A presentation coach I once spoke to told me about two clients he saw in the same week. One arrived having memorised a 16-minute speech and the other came in with a handful of clear points and the confidence to speak around them.
By the end of the session, there was a clear difference. One was focused on getting through it. The other was focused on the room (and the people that matter). Can you guess which was which?
Of course you can.
That’s exactly the difference most PowerPoints miss. They’re built to support the speaker, not the audience.
By the time a deck lands on your desk to “tidy up”, it’s already been built the same way. It’s never that the slides look bad, it’s that the deck is trying to do six jobs at once—inform, reassure, document, prompt, cover the speaker’s nerves and survive multiple rounds of feedback—and somewhere along the way it stopped being a presentation.
Earlier in my career as an events designer, I was the guy on site the night before, working alongside clients and speakers that knew something wasn’t right but couldn’t name it. In those situations you learn fast that what’s needed isn’t a tidy-up. It’s a rethink.
The slides are doing the speaker’s job
Most speakers use PowerPoint as a safety net, which is understandable. Nobody (and I mean nobody) wants to forget a key point in front of senior stakeholders. But once that happens, the slides become the script. Every reassurance the speaker needs is now sitting on screen in nine-point font, asking the audience to squint and listen at the same time.
As a marcomms professional, you’re being given a deck built for one person’s confidence and being asked to make it work for a whole room. Usually without enough time, alongside everything else. The deck is one job among twenty, and it’s the one that’s most visible if it goes wrong.
So the task is to work out what belongs on the slides and what belongs in the speaker’s mouth.
Words do more work than slides
It’s easy to assume good presentation design is about making slides look pretty. It isn’t.
Copy carries more weight than it gets credit for—as our creative copywriter and proofreader reviewing this article will no doubt agree (hi Becky and Josie). The strongest decks have clear, purposeful statements running through them. Not headings that label a topic, but lines that tell the audience the point straight away. A strong opening statement can frame a slide in seconds, which means people aren’t picking through the detail trying to work out what matters.
That’s where the real improvements start. Not making everything shorter for the sake of it, but being more deliberate. Say the right thing clearly and give the audience a way in.
The same goes for imagery. Used well, it sharpens a message or sets the pace. Used badly, it becomes filler.
Complex doesn’t have to mean cluttered
You’ll get pushback on this, especially in regulated sectors—”it needs to all be there”. And often, it does.
A lot of the decks crossing your desk are complex for good reason: real data, detailed graphs and technical nuance that really matters. In healthcare, medtech and similar spaces, that detail is often the point.
The work is in how you shape it:
- Lead with the takeaway before showing the graph
- Break one overloaded slide into two
- Rework a visual so people know where to look
- Decide what belongs on the slide and what’s better coming from the speaker
That’s a better conversation to have with stakeholders than “we need to make it look better”. It’s also often easier and more cost-effective. Win-win.
The decks that work are collaborative
The presentations that get it right are almost always the ones built together. Not the ones tidied up at the last minute, but the ones where there’s space for a real conversation.
If you’re the person managing this from the comms side, that conversation is yours to push for. The speakers who lean into it get more out of the process. And so do their audiences.
Once that’s sorted, designers can work their magic and creatives can carve the copy so the deck comes to life and nothing gets missed.
With that in place, the audience will remember what you said.
Which is the whole point of doing this in the first place.
Reading this and thinking “I need someone who can actually do all of this”? Good news, you’ve found them. Get in touch.
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