Avoid These Types of Graphic in Your Business Presentations

Market Research Has Provided Valuable Insight Into What Graphics You Need to Avoid in Business Presentations, Learn More.

Photo by Matthew Osborn on Unsplash

Are you working on an investor update, strategic growth plan, status report, or some other type of business presentation? 

Don’t Pooch it by adding the wrong graphics!

If you don’t already know the importance of effective visuals and graphics in your presentation, take 2 minutes to read this post. It could save your bacon before you . Using the right graphics in a presentation ensures that your audience:

• Gives you their full attention
• Better understands your points
• Retains your message for longer
• Takes action based on what you said

The content of your presentation is, without doubt, is the most important aspect. 

However, in trying to get the content to be as good as possible, we often overlook the value of graphics that make the presentation more interesting and attractive.

That’s a mistake. Because graphics can amplify the impact of well-researched and thought-provoking content.

High-quality graphics and visual aids are the easiest way to grab your audience’s attention and hold on to it throughout the presentation. More importantly, it is a reflection of the presenter. That’s right! Next time you haphazardly add random graphics to your presentation, just remember, the image people are left with impacts you.

Did you come off as an authority?
Did you convey the message effectively?
Did you look professional?

Hmmm.

Reasons to Use Graphics in Your Presentation

Before you can make a great presentation with effective graphics and visual aids, you first need to understand why the use of graphics is so important. 

So, in this section, we will discuss the three major ways in which high-quality graphics can significantly improve your business presentations and help you get better results. 

1. Saves Time

It’s commonly said that a picture speaks a thousand words — and nowhere is this truer than in the case of business presentations. 

This is because business presentations are usually used to explain technical details about a product or corporate strategy. This can involve a lot of long-winded, complex, and jargon-filled explanations.

So, if you can replace a chunk of text with a relevant image, chart, graph, or infographic, it will save both you and your audience a ton of time. 

Dragging and dropping a picture onto your slide is obviously less time-consuming than typing out multiple paragraphs. And for the audience, it takes less time to see and decipher a picture than to read and understand a chunk of complex, technical writing. 

Online Tools like, Beautiful.ai gives you an amazing platform to springboard your creativity.

This is why visual aids like charts, graphs, infographics, and images are the best solution if you have limited time in which to deliver your presentation. 

2. Improves Comprehension

High-quality graphics can help make your presentation more accessible to a larger audience. This is because the human brain processes images more quickly and easily than text. 

Our working memory has a limited capacity to take in and process new information. If we’re tired or distracted, the working memory can be easily overwhelmed, thus hindering comprehension. 

During a presentation, your audience will be hearing you talk, while at the same time ingesting the information presented on your slides. 

If there’s too much text on the slides, there will be more room for confusion as your audience’s attention will be divided between your words and the text on the slides. 

It is best, therefore, to use more graphics on the slides, relying on your words to explain your points and provide any required clarifications. 

3. Drives Action

A presentation can only be considered successful and effective if it drives the audience to take some kind of action after it has been delivered. 

Whether you want your audience to invest in your latest product or try a new marketing strategy, the first step is to ensure that they resonate with your presentation. And using high-quality graphics in your slides is a great way to ensure that this happens. 

Very few people resonate with a wall of text. But throw in a funny meme or a relevant pie chart, and the effect is a lot more immediate. It is easier to invoke emotions with a picture than with a paragraph of text. And emotions are, at the end of the day, what drive actions. 

So don’t hesitate to include as many graphics as you can without making your slides look cluttered and disorganized. 

It’ll help increase your chances of driving real change in your audience—be they investors, sales representatives, department heads, or any other stakeholders in your business.  

Avoiding Mistakes with the Graphics in Your Presentation

Now that you know the importance of using high-quality graphics in your business presentation, it’s time to talk about how to make the most of them. 

While it is true that any graphics are better than no graphics, you can significantly improve the impact of your presentation by choosing the right images and visuals to put on your slides and avoiding the wrong ones. 

Here are a few tips on what to avoid when choosing the graphics and images for your next presentation.  

• Do Not Mix Different Types of Graphics

Imagine a single slide in a presentation that contains three different types of visuals — a photograph, a chart, and an animation. Sounds distracting, doesn’t it? 

That’s because it is. While graphics can help emphasize your message, too many different types of graphics will only create confusion and chaos. 

Your audience will be too busy deciphering the different types of information being presented at once on the slide, to pay any attention to your words. 

Moreover, different types of graphics can make the slide look cluttered, disorganized, and imbalanced. And that’s not the effect you want your graphics to create. 

Instead, choose a single type of visual aid for each slide and stick to it. If you need to use different types of visuals in your presentation—like a line chart and clipart—simply create different slides for each of them. 

