PowerPoint Presentation: Design Ideas and Templates | TechSmith

Here you will find templates and design ideas for your presentation

When it comes to a PowerPoint presentation, a good design is the key to success. The software itself offers ideas for designing PowerPoint presentations, and there are external providers and libraries of templates for PowerPoint presentations, most of which are free of charge. We have summarized for you here where you can find ideas for your PowerPoint presentation and what you should pay attention to.

Why is a good design important for your PowerPoint presentation?

PowerPoint is Microsoft software for creating presentations, for example for lectures or online seminars. PowerPoint presentations essentially consist of slides on which the Key statements of the lecture in bullet points are held. A well-designed presentation makes it easier for the audience to follow a lecture and grasp the content faster. They can also be made available long-term after the actual lecture, for example for research purposes. The good design of a PowerPoint presentation first serves the audience and readers. In addition, you as a presenter also benefit from a good design template for a presentation: It helps you to develop an optimally structured presentation and thus to demonstrate your expertise on the topic. A poorly designed presentation, on the other hand, not only makes it difficult for the audience to understand it, but can also under certain circumstances devalue the content itself and the speaker.

Templates and design ideas for PowerPoint presentations

PowerPoint offers you a large selection of designed templates and design ideas for presentations and slides. You can either insert the content directly into a prepared template or let PowerPoint suggest design ideas, while you work on your presentation. How to proceed:

Create new presentation from template

If you want to insert the contents of a presentation straight into an already designed template, go to the menu File > New from Template and choose from the designed templates:

Add new slides in the selected theme by clicking File > new slide and then select a styled slide with appropriate outline structure:

Use PowerPoint themes for presentations

In addition to templates, you can also use themes in PowerPoint and view design ideas while you work on your presentation. First, choose a theme that has coordinated colors, effects, backgrounds, and fonts. To do this, go to in the menu bar Draft and click on a suitable design.

Once you have created the content of one or more slides, click on the ribbon Designideen. Microsoft PowerPoint now automatically generates ideas based on the slide content for the design and shows you design suggestions:

If you later want to change the background of your presentation, you can use PowerPoint’s suggestions here as well. Read how to change background in PowerPoint in detail. How to spice up your PowerPoint presentation: Read how to add animations and effects or insert audio files.

PowerPoint presentation: Ideas and design templates from external sites

The beginnings of PowerPoint go back to the 1980s. For a piece of software that has been around for so long and is so widespread and popular, there are accordingly many resources and templates, most of them free. First of all, Microsoft offers more templates for PowerPoint presentations on its official website. This overview from Monsterpost is also a good source of ideas for PowerPoint.

Additionally, if you want to stand out from the crowd, check out TechSmith’s presentation design templates. There are many professionally designed templates for presentations in the field of social media, tutorials and online training as well as marketing and human resources. Access to the TechSmith Library is automatic when you sign up to use Camtasia or Snagit. You can also benefit from other assets in the TechSmith library such as stock photos, animations, GIFs and MP4 films for creating presentations.

Why it pays to use design templates for presentations

PowerPoint presentations are mostly used in a professional context and should therefore be designed as professionally as possible. Your presentation slides should be well designed, especially if you use a presentation several times for lectures, as part of an online seminar or if you want to offer it for download in the long term. Layout, fonts, colors, effects and backgrounds should be well coordinated — and that’s often the case with templates, as they’re usually designed by design professionals.

However, a good design not only looks chic, but also pays attention to the User requirements: Sufficiently large font sizes, good contrasts, sensible slide structures and slide structures as well as easily legible fonts guarantee, among other things, good readability and usability.

If you frequently use PowerPoint presentations for your company or different people in your company give PowerPoint presentations, then you should look for a uniform design of the PowerPoint slides. It is worth creating and using a common PowerPoint template for this. It is usually very easy to adapt existing designs and, for example, insert a company logo, selected fonts or a specific color scale. Read what else you should pay attention to when making company presentations.