Use Animations to Give Life to Your Presentation

If you were ever a Harry Potter fan, you’d have wished for the muggle world to also have moving magical newspapers. That little touch of animation gives reading an extra kick and adds life to an otherwise pretty static story.

This same idea also applies to presentations with animations and that’s exactly what we’re here to talk about today.

In this article, we’ll go into their advantages and provide you with three helpful tips on how to create presentations with animations.

Why you should use animation in your presentation

When done well, animations in presentations can be an extremely powerful and influential tool for the speaker.

Animations add zest to speeches and make them much more dynamic. But as we’ll discuss later, not all situations call for animations.

Let’s first go into the benefits of using animation in your slides.

Keeps focus and flow

One of the main advantages animations offer is that they keep the crowd focused on the point the speaker is making.

Take for example this animated slide on milestones:

Instead of having all four milestones immediately visible upon getting to the slide, revealing them individually helps to keep the audience focused.

It prevents them from getting distracted by points the speaker hasn’t even gotten to and even jumping ahead of the content. In a way, this also helps to build up anticipation and excitement.

From a speaker’s perspective, animation acts as a visual cue and adds flow by guiding him or her from one point to the next.

Highlights main points

Another advantage animations offer is that they are fantastic for highlighting key messages. They work much better than stationary slides because they help to drive attention to a particular point.

If you’re addressing a crowd about a topic that they’re completely new to, the use of animation can help to emphasize your main message.

This is also particularly applicable to teachers, who could use animated visual aids to help drill a certain point into their students. Animating their slides points their students in the right direction by telling them what and where they should focus their attention on.

Communicates complex messages

There are certain messages that are just better communicated with animation than a still image.

For example, check out how effective a simple animation can be at providing perspective.

This location-by-location reveal works perfectly for marketing presentation slides such as company announcements on branch openings, subsidiary expansions, or even product launches in new markets.

It’s just a simple addition of a few icons and doesn’t take much effort to create. But it really helps viewers to visualize the evolution and impact.

Tips on using animations in your presentations

There are clear benefits to using animations in presentations. While creating them is no rocket science, applying them can be considered an art.

To guide you through its proper use, here are three tips to help you perfect this craft. 

1. Find the right context

The first commandment of the use of animations is finding the right context for it. 

Slides in marketing or business presentations with exciting news such as the announcement of a product launch or new company acquisitions can be boosted with animation. You could also use it on slides on which new hires are introduced.

Animations should also be used if it makes it easier to communicate complex ideas or data.

When in doubt, a good rule to go by is the two-P rule: animate the positive and perplexing.

2. Strike a right balance

As tempting as it may be to go all in and use animations for all your slides, we recommend you to use them sparingly.

Just like text, having too much animation on a presentation can be disastrous. Where too much text overwhelms your audience (and also possibly gives them myopia), too much animation distracts them from the speaker and his or her message.

As a general rule of thumb, we recommend using just one animation per slide to avoid overloading your audience. Plus, going from having too much on one slide to none on the next makes for a pretty drastic and unsettling transition.

3. Be consistent

It’s important to be consistent with the type of animation you use—especially on the same slide.

As seen in our earlier example on revealing milestones, if you have four bullet points to go through and you have used a fade effect to reveal the first point, continue using the same effect for the remaining points. 

Throwing in different animations one after another is like taking your audience on a visual rollercoaster ride and not recommended. 

You want your audience to walk away impressed with your presentation, not with motion sickness.

→ If you’d like to present your message in a presentation with animations, check out our tutorial on how to create awesome illustrations for creative presentations. Alternatively, you can select from our range of ready-made presentation templates.