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The Power of Grids in PowerPoint Design: Enhancing Consistency and Engagement
When it comes to designing compelling PowerPoint slides, grids are an often overlooked but essential tool. Leveraging grids in your slide design can significantly enhance the clarity, engagement, and overall aesthetic appeal of your presentation. Here’s why grids are crucial and how they can transform your slides.
The Golden Ratio: Harmonious Proportions
One of the most compelling reasons to use grids is their connection to the golden ratio, a mathematical principle found in nature that is pleasing to the eye. By structuring your slides around the golden ratio, you can create a natural balance and harmony that instinctively attracts your audience. The grid ensures that elements such as images, text, and graphics are proportionately sized and placed, fostering a sense of cohesion and elegance.
Using grids in PowerPoint has the advantage of engaging your audience by creating visually appealing designs that draw their attention to key elements, such as the Mona Lisa’s famous smile. Proportion and balance are crucial in effective design, and employing grids and guides in PowerPoint helps you achieve designs that are both aesthetically pleasing and well-structured. This not only enhances the visual appeal for your audience but also aids in effectively conveying your message and achieving your business goals.
Reducing Distraction: Clarity and Focus
In the digital age, where attention spans are short, minimizing distractions is key. Grids help organize content in a way that guides the viewer’s eye smoothly across the slide. This structured approach reduces visual clutter, ensuring that your audience focuses on the most important elements of your message. By aligning text and images consistently, grids prevent the chaotic scatter of information that can overwhelm and distract your viewers.
Creative and Consistent Layouts: Engaging Design
Grids offer a framework that allows for creativity within a consistent structure. They provide the flexibility to create unique and interesting layouts while maintaining a cohesive look throughout your presentation. This balance between creativity and consistency is crucial for keeping your audience engaged. When each slide adheres to a grid, transitions are smoother, and the overall presentation feels more professional and polished.
So what is a grid?
There are different types of grids, but for our purposes, we are interested in a balanced grid with columns and rows.
If your slide resolution is 16:9, then we’re interested in a grid that has twelve columns and as many rows as your slide will take, however a three-column grid works brilliantly, too.
Here’s what they could look like:
How to Create a Grid in PowerPoint
There are several ways that you can go about setting up a grid in PowerPoint.
Enable the Grid Option:
Go to the View menu in PowerPoint and turn on the grid option. This will display a 12-column grid in dots. This can be distracting for some but it does the trick.
Use Drawing Guides:
You can create a grid using the drawing guides.
In the View menu, turn on Guides. To add more guide lines, place the pointer directly on an existing line, hold down CTRL and click it. This will display a new guide line that you can drag to your desired position.
Draw Lines with the Shapes Tool:
On a slide master, use the Shapes tool to draw lines, creating a custom grid layout.
To do this, go to View > Slide Master, and find the main Slide Master (usually right at the top of the list – all other slides are indented below this). Go to your Shapes icon, choose the Line tool and use multiple lines to create whatever grid you want.
Close the Slide Master, create your slides, and when you are finished, go back to the Slide Master and delete your grid so that it no longer appears in your completed slide deck.
Download a Pre-made Grid:
We’ve created a few grids and sample layouts for you.
Simply download these from our collection and then insert into your master slides to use as a background. Once you have finished designing your slides, you can open up your slide master and delete the grid background.
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And that’s it!
Incorporating grids into your PowerPoint design process is not just about aesthetic appeal; it’s about enhancing the functionality and effectiveness of your presentation. By utilizing the golden ratio, reducing distractions, and enabling creative yet consistent layouts, grids play a pivotal role in crafting slides that are both visually appealing and highly engaging. Next time you create a PowerPoint presentation, consider using grids to elevate your design and captivate your audience.
If you’ve found this useful, you might find our Presentation and Public Speaking training of interest. We offer tailored workshops that cover presentation planning and preparation, structure, slide design, crafting content, delivery and managing questions. We also offer presentation coaching for groups and individuals.
Curious? Get in touch!