Five Affordable Resources that Will Make Your Presentation Look Amazing
1. Noun Project for Icons
“The most diverse collection of icons ever”, says the tagline. I’ve used this site in almost every presentation I’ve ever made. Sure I could design them if I had time. But as I’m mostly faced with tight turnarounds, I have to design decks fairly quickly. I often use icons to spice up a list of bullet points or agenda items. Here’s an illustration below:
Black icons are free to download (be sure to credit the designer if its for commercial use) and for any color, icons are available at $39.99 a year. (link)
2. Unsplash for Free Professional Images
High-res photos versus grainy old images could be the difference between getting a new client and not. Luckily, there’s Unsplash, full of thousands of free high-res images provided by very generous photographers. You may not find exactly what you’re looking for, but you’ll come pretty close. Here’s a few I’ve used for my clients:
3. Coolors.co for Color Palettes
Coolors is a color palette generator - its awesome! However, be wary to use all of these colors on every slide. The best use of multiple colors is for charts and graphs. For standard text slides, I recommend using two neutral colors (black, white, gray, navy, beige) with one color that pops. To input the colors into your deck, simply copy and paste the number at the bottom into the box labeled “hex color” and voila.
4. Google Fonts for Free Premium Fonts
I recently shared this on my post, The Battle of the Fonts, as Google Fonts provides some pretty stellar typefaces for free. For san-serif fonts, I recommend Lato, Montserrat and Bebas Neue. For serif fonts, I recommend Roboto Slab, Playfair Display and Crimson Text. Be wary of downloading fonts from questionable sources that label it as free. Often its fine to use those for personal use, like for party invitations, but be sure to purchase the font if its for commercial use if its not technically free.
5. Behance & Dribbble for Layout Inspiration
You can only design the same slide so many times. I’m always looking for inspiration for how to layout a deck. Behance and Dribbble are great resources for that. I also get inspiration from print magazine layouts, as they are often faced with the same dilemma I have, jamming a ton of information onto a slide! (Sometimes a client does not want me to cut anything, so I resort to this strategy!) Here’s a few choice finds from Dribbble:
Happy creating!