If you want see your audience freak out (in a good way) over your next presentation, you need to design slides that are unexpected and exciting. Using professional photography and high-quality graphics will definitely elevate an average powerpoint presentation to modern design standards, however even these advanced techniques rarely cause people to lose their mind with excitement. So what can you do to really impress your audience with your slide design?
The answer is simple: add GIFs to your presentations.
Thanks to their hypnotic movement, GIFs, when used correctly, can add an element of sophistication that is difficult to achieve with other slide design techniques.
What Not To Do
Let me clarify something before you hurt yourself from laughing so hard at the thought of showing your boss a presentation that includes your average joke of a GIF – most GIFs are not appropriate for professional presentations.
For example, the GIF below that shows me being chased by imaginary birds was created by my colleague as a silly prank. Buried in the graveyard of bad office jokes is the appropriate fate for this GIF; it is only suitable for office pranks or social media threads making fun of blondes.
This type of humorous GIF is almost certainly not the right fit for your professional presentations unless you are confident you can successfully add a joke to your otherwise professional materials. As a general rule of thumb though, don’t use GIFs that look like they belong in a teen’s Twitter stream.
What The Pros Do
If you don’t want your presentation GIFs to be the new office joke, start thinking of GIFs as an artistic medium and a tool for elevating the quality of communication. Inspired by the potential of GIFs, many professional artists are indeed using GIFs to create stunning pieces of art, worthy of being featured in the world’s finest galleries and publications.
Armed with a healthy respect for GIFs and the knowledge that GIFs can contribute to a more interactive and meaningful experience for your audience, you are prepared to take the next steps towards utilizing GIFs in your slides.
To inspire you, let’s take a look at a few examples.
If you gravitate to an illustrated style for your presentations, and you also have illustration skills or access to a talented design team (like us!), you might consider enhancing your slides with GIFs like the ones below.
If photography is a better fit for your presentations, you should seriously consider using cinemagraphs on your slides. As Adweek.com noted in the article, 5 Branded Cinemagraphs on Instagram That Are Sure to Mesmerize, big brands are starting to capitalize on the beauty of cinemagraphs for their ad campaigns.
Cinemagraphs are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs. Cinemagraphs, which are published in either animated GIF format or as video, can give the illusion that the viewer is watching a video, according to Wikipedia.
According to Elizabeth Flock in her Washington Post article, cinemagraphs are a piece of artwork that seeks to perfectly capture a fleeting moment in time.
The cinemagraph Powerpoint slides below were created by an Ethos3 presentation designer to demonstrate the captivating quality of cinemagraphs when used as part of a presentation.
As you can see in the examples above, GIFs can be used to create slides that make traditional Death by PowerPoint slides seem like a distant memory that should immediately be forgotten.
Ready to create your own cinemagraphs?
Check out the video below for a tutorial on the process.
Conclusion
If you are curious to learn more about GIF presentations, contact us. We can help you create presentations that your audience will want to watch on repeat – even after you’re done presenting.
