Think BIG to create high-impact presentations

You want your presentations to have an impact on your audience — change them, move them to action, inspire them.

One way to do this is to think BIG, both in terms of your concepts and your visuals.

Big ideas help to inspire people. Plus, the brain learns more easily when new knowledge is connected to existing knowledge.

How to think big in terms of ideas

In terms of ideas, connect:

• The local to the universal
• The present to the past and the future
• Facts and data to general principles

People are not inspired by facts and figures, but by the concepts they reflect.

How to portray big concepts visually

In all cases, visuals should reflect the ideas you’re trying to get across. You can increase the power of your ideas with images that are big, inspiring, and powerful. Big visuals are big both in their content and their size.

The slide at the top of this post and the one just below are two examples. Why the slide at the top shows the concept of bigness is obvious–it shows the galaxy. That’s pretty big!

But the slide below is different. It uses a metaphor to show a child on a road that obviously refers to a person looking at his or her future. In other words, “Where are you going?” sounds like it could be about going to the store, but it’s really much bigger than that and the image portrays the big/small duality of the concept.

When you make an image big in size, you often have to adjust the text around the image, rather than the usual practice of fitting the image around the text.

Here are a couple of examples…

In each case, the image covers the entire slide and the text has been moved about to accommodate the image. The image is front and center. When you create slides like this, they will almost always have a high impact on your audience.

How could you use BIGNESS in your presentations? Leave a comment and please use the buttons below to share this with others who would benefit.