My top 15 resources for presentation designers
Work more efficiently and create beautiful slides with these tips
I’ve been neck-deep in client work lately. It’s that back-to-school September rush of new projects and impending deadlines. When it rains, it pours. When this happens I have to work hard to shift my mindset from a place of overwhelm to one of abundance (it’s truly great to not have a shortage of work.) The reverse side of this coin is that as a self-employed independent contractor and design team of one, the frustrating reality is that I often have to put a pause on my personal passion projects (like writing tutorials like these on Medium) in order to get through the busy seasons.
So — while I’m heads down creating things for other people, I thought it would be helpful to share a list of my favorite resources that I use when creating presentations. These tools & sites will hopefully save you tons of time too. Let me know in the comments if you have any additional recommendations!
1. The Noun Project
With “over 5 million icons to communicate any idea,” this site is my not-so-secret weapon. While all of the icons here are available for free, I recommend a pro subscription ($40 USD per year) so you can use them in your slide designs without attribution. Best of all they’re available in .SVG format so they are totally scalable and you can recolor them directly in PowerPoint.
2. Data Color Picker
When I’m designing charts, graphs, or other data visualizations this tool is so helpful. I can’t imagine living without it. It does a great job of filling in the gaps between two distinct colors — see the various options for palette, single hue, and divergent colors. You can adjust the total number of colors and view it on both light and dark backgrounds.
3. The Better Deck Deck
When you’re feeling stuck and looking for slide design inspiration, try Nolan Haims’ The Better Deck Deck (available in physical and digital formats.)
“You know bullet points are bad, but what are your options? Where do you go for design inspiration to break out of your PowerPoint rut?
This deck of cards gives you 52 proven design alternatives to the dreaded bullet point layout and over 150 professionally designed examples of slides using these techniques to spark your creativity and improve your next presentation.”
- Nolan Haims
4. Related Words
This online thesaurus is helpful for brainstorming exercises, writing great slide headlines, and generating new ideas.
5. Coolors
Anytime I’m creating a new color palette from scratch, I pop over to Coolors to use the color generator. This also works especially well for clients with pre-existing brand colors. PowerPoint templates require up to seven different colors, and this tool helps me round out the slide palette with additional colors that pair nicely and work well for charts and diagrams. Copy and paste the hex values right into PowerPoint, or take a screenshot and use the eyedropper tool to apply it to objects on a slide.
6. BrightSlide PPT Add-In from BrightCarbon
Quickly align objects with precision. Select and edit similar objects based on fill color, line color, and more. A Format Painter tool for tables. What more could you want? Oh, and it’s free!
7. Slide:ology, Resonate, Illuminate, and DataStory by Nancy Duarte
The must-read quartet for any presentation designer. These will help you improve your skills in your craft. Even if you’re not the one presenting, the plethora of knowledge here will improve the quality and impact of the presentations you create. These reference books belong on your shelf.
8. YouWorkForThem
Incredible assets for download including fonts, graphics, photos, and more. Gorgeous stuff. I mean, look at these paper textures, these geometric patterns, this marker-style SVG font, these shadow overlays… I want it all.
Similar to YouWorkForThem, Creative Market is a great place to find high-quality fonts, illustrations, graphics, photos, textures, templates, and more. There is so much good stuff here. When I don’t have time to do the heavy lifting myself, I turn to this site for custom creative assets. Most downloads offer commercial licensing which is important for external client work. Creative Market also offers weekly free assets for download, so don’t forget to bookmark this site.
9. Fonts In Use
When you’re hunting for that perfect font for your design project, FontsInUse is a fantastic resource. Great for seeing how fonts pair together, discovering what fonts create different vibes, and general design inspiration.
10. Mesh
Currently in beta, this easy-to-use tool lets you create gorgeous mesh gradients in just a few simple clicks. Download in .PNG format. Try it out, it’s fun and kind of addictive. 😀
11. WordmarkIt
Type in some text and wordmark.it will display it in all the fonts available on your computer. An amazing timesaver when trying to select fonts for a design project!
12. Building PowerPoint Templates
I simply can’t live without this book. It has a permanent home on my desk. If you want to know why, please read my article, Expert Secrets to Building Pro-Level PowerPoint Templates.
“Holy guacamole. This book is the indisputable bible of PowerPoint template architecture. If you design templates or PowerPoint presentations, you neeeed to get your hands on this book ASAP. Seriously, stop what you’re doing right now and order a copy.”
- Alicia Thornber
13. Yellow Images
Object mockups in .PSD and .JPG formats. Perfect for when you need to mockup a screenshot on a device. Especially for designers, these .PSD downloads come with smart objects for super-fast image swaps.
Also, please check out mockups-design.com — another great resource for free 3d object mockups.
14. Tableau Viz of the Day
Find inspiration for your data visualizations and see how different design choices (color, fonts, density, etc.) affect how the data is perceived.
15. Unsplash and Pexels: free stock photos
These two are so ubiquitous, I was hesitant to include them on the list. Everybody knows about Unsplash and Pexels by now, right? But, these are on the can’t-live-without list so here they are. Personally, I find the more abstract content is most useful for presentation design: textures, color gradients, blurry landscapes, etc.
16. Distillery A Creative PPT resources (most of them are free!)
As a bonus item on the list, I’m giving a shameless plug for my own PPT resources available on Gumroad.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like my other tutorials:
Thanks for reading! Please add your thoughts or feedback in the comments, and give a clap (or three) if you like this content.
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Alicia 👩💻 [email protected]