Design a Good PowerPoint Slide: Episode 1 – Boring to Beautiful

This week’s tutorial is going to be a little different to what you’re used to: we’re going to take one of your PowerPoint slides and redesign it, from boring to beautiful.

The ‘Design a Good PowerPoint Slide’ Series

On Friday morning, I got an email from a Slide Cow follower. It reads:


Dear Yoyo,

I love your tutorials and have been following you since December of last year. I was wondering if you could help me out.

I work for a small wedding planning company, and I was thinking of making a small company presentation that can show off our social media followers to the team. The thing is, your tutorials are fantastic but I really want to approach this in a unique and creative way.

If you could, can you show me how you can turn something as bland as this into something beautiful?

Sincerely,

Jen L.


In an effort to engage with you guys more, I thought this would be a fantastic way for us to start a new series, a series where we enhance your slides from all the perspectives of design and communication.

For our first episode, we’re going to start with Jen’s slide about her wedding planning company’s social media followers.

From Boring to Beautiful – Before and After

You can see Jen’s PowerPoint slide on the left, and Slide Cow’s redesign on the right. Be sure to move the slider accordingly to get a better view.

Is this Easy to do?

Yes, it really is.

What does this PowerPoint tutorial cover?

This PowerPoint tutorial will teach us how to:

  • Turn a PowerPoint slide from boring to beautiful based on sound design and communication principles.
  • Effectively utilize a high-quality stock photo as the background of our PowerPoint slide (I have listed 4 websites that you can use to find high-quality stock photos for free over here).
  • Set transparent backgrounds using shapes and transparency in PowerPoint.
  • Position elements perfectly with ease in PowerPoint using the arrange options.
  • Create a strong flow of communication on your PowerPoint slide by associating color and icons to the information (I have made a tutorial on how you can bring in editable icons into your PowerPoint slide over here).
  • Take advantage of white space within our PowerPoint slide so that it is clear and concise through key positioning.
Yousef "Yoyo" Abu Ghaidah

Yousef "Yoyo" Abu Ghaidah

Yousef "Yoyo" Abu Ghaidah is a PowerPoint ninja that founded Slide Cow, a learning platform for all things PowerPoint, presentations and public speaking. When he's not designing slides or giving presentations, he's on another coffee run.
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