This kind of structure makes your slides easier to remember, and it really does help to weed out all of your ‘kind-of important’ messages so that you’re left with the purest story. And finally, don’t forget to animate each beat of your story so that you don’t give the punchline away too soon.
How to make something look ‘important’
Now we know what’s important in our story, how phone numbers in afghanistan do we make it look important? I mean if you can’t give it a hi-res jacket and a clipboard, what do you do? Using colour and contrast (for instance darker, more saturated colours will ‘pop’ over lighter ones), so all your benefit statements use the same colour, or intensity of tone, will make those pieces stand out over the rest.
A note on colour: be mindful that not all users can see colour clearly, but going to ‘View’ on choosing ‘Greyscale’ will knock out the colour and allow you to see tones and saturation, and show you if the slide has the same impact for users will a visual impairment. For more information on accessibility in presentations, you can read our guide here.
Another way you can emphasise something important is to make it stand out. Think of The Wizard of Oz: the action starts in plain-old Kansas in black and white, and then switches to glorious technicolor when Dorothy is transported to Oz. Colour is definitely one way of showing that change, but think about having the problem look drab and boring, and then have the solution look a bit more interesting, and then add some design flourishes to the benefit to make it really stand out. Sites like Behance are a great source of design inspiration if your brand guidelines don’t have anything you can use for this.