Maybe it’s because I come from a graphic design background, but the importance of having a solid deck (powerpoint presentation) is not lost on me. And when I say ‘solid’, I’m not talking about all of the fancy facts and figures procured from the insights or finance department.

I’m talking about the basics like: fonts, page layout and presentation size. It’s unbelievable how many presentations I’ve seen from agencies, sales people, etc. that forget (or just don’t know) these 3 basic rules.

1. Fonts
While it may be tempting to put on your creative-hat and hope to impress your audience with the latest font you downloaded, keep in mind that you are the one that downloaded it – not the rest of the world. So unless you plan on attaching a font suitcase to your presentation and asking them to download and install it, stay away from adding pieces of flair to your deck.

Stick with the classics, also known as systems fonts or universal fonts, that most people would have on their computer so when they open your presentation it looks as you intended on not like gobbltyguck.

So yeah, that will happen. However you can get around the font neutering by creating your presentation with as many bells & whistles and you can stuff into it, then saving as a PDF and sending that way. Word of caution though; From personal experience I’ve tried this route and you would have thought I’d sent the recipient a bouquet of dead roses (i.e. They did not like the PDF file.)

I think there’s something familiar and standardized about good ol’ PPT files which makes people feel more at ease because that’s what they are used to getting. Also (and I’ll touch more on this when we get into file size) you never know who’s going to get their hands on the file, so my advice would be to keep it simple and stick to the basics.

2. Page Layout
This step is tricky because sometimes you don’t know what the final outcome of the presentation will be… is it going to be printed, displayed during a webex, both? I actually worked on a deck once that was going to be projected onto a movie theater screen, which required some additional planning to say the least! On that size screen, you have to actually think of your deck as a movie and keep in mind where the eye goes (and what it can easily see) during a film. I took the stance of keeping everything at least an inch or two away from all borders and trying to centralize all of the text + images. That would make it easy for anyone, regardless of their seat in the theater, to see the content.

Anyway for all of those times when you don’t have to worry about a cineplex-friendly layout, here are a couple tips:

• Try to get as much info as you can in advance about where this presentation is going to go and how it will be used. If you know it will be printed, try to stick with standard sizes (letter and legal). Absolute last resort would be tabloid size (11×17) unless for whatever reason that is deemed reasonable. (Another personal experience tid-bit here: I received an agency presentation once in tabloid size and 30+ pages [goodbye rain forest]. Not only was it a nightmare to get printed for myself and the team, but carrying the thing around from meeting to meeting was like having a toddler on my hip. So if possible stay away from the dreaded tabloid size!)

• If it’s going to be displayed on a screen and not printed, try to find out what size. For example: movie theater or boardroom. This makes a difference. But in either case you want to use the 16:9 ratio setting which will work on most flatscreen tv’s and newer laptops.

3. Email-able Presentation Size
I think we’ve all had the vendor/boss/coworker who’s emailed over a presentation and said “can you take a look at this?” only to click on the attachment and realize it’s 20mb or more. (Really?) Not only does this fill-up your inbox but if you’re expected to forward it onto someone else, now you’ve got two copies of this beast on your email and sending/receiving will absolutely slow you down if you’re traveling and on wifi. No bueno.

So what to do? Well if it’s your presentation, it’s time to take it to fat camp:

• Make sure all of the photos you’ve inserted are optimized for web. If you’re not sure what this means, ask a friend who has photoshop and tell them you need 72 dpi JPG images stat!

• Be careful about embedding videos. Yes, it’s cool and all when you don’t have to navigate out of a presentation to show a video but I recommend following the Spandex Rule here. (Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Know what I mean?) In this case, embedding a video file directly can take a simple presentation from the 20mb range up to the 200mb range… (“I love it when you call me Big Poppa”) My advice, pull up the videos on You Tube and leave that tab open on your browser. If you need to hop over during the presentation it takes about 2 seconds and I don’t think anyone is going to fault you for that.

• And to wrap up the point I made earlier, you never know who’s going to get this presentation so keep things svelte. The worst thing would be having a CEO/boss/potential client receive your big fat deck, decide it’s taking to long and they’ll “download it later”. Which means… the Monday after never.