Design 101: Your Painless Guide to Designing for SlideShare

I’m sure you’re familiar with SlideShare. It’s pretty much just like a YouTube for PowerPoint presentations. Although SlideShare and PowerPoint presentations share the same dimensions and even look the same, they’re actually much less of a headache to design than a regular PowerPoint presentation. Keep reading to find out just how and why to design SlideShare presentations regularly.

Make @slideshare work for you with these tips from the @RedBranch #graphicdesign team: Share on X

 

The Pros

Think of SlideShare as your online free-promo platform that gives your presentations the potential to reach vast amounts of people. A great benefit to this platform is that SlideShares are embeddable for your website and other social networks. What’s more is that LinkedIn recently acquired it, which gives you the added ability to post them in your LinkedIn profile. This is incredibly important because CEO Maren Hogan of Red Branch Media mentioned that this ability alone was one of the top tricks to stand out on LinkedIn.

Read the full article, “Top Tricks to Stand Out on LinkedIn” here.

The success your presentations could bring you is by no means limited in any way. Even Eugene Cheng of SmartBlogger noted:

“What if you could leverage a platform that gets more than 70 million visitors a month, won’t cost you a dime and lets you direct traffic back to your blog?” – Eugene Cheng of SmartBlogger (@SmartBlogger)

What are you waiting for? Let’s get started!

 

 

Choose Your Tool & Get Going

Although you can still use programs such as PowerPoint, Google Slides or Keynote to create your presentation, I still recommend Illustrator, as it’s the easiest and least painful way. The main reason why I stress using Illustrator is that you’re totally unrestricted and have free reign to design anything you’d like. Not to mention the end result looks amazing and crisp (see the most recent SlideShare I designed for Beyond above). Make sure that when you’re creating your presentation in Illustrator to set all of your artboards (your slides) to the dimensions of 1024x768px. These are the standard PowerPoint slide dimensions and it fits like a glove when you transfer these slides to a PowerPoint file (keep reading, I’ll explain).

If you don’t have access to any of the Adobe programs and would like to use good ol’ PowerPoint to design your SlideShare, that’s okay… just become a PowerPoint pro first:

• Design 101: 3 Legitimate Tips for Working in PowerPoint
• Design 101: 3 Hacks to Compress Giant PowerPoint Files

 

Exporting & Uploading

Okay, okay. I said that we’re using Illustrator and not PowerPoint, but I meant for design purposes. Don’t worry, we’re only going to import slides into a blank PowerPoint file so SlideShare can read it and upload it correctly. Here’s your painless step-by-step guide:

1. Export your Illustrator File by going to File > Save As > Adobe PDF (making sure “All” is selected so Illustrator will export all of your slides). Make sure when the PDF window pops up that you change the preset to “[High Quality Print]” and uncheck the “Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities.”

2. After your PDF finishes saving, we’re going to open it up in Adobe Acrobat. From here, go to “Tools” and click “Organize Pages.”  Now, we’re going to do some automation and have Acrobat extract all of these slides and save them out individually. Click on “Extract” and make sure you check the box “Extract pages as separate files.” Now, simply click and drag a selection box over all of your slides and let go of your mouse to get all of your slides selected at once. Finally, hit the blue “Extract” button and save your slides into your desired folder.

3. Open up PowerPoint and start a blank deck and insert the number of blank slides that your presentation is made of up. See all of those words on each slide on your designed presentation? This is the slide text Slideshare reads when it generates the text portion below your online presentation. Because we used Illustrator, SlideShare will need another way to read the text. Simply create a text box on each slide and type out the slide text in plain, default font settings. For example, on the Beyond SlideShare above in slide 3, I literally typed out: FIX: Check your screened candidates to interview ratio per hiring manager. You may find there is an issue in a certain department!

4. Once you’ve typed out the text for each slide, simply drop your images in your slides right on top of each text box. SlideShare will now recognize the text from your PowerPoint file text boxes even though they’re hidden under the slide images and generate your text portion. Now, export your PowerPoint file.

5. Finally, log in to SlideShare and select the orange “Upload” button in the top menu bar. Drag in your PowerPoint or click on “Select files to upload” to upload your presentation. Simply fill out everything on the next screen using SEO keywords and hit “Publish.” That’s it!

Not sure how to add Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Check out our “SEO Quick Tips Tuesday” article series by Noelle Murphy to go from newbie to proficient.

Don’t underestimate the power of SlideShare. Something as little as a presentation has the ability to go VIRAL, so utilize that opportunity! With these tips, you can use Illustrator to easily outmatch the competition because of the almost infinite possibilities Illustrator has over regular presentation software like PowerPoint, Google Slides or Keynote. Designer’s block? Try hitting up Pinterest or even browsing presentations in SlideShare too.