How to Simplify your Presentation [A guide by experts]
- Ink Narrates | The Presentation Design Agency
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
While working on a high-stakes investor pitch for a client named Daniel, he asked,
“How do you know what to keep and what to cut?”
Our Creative Director responded without skipping a beat...
“If everything’s important, nothing is.”
As a presentation design agency, this question hits familiar ground. The team spends weeks every quarter simplifying investor decks, board meeting slides, annual business reviews, and product launches. Each one begins with someone believing they need thirty-five slides to say what could have been said in ten.
The challenge isn't the content itself. It’s the unwillingness to let go.
And that’s the paradox: people who know their business best often struggle the most to express it clearly. That’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a storytelling problem.
So, in this blog, the focus is on a topic that seems simple, yet remains one of the hardest things to execute well: how to simplify your presentation. Not just in structure, but in thinking, in narrative, and in design.
Why Simplifying a Presentation Is Not Just a Style Choice, it’s a Strategy
The pressure to impress has hijacked the purpose of most business presentations. Somewhere between the desire to appear competent and the fear of leaving anything out, decks have become bloated with jargon, overloaded charts, and “just-in-case” slides.
But here’s the thing: complexity doesn’t earn trust. Clarity does.
When a presentation tries to say everything, the audience remembers nothing. Attention is not something handed over politely. It’s something earned. And in presentations, that happens through relevance, pacing, and restraint.
The most successful decks our team has worked on (across industries, across continents) share one trait. They make hard choices. What stays. What goes. What gets two minutes, what gets ten seconds. These aren’t design tweaks. They’re strategic decisions.
The irony? Most teams spend 80 percent of their prep time perfecting what to say, and almost no time editing what not to.
That’s exactly why simplifying a presentation is not just a formatting exercise. It’s a mindset shift. And once that shift happens, the narrative starts working for the presenter, instead of against them.
How to Simplify Your Presentation [The Moves that Matter]
The problem is never the number of slides. It’s the number of ideas competing for attention on each one.
Teams don’t get lost in their message because they lack data or ambition. They get lost because they haven’t decided what the story really is. A cluttered presentation is a symptom. The cause is upstream—it starts when the story is unclear, and every new slide becomes an attempt to compensate for the lack of clarity.
So, let’s break down what it actually takes to simplify your presentation. Not cosmetically, but fundamentally.
1. Begin With the Tension, Not the Timeline
Most presentations follow a chronological format: who we are, what we’ve done, what we offer, why we’re different. Logical? Sure. Memorable? Never.
Every simplified presentation starts with tension. Not your company’s tension—the audience’s.
Before introducing a product, pitch, or roadmap, the first task is to illuminate the shift that’s already happening in the world. The change your audience cannot ignore. Once that shift is visible, everything else becomes context.
One of the most effective opening slides we’ve ever designed didn’t have a product name or a mission statement. It simply said: "The way buyers evaluate vendors has changed. They no longer trust what companies say about themselves."
Eight words that make the room lean forward. That’s how a simplified presentation starts—not by dumping credentials, but by revealing the conflict the audience is already living through.
2. Turn Features into Weapons in the Story
A feature list is not a strategy. It’s a brochure.
Simplifying a presentation means making every feature earn its place in the narrative. The litmus test is simple: can each capability be tied to the larger shift introduced earlier?
Let’s say the presentation is about a SaaS platform with an auto-scaling engine. That’s not the point. The point is that cloud costs are ballooning, and teams can’t keep up manually. So the slide should frame the feature like this: "In a world where cloud costs are eating margin, real-time auto-scaling becomes your unfair advantage."
See the difference? One tells. The other sells.
Simplifying the presentation doesn’t mean removing features. It means elevating them to story status—where each one becomes a response to an undeniable shift the audience already feels.
3. Design Like You’re Telling a Joke
Every good joke relies on timing. Setup, pause, punchline.
Presentations are no different. The problem is, most decks give away the punchline on the same slide as the setup. There’s no build-up. No tension. No payoff.
To simplify a presentation is to control pacing with surgical precision.
Instead of cramming a before–after scenario on one slide, separate them. Let the audience sit in the pain for a moment before introducing relief. Use visual contrast. Let whitespace do the talking. Let one idea own the space.
One client presentation we worked on had a slide that tried to say this:
“Legacy systems are slow and expensive. Our solution deploys in minutes and cuts cost by 40 percent.”
The rewrite?
Slide 1 (just text):"Legacy systems are still draining millions per quarter."