This will prevent confusion and keep your presentation looking clean, comprehensible, and professional. For the best results, you can use a template to help you organize the different elements of your presentation, and keep disparate elements from mixing together.

• Do Not Clutter Your Slides

Graphics are important for catching and holding the attention of your audience during a presentation. However, too many graphics can distract from your core message. 

You must remember that the graphics are simply there to aid your presentation, they aren’t the centerpiece of it. 

Hence, you should ideally limit yourself to a single image or graphic per slide. This will help emphasize your point without cluttering up the slide and distracting your audience. 

Even if you have to use more than one image in a single slide, make sure that they complement each other well. 

If you use images that clash with one another—combining a black-and-white image with a very colorful and vibrant picture—this can drag your audience’s attention away from the point of your presentation. 

And that can be disastrous because it is not enough to hold your audience’s attention when delivering a successful presentation. 

You have to make sure that they pay attention to the right things. In other words, you must use images that make the audience pay attention to your message, not ones that pull all the attention to themselves.  

• Do Not Use Blurry Images

Using blurry, distorted, low-quality images in your business presentation is a surefire way to lose the attention and interest of your audience. Another way is to use images with watermarks on them. 

This shows a lack of professionalism and attention to detail, which your audience will undoubtedly pick up on, even if subconsciously. And if your audience doesn’t believe that you’re serious about your presentation, then they won’t take your message seriously either. 

Fortunately, these problems are easy to fix. Here are some simple tips to get high-quality graphics for all your future presentations:

• Use websites like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay to get high-quality stock images for free.  
• Don’t randomly crop your images to make them fit into your slides. Rather, choose photos that have the right proportions to fit naturally into the available space on your slide.
• If you must use an image with a watermark, be sure to buy it first from its rightful owner and have the watermark removed. 
• Make sure your chosen graphics aren’t too large or too small for your slide. The graphics should be balanced properly with your text so that neither can overwhelm the other. 

These simple precautions will ensure that the graphics used in your presentations are always of the highest quality and help emphasize your message to the audience.  

• Do Not Use Irrelevant Graphics

The most important factor to consider when choosing the graphics for any presentation is relevance. In other words, your graphics should be in line with your core message — in terms of style, color, and (most importantly) subject matter.

For instance, if you’re talking about the sales record of Apple phones, you don’t want to use the image of an Android phone to illustrate your point. This may seem like a simplistic example, but the idea is fundamentally the same.

You must spend the time needed to do your research and come up with appropriate visuals for each slide of your presentation. Make sure that you don’t use a picture from Scotland when talking about shopping trends in Ireland, or vice versa. 

Although the mistake might seem minor to you, it can be distracting for audience members who are deeply familiar with the subject matter. And it could lead them to question your authority on the subject, thus disengaging from the presentation as a whole. 

• Do Not Make Your Slides Overly Complex

When using graphics in your presentation, it can be tempting to overload each slide with as much information as you can cram into it. 

After all, you’ve spent so much time researching and double-checking all the information, why wouldn’t you want to share it all with your audience? 

While this impulse is understandable, you must work to control it. The point of graphics in your presentation is to make it more appealing and attention-grabbing. And there’s nothing that can make our attention slip faster than information overload. 

A single graph on your slide will help emphasize your point during the presentation. A plethora of graphs and charts will confuse your audience and make them stop listening, as they try to make sense of all the data presented on the slide. 

Each graphic should be carefully selected to help your audience better understand the subject matter. 

If a single graphic doesn’t communicate all that needs to be communicated in the slide, you need to find a different image, instead of jamming the slide full of multiple visuals.  

Using a Template to Organize the Graphics on Your Slide

If this seems like a lot to take in at once, you can make the task easier for yourself by using a ready-made presentation template to organize all the text and graphics on your slides. 

Most ready-made presentation templates will come with pre-designated spaces for pictures, charts, graphs, headings, subheadings, etc. If needed, you can modify the template to better fit your needs and preferences. 

However, having a framework upon which to design your slides will make the decision-making process much easier for you. It’ll help you make several small but crucial decisions, such as:

• Where to place your text and images
• How to size your headings and subheadings
• What background to use for your image
• What font to use for your text

On its own, each of these decisions might seem small and insignificant. But taken together, they will determine whether your presentation is clear and memorable or chaotic and hard to understand. 

And that’s why a template is so useful, both for those who are new to giving presentations and those who have a lot of experience with it. A good template helps save time and ensures that a small mistake doesn’t cost you hours of hard work and careful preparation. 

In Parting

Hopefully, this post has provided you with plenty of insight into why strong graphics are so important as well as what graphics you need to stay away fr0m in your business presentations. Now get out there and crush it!