Presentation Design Tip: Alignment and Spacing in PowerPoint

Because our clients hire us to beautify their presentations, we’ve seen it all: the good, the bad, and the ugly of PowerPoint design. Our inboxes are constantly flooded with PowerPoint slides needing some major TLC. The Ethos3 presentation designers list alignment and spacing as two of the most common issues they consistently see on slides designed by amateur presentation designers.

A lot of people just eyeball their spacing and alignment, hoping their estimation is close enough to suffice. Trust us, it’s not. We can tell your design is slightly amiss, and your audience can too. Even when audience members can’t quite put their finger on the problem with your presentation design, they can sense it. 

Luckily, PowerPoint makes it easy for you to align your text, icons, and photos. Because it is so simple to achieve perfect alignment and spacing, there is no excuse for eyeballing these critical design elements.

To help you avoid improper alignment and spacing, two tell-tell signs of an inexperienced presentation designer, we are providing the tips you need to design PowerPoint slides with proper spacing and alignment.

1. When designing in PowerPoint, use align and distribute to keep your alignment and spacing in order. This makes it incredibly easy to properly space and align icons or logos.

2. Align: The align feature does just what it says; it will either align a single object to your slide, or you can use it to align two or more objects relative to each other.

To use align, select all of the objects you want to align, go to the arrange dropdown menu, then choose how you want to align them (left, top, right, middle, center, bottom).

powerpoint design tip

3. Distribute: The distribute option spaces selected objects so there’s an equal amount of space between each object, either horizontally or vertically.

To use distribute, select the object you want to distribute. Then, go to the arrange dropdown menu and choose to distribute the objects either vertically or horizontally.

4. Group: Once you’ve aligned and distributed your objects, select the objects again. Next, group the objects by selecting group under the arrange dropdown menu. Once the objects are grouped, align the objects one more time, following the steps above.

powerpoint group alignment

Conclusion: To ensure your slides look professional, take advantage of the alignment and spacing features in PowerPoint. Your audience will notice if you skip these essential design steps, so use the tips above to design slides that are refined and sophisticated.

Additional Resources:

Presentation Design Tutorial: Integrate Type Into Photos

PowerPoint Tutorial: Use Color Overlays with Photos

How To Transfer Designs From Photoshop To PowerPoint

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