: Professional Powerpoint design from Indesign I just have some very basic questions regarding how a professional designer would approach creating an impressive Powerpoint presentation using todays

@Murray976

If the presentation needs to be done in Powerpoint, I wouldn't try to use a different platform. As you mentioned, your client might want to change things, so the format should be a popular and easy to edit one.

Since re-usability seems to be an important point here, I would consider preparing a Powerpoint template for your client. A template contains everything from different covers, layout and styling options, to (if you want) guidelines in regards to animations (this would have to go separate).

I personally spend almost as much time preparing the assets for the presentation as I do preparing the presentation file itself. This is the key, I believe. And by preparation I mean:


Plan a grid you can use as layout base
Adjust image formats and sizes so they doesn't have to scale weirdly (export them in the correct quality and size from the start)
Prepare graphs and graphic assets as transparent PNGs
Create and atomise elements you want to re-use (bullet list styles, text styles, anything really)
Create and import videos files to replace complex animations


Powerpoint is quite powerful, but it's also a bit heavy. The most work you can produce outside of it, IMO, the better. In the end it will be about using PP to get all those assets together, to create a template that you have designed previously.

You will never be able to get the client to use things exactly as you explained, but if you have a template they will have less chances to mess up. If you are using PP, design for PP. Use InDesign for ideas, but take advantage of the tools the other app offers, because the two softwares were planned for very different tasks.

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