You have been there before. It’s a crucial meeting in the boardroom or an important keynote at a conference in your field. The speaker rises to go over the numbers or present a new way to approach your market. They pull up their Google Slides or PowerPoint, but their slides are crowded with text, and rather than provide a succinct analysis of a few key stats, the speaker opts to read directly from the slides. A few minutes in, you get that sinking feeling that this is going to be an especially long hour.
You aren’t alone in having that feeling. Recent surveys of executives reveal that most executives dislike the standard approach to giving presentations; they find them boring and inefficient. Many executives long for a new approach to corporate presentation design: one that not only designs more engaging and interesting slides but also reshapes how corporate executives communicate their initiative’s vision, quarterly performance, and value proposition in ways that demonstrate and create impact.
Board meetings shouldn’t be boring; they should be opportunities to wrestle with strategy or to get other executives on board, energizing them and communicating a sense of shared purpose and shared urgency. Keynotes shouldn’t be dull; they should challenge you to rethink basic assumptions or inspire you to aim for heights you had stopped believing could be possible.
Design That Thinks Like a Boardroom
Rather than just tasking an overworked executive assistant with creating a slide deck, some executives are turning to design agencies like Slidor to upgrade the way they present their ideas. These agencies have expertise in designing corporate presentations that do more than just dump information; they spark conversations. They use art and design to captivate audiences and command attention. And they give executives ways to communicate challenging or exciting ideas visually.
Slidor has been designing such presentations since 2013, and their work is done entirely in-house. Because they don’t outsource to freelancers, their team is able to work directly with executives to create corporate presentation designs that are specifically fitted to their organization or to their initiative. (The in-house design also helps maintain confidentiality.)
Telling the Story
In addition to boardroom meeting slides, Slidor designs dynamic sales materials, templates, slide banks, pitch decks to help entrepreneurs raise capital, and readable and compelling financial reports. Their approach to designing PowerPoint presentations is to tell a story.
After all, that is what any executive giving a presentation or a keynote is tasked with doing. You have to present your audience with a story so compelling that they are ready to get on board and respond to your call to action. The reason that text-crowded PowerPoints don’t work isn’t just that they are difficult to read and parse visually; it’s that they don’t evoke emotion. They don’t convey a story that gets the audience thinking and planning energetically. Perhaps most concerningly, they don’t always end in a conclusive way that leaves the audience with clear direction on where to invest their energy next. A story is only as powerful as its ending.
Corporate presentation design isn’t just about aesthetics. Slidor’s design methodology is all about creating visual systems for relaying complex narratives. When their designers work with busy executives, they start by striving to understand the business intent behind the presentation. That’s the core of the story. Once that is understood, each slide can be designed to advance the executive’s strategic goal. Then the aesthetics kick in, as the designers create decks that reflect the polish and precision expected at the highest level of the business.
The Fast, Executive-Caliber Presentation
The other thing that is characteristic of modern, more forward-looking presentation design is that it is developed and delivered fast. Organizations like Slidor develop specific design methodologies that allow them to quickly capture, visualize, and present a mission-critical story, and that can be applied in a modular way across varied corporate functions and teams.
As these modular, narrative methodologies continue to evolve and become more common, perhaps the meetings you attend and the meetings you lead in the future may be less boring, more inspiring, and more adept at propelling your team into action. If that becomes the case, and we end up with more meetings that shouldn’t “have just been emails,” imagine how such moments could increase the productivity, strategic thinking, and future-readiness of you and your team.