When you’re tasked with creating a slide show or visuals for team members/clients, relying on tools like Powerpoint and Word will rarely impress. While these tools were considered innovative in past decades, they offer nothing fresh to brand you as more inventive than your peers and competition. With increased online resources, it’s easier than ever for even the tech-challenged to create stunning presentations, infographics and posters.
Your peers and clients will perceive you and your information as having more value, based on the quality of packaging. Now you can quickly produce professional-quality materials in minutes!
Three Tools for Amazing Visuals
There are innumerable tools and resources online to help you generate stunning graphics. Below are a few of my personal favorites.
Prezi
If you’re tired of creating and viewing traditional, slide-based Powerpoint and Keynote presentations, Prezi is a great alternative. Rather than creating linear slideshows, you have the ability to create an overarching image and “zoom in” to parts of the image where you can create more images and text. As an example, if you were creating a presentation on anatomy, instead of a boring slideshow, you could start with an opening graphic of a human body and the title of your presentation. From there, you can zoom in to different parts of the body where you have labels, additional images and text. You can even zoom in further within the smaller text and images for additional sub points! Prezi works more along the lines of how humans process information. Additionally, people are just plain impressed by Prezis!
Canva
With Canva, you can design posters, flyers, infographics, and much more! Canva’s most impressive feature is its highly-polished template gallery paired with the ability for users to quickly customize projects to make them appear 100% unique. The site is extremely user-friendly with a very small learning curve. Even if you have an in-house graphic designer or department for design, this service is great for those smaller projects you wouldn’t normally use them for. Your materials will have your clients and peers swearing your project was professionally constructed!
Piktochart
Piktochart is extremely similar to Canva, allowing you to create flyers, reports, infographics, presentations, etc. using templates. However, this service has a particularly impressive template gallery for infographics specifically. If you want to simplify the information you’re presenting while creating a stunning visual, creating an infographic on Piktochart is a great strategy.
Becoming known for creating amazingly polished visuals while everyone else creates simple charts on Microsoft Word, will definitely help build a strong personal brand. I use all of the above services regularly to create eye-catching visuals. What are your favorites?
