic helps develop the consistency your audience needs to follow you better.

Some of the clip art graphics available are already animated, meaning that they move. While these are useful for illustrating some of your points, they can be distracting. Leave them on your screen for just a short time to make an impact, and remove them when you move on to another idea. Your audience will focus on you if they’re not watching your animated clip art.

Animation is effective for both bullet points and graphics, but be careful not to over-animate. Too much, and in addition to losing your impact, your business presentation begins to look like a cartoon. For each animation you choose, make sure you have a clear purpose for using it.