Slide 2 (image of broken machine):"Deployments take weeks. Costs spike. Teams burn out."
Slide 3 (clean visual of their platform):"That changes here."
Slide 4 (impact stat):"40 percent lower costs. Fully live in under 48 hours."
The content is the same. But now there’s tension. Rhythm. Clarity. That’s the power of simplifying a presentation through structure, not just aesthetics.
4. Remove the Burden of Interpretation
One of the biggest traps in slide design is assuming the audience will “get it” if the data is just shown.
They won’t.
Complex charts. Stacked bar graphs. Tables with eight columns. They belong in the appendix, not in the first five slides. Because when the audience has to work hard to interpret the meaning, they stop listening to the speaker.
A simplified presentation puts the takeaway above the data, not hidden inside it.
Consider this transformation:
Original Slide: A line graph showing market growth from 2018 to 2024 with five color-coded regions.
Simplified Slide: Large text: "APAC will outgrow North America by 2x in the next 12 months."
Supporting visual: Just the two lines for APAC and North America. Everything else fades to grey.
Same data. Clearer point. Less cognitive load. The presentation is now doing the work for the audience—not making them decode a thesis.
5. Treat Slides as Scenes, Not Storage Units
Think of each slide as a scene in a movie. It exists to create forward motion. It does not exist to store information for later.
One of the most common mistakes in slide-heavy presentations is redundancy—repeating points in slightly different words or showing variations of the same data from different angles.
That kind of repetition slows the story down. Worse, it makes the audience feel like they’ve already seen the good part, even if they haven’t.
To simplify a presentation, apply the “scene test” to every slide. Ask: What does this scene move forward? What question does it answer or create?
If the answer is “None,” cut it. If the answer is “Kind of,” rewrite it.
Great presentations don’t feel long, even when they are. Because each scene earns its place.
6. Get Ruthless With Language
Simplification starts with story. But the story is told through words. And most business decks are written by committee, soaked in safe language that says nothing boldly.
Words like "synergy," "seamless," "solutions" don’t help. They dilute. They hide.
To simplify a presentation, every word must pull weight. Swap “transform” with specifics. Swap “optimize” with a number. Use verbs. Use nouns. Kill adverbs.
Compare these two versions:
Vague:
“Our platform enables businesses to leverage data more effectively to drive success.”
Sharp:
“Our tool helps logistics firms cut shipment delays by 37 percent.”
That’s not just copywriting. That’s clarity. That’s storytelling that respects the audience’s time.
7. Own the Silence
Simplification isn’t just subtraction. It’s permission to pause.
Most presenters rush through simplified decks as if speed equals strength. But it’s the silence between points that lets the message land.
One deck we coached used a single black slide between key transitions. No text. Just a moment of breath. It created anticipation. It invited attention. And it worked—stakeholders remembered not just the message, but the feeling of that shift.
A simplified presentation does this well. It knows when to say less. It knows when to stop talking. Because confidence doesn’t shout. It signals.
8. Stop Designing for Every Possible Objection
This one is hard. Because most decks are built on fear. What if they ask this? What if they don’t see that? What if they don’t believe it?
And so the deck grows. And grows. And loses its spine.
Simplifying a presentation means resisting the urge to defend every possible angle. Not everything has to be proven upfront. Some things are better addressed in conversation, during Q&A, or in follow-up materials.
The presentation is not the full argument. It’s the opening move. The best decks trust the room to be smart—and they invite dialogue, not pre-empt every doubt.
9. Cut, Then Cut Again
Every deck we work on goes through at least two ruthless editing rounds.
The first is logical. Removing redundancy. Tightening sequence. Rewriting slides that blur the message.
The second is emotional. Asking hard questions. Is this slide here to inform or to impress? Are we attached to this section because it’s working—or just because we spent a week building it?
Simplifying a presentation means giving up the need to say it all. It means choosing resonance over coverage. It’s uncomfortable. But it works.
Because in the end, no one remembers the deck that said everything. They remember the one that said the right thing.
Why Hire Us to Build your Presentation?
If you're reading this, you're probably working on a presentation right now. You could do it all yourself. But the reality is - that’s not going to give you the high-impact presentation you need. It’s a lot of guesswork, a lot of trial and error. And at the end of the day, you’ll be left with a presentation that’s “good enough,” not one that gets results. On the other hand, we’ve spent years crafting thousands of presentations, mastering both storytelling and design. Let us handle this for you, so you can focus on what you do best.