In this article, you will learn about 3 sites that will help you make your presentation more visual and original. You will also see some examples of what your slides might look like after you master these sites.
Let's say you have such a slide, designed with the help of quite popular and therefore already boring images.
Where can I find pictures to help our slide stand out? Preferably free.
On this site you will find a large number of pictograms on a variety of topics: from cats to logistics. By the way, don't confuse pictograms with infographics. They are only a small part of it.
They are black, but in Powerpoint they can be recolored in a different color, like any image inserted on a slide. Here is an example:
If you want to make a background in the form of a photo, then be sure to do 2 things:
1. Strongly darken or vice versa lighten the photo. ()
Click on the picture, then select Picture Tools: Color or Adjustments
Section Working with pictures: Color or correction
2. Make backgrounds for text or icons. ()
Select Insert - Shapes - Circle or Square. Fill in the desired color
and move back behind the text
Insert - shapes - circle or square
Here is the result:
There is also great amount pictograms. The feature of the site is that there are multi-colored pictograms and sets of pictograms. For example, a set of colored pictograms
Here's what it looks like:
On this site you will find a large number of images in the now popular FlatArt style. Most of them are free.
This is what your slide will look like if you use Flatart style images
The site is especially good for those who know how to edit vector images in special editors, because. in this case, you can replace labels and insert your data.
ATTENTION! Do not rush to use all sites at once within one presentation! You always need to remember about a single style. It is better to use icons from one set throughout the presentation. Otherwise, a variety of styles will immediately give out an inexperienced amateur beginner.
Try using original images in your own slides!
All beautiful and effective presentations!
P.S. You can watch the full recording of the master class
I want to disappoint you, but PowerPoint does not include design templates. Often these templates are no longer in vogue and will immediately be perceived by your audience as a "low-quality product".
I suggest 2 solutions:
1. Don't use templates at all. Unite your slides with a single color scheme and make the format and position of the titles the same on all slides except the first and last.
2.Create your own templates if you plan to use and edit this presentation in the future. To do this, we need to go to the tab View -> Slide Master. This is a secret room, which not everyone knows about, as practice shows :) 
In this section, we can create our own template!
I usually delete all the default master slides in the left tab and create mine from scratch. All you need here is to add fillers and decorate them.
Now you have your own template. Bonus: As a reward for reading the section, I want to give you my secret weapon for creating presentations - a free template of 800 animated slides with infographics, icons and maps, which is very creative. Believe me, it's worth it :) (on our page you can subscribe and get 800 cherished templates)
2 Use 3-5 base colors when creating presentations.
Please do not use more than 5 different colors in your presentation. Moreover, use only 3 base colors, as the other 2 are usually shades of the base colors. How to choose a color palette.
⁃ One of the three shades should be highlighted for the background. Decide right away - it will be a presentation with a light or dark background. If you are an advanced designer, you can try to alternate, but in this article I skip these experiments.
⁃ Next, choose a color for the text. It should be as contrasting as possible with respect to the background color. The ideal and often found option: the background is white - the text is black. But this option is inferior in terms of creativity :) So let's look at a few examples. Maybe I can give you some ideas:Gray background, blue body text and dark gray accent. White background, black text, blue accent. 3 Colors. Alternates with a dark background and white text. Dark background, white text, light green accent. Shades of light green are also used here and a dark and light background alternates.
If you still couldn’t decide on a color palette or you don’t have a company/project brand book, then I suggest you the following resource color.adobe.com
Here you can choose a color palette based on the image, as well as in the "Explore" tab (Watch) see the solutions of other users and even find out the number of views and likes :) 
3 Refuse 3D icons from search engines - turn to linear and flat icons.
Unfortunately, I still often see slides that use voluminous low-quality icons. Now it is an outdated theme and looks very ugly. And some do not use icons at all, which is also bad, because visualization is important in the presentation, and not just solid text. Purpose of icons: replace unnecessary text and speed up the memorability and comprehensibility of information. My advice to you: use icons from this resource when creating a presentation - flaticon.com
Flaticon icons will make your presentation more modern and concise.
