A 6-figure freelance presentation designer's advice for creating a pitch deck or PowerPoint that won't put your audience to sleep

• Adrienne Johnston has been a freelance presentation designer since 2018, building her business to earn $200,000 a year in under two years.
• Her tips for creating great presentations include using white space and differentiating text sizes.
• She also pushes for using your own content to make effective slides, rather than relying on other people's images, and keeping extraneous information at a minimum.
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Adrienne Johnston has been a freelance graphic designer since 2018, after she traded in an executive role in financial services to become her own boss. Once independent, she quickly homed in on a specialization - presentation design - as her business' sweet spot.

Despite having had no prior classical training or education in the design field, Johnston built up her freelance business to $200,000 a year - $70,000 more than she made as a VP in finance.

"I had a passion for design," Johnston said. "Working in smaller companies, there was always a need for design work that I would take on simply because I liked it."

Along the way, the presentation designer developed a number of best practices that helped her create beautiful and effective pitch decks and PowerPoint presentations. Johnston gave Business Insider the scoop on the methods she uses to keep her clients happy and coming back for more.

According to Johnston, most pitch decks are trying to function as 1. a visual aid for presenters, and 2. an informational piece or "leave behind" that needs to stand alone. Consequently, she explained that most pitch decks have far more content than the typical "10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint" recommended by business leader Guy Kawasaki: 10 slides that take no more than 20 minutes to present in a font no smaller than 30 points.

With this reality in mind, she said to focus on hierarchy.

"Best practices for designing a pitch deck to serve both functions requires creating a visual hierarchy that emphasizes the headline text and imagery that work effectively for a meeting, but still makes it easy to digest more detailed content when consumed as a stand-alone piece," Johnston said.

One way avoid what Johnston called the common "death by PowerPoint slide" - in which every element on the slide is the same proportion, resulting in a look and feel "like an eye chart that no one is going to read," she explained - is to create more contrast between the headline and the descriptive copy.

As an example, she shared that the default settings on PowerPoint to create a standard slide with bullets on the left and an image on the right isn't very interesting.

To improve this, Johnston advised that simply increasing the title size and making it bold would command more attention. It also helps to make the bullet text smaller with a thinner font weight, establishing a hierarchy.

To take it a step further, Johnston creates subheadings for descriptive text so that people can quickly glean the idea of the bullets without having to read each one.

When you create hierarchy like this in your presentation, Johnston emphasized that a related benefit emerges: It creates white space, which helps improve readability for your viewers.

"While it's intuitive to think that if the text is larger, it makes it easier for people to read, it can actually be quite the opposite," Johnston said. "Having a wall of letters with no spacing overwhelms anyone attempting to consume the content, and they just flip to the next page looking for something easy to digest."

Leave plenty of white space around the title, text, and image on the slide, which Johnston pointed out enables the viewer to recognize them as three distinct elements.

Another way that Johnston creates hierarchy in her presentations - both to draw the viewer's attention and help people visualize the content more simply - is to use icons instead of bullets. When selecting icons, she recommended trying to choose designs that look similar to one another so that they aren't distracting.

"For instance, use all filled or all line icons so they have the same style and don't draw attention more than another - especially if you're not trying to imply hierarchy between your points," she said. "Using a filled icon with a thin line icon emphasizes the point represented by the filled icon and de-emphasizes the point of the thin line icon."

One resource that Johnston relies on when selecting icons for her client's presentations is Noun Project (both free and paid accounts are available, with paid accounts costing $39.99 a year), where she gets vector icons that she can import into PowerPoint and recolor.

Typically for a pitch deck, Johnston stressed that you'll want to include images that support your value proposition. But she noted that when choosing product screenshots or mockups, you need to be careful what type of image you select. In other words, it shouldn't be so obnoxiously bright or fake looking that it's distracting or turns a viewer off.

Alternatively, in the case of software screenshots, Johnston suggested that by enclosing your screenshot in a device like an iPhone or computer screen, you not only elevate your design but also help bring your product (or your client's product) to life.

"In the case of physical products, lifestyle images of someone using the product are great," Johnston added. "If you are including your own photos, make sure they are high quality and shot in an environment with good lighting and little clutter or background distraction."

Johnston recommended that for the most part, you should stick to your or your client's brand colors when creating your design.

"Because color also impacts hierarchy, if you have a bold primary color, you should use that for text you want to accentuate, as opposed to using it for all of your design elements," she said.

Occasionally - Johnston suggested every three to four slides - you can invert the color of your background.

"So if you're mostly using a white background, have a colored background that contrasts with the white," she explained. "If someone's attention has wandered, the change in color will help re-engage them."

When it comes to more complex concepts for which bullets just don't do justice, Johnston noted that using infographics can create a real "wow factor" for your presentation.

"Infographics don't have to be complicated to create," she said, "But they can help viewers visualize a process or concept in a more visual way that will not only lend credibility to your process, but engage people in the content."

Charts and graphs are another area that often lends itself to "death by PowerPoint" fatigue, according to Johnston.

"When many presenters use the standard PowerPoint defaults, all the charts start to look the same," she said.

Some simple ways that Johnston elevates charts that she designs include adding data labels so that you can remove your axes and gridlines to create a more minimalistic feel, and adjusting the fonts as well as the colors to match your brand.

Johnston offers free sample templates for readers to download to make their own presentations, which you can access here.