One of the most important aspects for good design of PowerPoint slides is consistency. Always use the same fonts, same font sizes, and same colour scheme for objects.
Another important consideration is placement of content on your slides. You can create ‘drawing guides’ which allow you to consistently line up your content in the same position on each slide.
1. Right-click on the background of a slide in your presentation, and choose ‘Grid and Guides…’
Right-click slide background
2. From the ‘Grid and Guides’ dialog box, tick ‘Display drawing guides on screen’ and click ‘OK’
PowerPoint Grid and Guides dialog box
3. You will now see that your slide has two default guide lines – one in the horizontal center and one in the vertical. You can click on either of these lines and drag it with your mouse pointer to position it anywhere.
To return a line to the center, right-click on the slide background again and select ‘Ruler’ to view a ruler, then line up the guide line with ‘0’ on the ruler (zero represents the horizontal and vertical centers of the slide).
4. If you want to create another guide line, hold down the ‘Ctrl’ key, and then click and drag a guide line – this will leave the existing line where it is, but create a new one.
PowerPoint Slide with guide lines
In this example, I have created 2 extra guide lines and repositioned the center lines in order to position my text boxes in the same position. The guide lines will be displayed on all slides in this presentation.
5. To remove a guide line, click on it and drag it past the edge of the slide.