There is a section there Packs", where you can find icons of the same style on a specific topic from one designer. I advise you to select icons in a complex way so that everyone is in the same style.
Subconsciously, we feel every detail in the presentation up to the line thickness of the icons, and if this thickness is different between the icons, then the presentation immediately ceases to harmonize, and subconsciously we no longer perceive it as a quality one.
Also, when working with icons, I want to note such a trend among people as "syndrome of blindness". This is when everything in the presentation is done in large sizes - "for everyone to see." Making everything huge will greatly reduce the quality of your presentation, and icons only look good at small sizes. Let's look at an example:
4 Each slide is a picture and needs a frame. Or not needed?
When creating a presentation, respect the frame from the borders of the slide. Moreover, large frames are in fashion now. Important: the distance from the borders to the content of the slide should be the same on all sides. Example:
What can happen? It may turn out that the content that you planned to place does not fit on one slide, and that's good! No need to try to cram everything on one page. It's better to split it into two slides with the same title.
One slide - one message.
Why do everything in large sizes - the slide needs air.
5 Give up bad habits. Quit with serif fonts.
If you are not an avid designer and do not experiment with fonts, then I advise you not to use serif fonts.
I offer you the following list of fonts: System fonts:
Arial Black (headers only)
Calibri Third party fonts:
Bebas (headers only)
Gotham Pro How to combine fonts when creating a presentation?
If you have never touched on the topic of font combinations before, then I advise you to use only one group of fonts when creating a presentation and change only its type. For example, make the heading Arial Black, and for plain text Arial, or another option from third-party fonts - the heading is Raleway Bold, and the body text is Raleway Regular.
If you still decide experiment, then you can try the following combinations:
Bebas Bold - header
Raleway Regular - plain text
For other combinations, I prefer to choose one font and change only its type. This is more correct.
And here's a couple links which I personally use to download fonts:
6 When creating a presentation, use only high-quality images.
This is generally a sore subject. Especially here in Russia. If anyone has read Artemy Lebedev's book "Kovodstvo", then there he clearly notes how, due to the fall of design culture after the collapse of the USSR, our population's taste for quality design was distorted in parallel. Perhaps you are reading now and will never appreciate the work that I am celebrating here. And it's not because you bad person, but because our environment did not allow you to develop good design taste.
I can only give advice what has been working great in our studio for several years and is valued at the international level (tested on all continents of planet Earth):
⁃ Do not use images from search engines as background images if it is not necessary
⁃ Download images only from specialized sites where photographers publish their work
⁃ Use high-resolution images as the background - for me it is at least 1000 pixels in height and width
⁃ Do not use stock images with forced smiles of people and a white background. It looks unnatural.
⁃ You can use the following resources as sources: flickr , unsplash , everypixel
7 Do not use outlines. Either fat or nothing.
Now let's dive into the design a bit.
You may notice that when you draw a shape in PowerPoint, it may come out blue and with a light blue outline. Important: remove these lines immediately. They will only emphasize that you are not in trend and did not want to bathe with the design of the presentation.
Which begs the question: are contours out of fashion now?
Answer: no, they just mutated into large frames :). Here are the contours you can still use now:
And the rest - yes, the contours have gone out of fashion like white wigs once did.
8 Do not use shadows. Either large and blurry, or none.
Shadows, of course, have not gone out of fashion, unlike contours. But they have turned into something exclusive and expensive. Like a Patek Philippe watch. You either buy an original or a Chinese fake and everyone understands that this is a Chinese fake.
The moral of the story is this: if you can create trendy shadows, great! If not, then please cancel them everywhere in the tab " Format".
PowerPoint comes with shadows by default (especially in earlier versions). And I can tell you for sure that such shadows should be removed immediately from the template. Let's look at examples: Bad shadows from PowerPoint
Nice shadow from Dribbble
Nice shadow from PowerPoint I even attach the settings for you if you still want to use shadows. But use this power wisely ☝ and don't cast such a shadow on all the figures in a row so that they don't fill the entire background. 
