Ah! 2023 has dawned and it’s full of fresh possibilities and new opportunities for effective communication. Like boy scouts, BrightCarbon is always prepared. So, we asked our designers and presentation experts what they expect 2023 to bring for presentation design. Is it new year, new you? Or business as usual? The results are in!
Accessibility
Improved accessibility came out on top, with 40% of our presentation designers naming it as a key area of development for presentations and presentation creation platforms in 2023. Both PowerPoint and Google Slides are regularly adding new features, making it easier for users to create more accessible presentations. So, we’re expecting increased use of alt text, better adherence to contrast guidelines, and an improved understanding of screen-reader compatibility. We’re also expecting to see more requests for presentation slides with room left at the bottom for live caption generation.
As presentations are usually mediated by a presenter, presentation accessibility is a fairly complex topic. If you’re creating your own decks, you might find this starter guide useful: 5 tips for more accessible presentations.
Interactivity
The silver medal goes to interactivity – predicted to be a trend by a third of our designers. Presenters wanting to have better conversations with their audience will lean on presentations with robust navigation to facilitate agile, non-linear paths through their content. Most importantly, with proper menus and navigation, everyone avoids the awkward spectacle of a presenter exiting Show Mode and scrolling through their slides to find what they need. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to add basic interactivity to your decks in PowerPoint and Google Slides.
Our presentation experts expect these interactive presentations to be large, modular decks designed to be broken up into smaller, more targeted presentations. These decks will empower presenters to have better, more flexible conversations. On the one hand, decks like these give salespeople the flexibility they need whilst protecting carefully crafted structure and messaging. On the other, they can quickly become scarily long and unwieldy and your salespeople might need a specialised tool, like our PowerPoint add-in ShowMaker, to stay in control!
We’re also predicting more audience interaction, including live surveys, use of tools like Mentimeter, and the triumphant return of the QR code – all boosting audience engagement and helping presenters collect useful data and feedback.
Diversity
Our final big hitter is doing diversity better. Our clients want their presentation design to reflect the diversity of their organisations in authentic and meaningful ways. So, we’re looking forward to celebrating diversity through imagery and illustrations, as well as through the stories we’re telling.
A specific focus we’re expecting for 2023 is an awareness of disability diversity. Poor disability representation can look like a token image of someone in a wheelchair – let’s leave this behind in 2022. As explored in Getty Images’ VisualGPS, good disability representation means representing people with a range of visible and invisible disabilities as active members of society across ages and intersecting identity factors.
Home…
Though some things are returning to how they were pre-Covid, many won’t be the same again. One reversal we’re not expecting is a complete return to in-person presenting, so don’t delete your custom Zoom backgrounds just yet!
With more flexible working, asynchronous knowledge transfer is becoming more and more popular. We’re expecting an uptick in requests for self-running, scripted videos. Whether it’s talking-head videos or illustrative dynamic animations, videos with bold colours and diverse characters that your audience can enjoy when and where they like are going to be crowd-pleasers in 2023.
…and Away
With in-person conferences ramping up again, we’re expecting the return of beautiful, bespoke decks developed for specific events. With presenters tackling unusual screen sizes and configurations, big audiences in big rooms, and online and offline attendees – getting a specialist in can really make a difference.
And, as we all pack our bags and jet off to network, BrightCarbon’s presentation design experts are expecting 2023 to bring more requests for one-pagers, leave behinds, and worksheets for in-person events with clear, engaging storytelling and visuals.
Are the robots taking over?
Like most of you, our presentation experts are keeping a beady eye on the robots – and by that we mean AI design. Though AI-generated art is still novel, images generated by AI following user prompts could allow presentation designers to create things that stand out from the generic stock photos others are using – they could even avoid some of the copyright implications of sourcing photos on Google. That said, there are ethical questions about AI generated art that we should be aware of. Will AI art help truly visualise meaning? Probably not. Will everyone be sick of it by the end of the year? Probably! Will everyone try it anyway? Yes, yes they will.
So, those are the key presentations trends we expect to see in 2023, but what about the design trends that will transform our slides from dull to dazzling this year? Here’s what our presentation design experts predict:
Now you’ve read BrightCarbon’s predictions for 2023 presentation design trends, it’s time to share yours! Let us know what you’re hoping to see on slides across the world this year in the comments below!
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