Learning to create a great presentations involves much more than knowing how to use Apple Keynote or Microsoft PowerPoint. It is also important to understand the principles of presentation design in order to effectively communicate your message. To address this gap, there are now presentation design courses, including Keynote design classes and PowerPoint design classes. Both courses cover the same principles, and are part of the recently added presentation design courses.

As part of these presentation design courses participants learn to use fundamental design principles that enable you to clearly and effectively share your messages. Some of these presentation design principles include:

The page layout and placement of objects within a presentation. Knowing where to place pictures and text, and when to use one or the other, or both, helps you to effectively convey your message with your presentations.

The use of images in presentations is important, but knowing where to place them on a slide, and their size, and even when to use images.

Effective use of text and typography within a presentation is also covered. Too often presentations are difficult to follow with an endless array of bullet points. Helping to use text to make your presentations easy to follow, communicate your message, and allow viewers to understand the most important points of your presentations.

Transitions and multimedia can keep users engaged, or become a distraction. Learn to use these to your advantage so that presentations capture your audience’s attention while conveying the most important points you wish to share.

Color choices within a presentation can also convey mood as well as direct user. Color choices go beyond brand identity and can help direct users attention and focus to the most important items on your page, or convey an overall theme.

While both Keynote classes and PowerPoint courses teach you how to use these powerful tools, these design courses differ in that they help to make sure that you can apply good design aesthetics to the slides you design, whether working in Keynote or PowerPoint. Learn to create great presentations and make better design choices so that your slide decks become effective and powerful communications tools.