9 How to make tables and charts beautiful? Remove all unnecessary.
Here, in fact, the rules intersect, but I noticed that for some, when it comes to tables and diagrams, they seem to forget everything: the rule of colors, outlines, shadows, frames, and the like.
However, I have already described all the errors. The only thing left to do is not to do it. :) Let's see in practice:
Here is the smoker's table:
What is the difference? One is heavy and bulky, the other is clean and concise. Note:
⁃ There is free space between the cell border and the content.
⁃ Of course there are no contours
⁃ No extra shadows
⁃ Some fields are not shaded at all
10 The slide is your canvas. Be creative. Imagine that you have a brush in your hand.
If presentations were created in Paint, the slides would look much more creative. I say this to the fact that we often drive ourselves into stereotyped powerpoint frames, although there you can also create unique works of art. Consider examples of slides created in PowerPoint:
I wish you to create only high-quality presentations for your projects!
Free storage with almost 200,000 icons. Download in PNG/SVG formats. No additional settings are required. You don't even need to register. Chip: allows you to paint the icons in the desired color before loading, this is super-convenient when creating a presentation.
One of the biggest repositories of free icons: icons are added every day. Icons are available in PNG/SVG formats. Download for free, but with the obligatory mention of authorship. Or buy icons by the piece. You can also buy the NounPro plan for $39.99 per year.
In the Pro app for Mac, all icons are available literally from the desktop. The tariff allows unlimited use of icons without attribution. Pro also allows you to change the style of icons to your liking.
A repository with a friendly interface in Russian: almost 70,000 free icons by style, popularity, theme and color. Key Features: Application for web, Mac and Windows from which you can simply drag and drop icons into Photoshop, Adobe XD, Visual Studio. Before downloading, you can change the color of the icons. In addition to icons, the site provides free illustrations, music and photos.
2 000 0000+ icons, 400+ sets, 30+ styles. You can choose Russian. For personal and commercial use free of charge - in the second case, you will have to provide a link. The free package has sizes up to 72px and no source files. For unlimited use, subscribe for a year for $79.
Another Russian-language - and impressive - collection of 638 icon sets, which are divided into two blocks by category and style. Search for the ones you need by request, filter in three ways - by background color, size and color of the picture. The format is mainly PNG and / or ICO, less often - SVG. Icons are free, but check the license: some cannot be used for commercial purposes.
More than 1,000,000 icons, but the most interesting ones are paid ones. Although the free database is rather large, it offers mostly standard images. But you can download voluminous icons (but it's better not to). We have prepared video tutorial about how to search for icons on Iconfinder.
The feature of this resource with icons is the simplicity of the interface. Icons can be downloaded in PNG/SVG formats. The main downside is the poor selection. For example, there are simply no icons for randomly entered "sea", "luck", "doctor", "couple". So go to iconmonstr for the ease of searching and downloading and the most basic queries. See our video tutorial about how to work with this resource.
A resource with a complex interface is not like other icon archives. There is not even a search bar. But there is an application with icon sets that works offline. But if with the application "everything is complicated", then with the Icon Packs section - the opposite is true. Click Icomoon and you can download a free archive of 490 standard icons on your PC. Very useful if you are making a simple presentation and don't want to search for every single icon.
Resource where you can find free icons and stock vector illustrations under a Creative Commons license: allowed commercial use with attribution. When upgrading to a premium subscription, attribution is not required. A subscription gives you access to a lot more images, including vectors. The price is $11.99 per month or $99 per year.
An editor that recognizes what you wanted to draw and suggests a prettier version. Much more likeable. Color the drawings, resize them, add text and geometric shapes. The resulting drawing can be downloaded or saved in the program for further use. Is free.
The site states that the icons are “with character”. Lovers of geometry will love it: all 3,600 icons are created from triangles, squares, hexagons, straight lines and broken lines. Presented in SVG, PDF, AI, SKETCH, EPS and ICONJAR formats. You can use existing icons for free. The free version also offers 100 vector icons. To get more, you can choose from two subscription plans: 12,000 vector icons for $194 and 31,500 icons for $274.
The creators of the site call themselves "the world's largest repository of icons for