5 ways to give your PowerPoints a glow-up without pulling out your corporate card (or your hair)

For better or worse, PowerPoint has become the predominant vernacular of Corporate America, yet most practitioners approach it with the trepidation of someone traveling to a foreign country without having learned how to say “hello”, “please”, and “thank you” in the local language. As the person my peers always turned to for slide help, I speak PowerPoint with native fluency.

I started using the Mac Classic II version of PowerPoint called AppleWorks in middle school in the mid-90s—not for homework, mind you, but as an artistic outlet to create birthday cards for my friends and flyers for Girl Scouts, because yes, I was that nerd. As that kid who made intricate handmade pop-up cards for holidays and miniature keepsakes out of Sculpey, using my computer as a way to create visuals I couldn’t do by hand seemed like a natural extension of crafting, and presentation software was the best medium available to me in a time when the Internet meant hogging a phone line and Photoshop was out of reach. Thanks to those early years playing around with making slides, I’ve always been able to approach PowerPoint more like a canvas for creative expression and storytelling than an impediment, or vehicle for a spreadsheet in full screen mode.

You don’t have to have my fluency with PowerPoint to make a deck look good—with a few tricks, you can easily up your presentation game and make the slide equivalent of Instagram reality actual reality by focusing on 5 key elements: Layout, color, font, icons, and images.

1. Layout

Source: Canva

The hardest part of PowerPoint is getting started. If you’re not working from a professionally created template, or have one you’ve fallen out of love with (or never were in love with), there’s nothing worse than staring at a blank slide and not knowing where to start. That’s where Canva comes in. Whether you’re looking for slide inspo, or need easy-to-edit layouts, you can build components of your presentation online using Canva’s graphical interface and export it as images to paste into PowerPoint. 

2. Color

Source: Adobe Color

Even if you’ve perfected your layout, an ugly color palette can sink your design. Luckily, Adobe has a free tool called Adobe Color that takes the guesswork out of picking colors you hope will look good in a pie chart. Choose your favorite color, upload an image, or explore pre-sets of current color trends to get 5 complementary colors that will make you feel like a designer when you add them to your Master Slide’s color theme. 

3. Font

Source: Google Fonts

A great way to give your presentation a little bit of personality is a fresh font, especially if you’ve tired of Calibri and Arial. Google Fonts is free and offers plenty of options, from handwritten to ornate. Make sure you embed the fonts in the PowerPoint when you save it so anyone who accesses the document can see it the way you intended it. 

4. Icons

Source: The Noun Project

While PowerPoint has a built-in icon library, one of the easiest ways to make your PowerPoint feel a little custom is through iconography. The Noun Project sources icons from artists from around the world for a truly global visual language in diverse styles. Download the SVG* version of your selected icons to easily recolor and resize them in PowerPoint and don’t forget to attribute the artist in your final deck (a requirement of the free version). (*SVG=Scalable Vector Graphics, which means you can resize it up without making the image look blurry.)

5. Images

Source: Unsplash

If you don’t have a pro stock image account or want to avoid your visuals looking like every other corporate deck, Unsplash has great free photography spanning diverse subject matter that often has more warmth and personality than what you’d find with the expensive image services. Like The Noun Project, creators on Unsplash simply ask that you credit their work when you use it in a deck.

While these tricks won’t make you a presentation master overnight, they will make you more confident in your design choices. Think of it this way: You now know how to do more than say “hello”, “please” and “thank you” in PowerPoint.