11 fantastic tips to improve your virtual presentation slides

Creating clean and aesthetically pleasing slides should be your mantra when designing for any presentation. But the slides that work for in-person presentations don’t always work best in the virtual world.

With more presentations going remote and online, it’s important to consider how your presentation slides might be seen on a laptop or desktop screen, as well as a mobile device. Something that might seem fairly uncluttered for a large projection screen, or even a laptop, may not read as well on a screen that only measures 5 inches high and wide (or less).

And it is not an unimportant consideration. Over the past decade, Americans who say they own a smartphone has increased to 81 percent from 35 percent. Further, nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults use a smartphone to access the internet—up by nearly double from just six years ago. Today, one-in-five American adults say they own a smartphone but do not have traditional home broadband service, according to Pew Research Center.

When designing for smaller screens, such as those on phones and tablets, it’s best to be guided by scale and readability. Here are 11 tips to make your virtual presentation slides stand out:

1. Increase the slide count.