The Best Way to “Professionalize” Your Slides

Last week, I attended the 2024 Society for Prevention Research annual conference. My boss [gestures to myself and rolls eyes] kept me chained to the Data Soapbox exhibit table for most of the event, but I did have a chance to pop in to a few presentations.

And I realized that the biggest thing distinguishing between presentations that looked professional and those that looked less refined was image consistency.

Imagine, if you will, a research study about three types of parents. The presenter projects a slide like this:

What’s your reaction? Mine is: “Mixing icons, photos, and illustrations on the same slide?! THE HORROR!!” In other words, this is a pretty egregious example of images being inconsistent.

But, don’t be fooled into thinking that using only one type of image (icons, photos, or illustrations) will protect you from inconsistency. If elements like style, color, and shape are inconsistent, a slide can still look sloppy:

Making images consistent takes some time, and may take some money, but it can do LOADS to improve the appearance of a presentation.

You may need to spend time looking for complementary images, rather than settling for the first few you find. This may involve going beyond the often limited selection of free images available through your software or stock image websites. There are way more options if you’re willing to pay, and it doesn’t have to break the bank.*

You might also need to edit some images to make them consistent. For example, you might crop images to the same shape (like a circle), recolor them, or remove solid backgrounds.

But that time and money is worth it, don’t you think? Comment below!

* Here’s an example: A search for “dinosaurs” in Microsoft 365 (free if you have PowerPoint) currently returns 28 icons, only 10 of which are actually dinosaurs. The Noun Project (paid site) returns 1,620 icons, and on the first page of 200 results, 192 are actually dinosaurs. If you’re willing to shell out $2.99 per icon or $40 per year, your presentation on dinosaur asteroid attitudes will look SO much better.