Be careful with using animations on a presentation slide

It may look like fun to add a number of (gif) animations to your presentation slides, but you should be careful with this. First of all you should know that peoples eyes are drawn towards movements. So if you put an animation on a slide you can be fairly certain that people will start looking at it. Knowing this you should ask yourself the question if that part of the slide is indeed something that you want people to look at or will this be distracting.

If you put for example an animation of a fountain in a corner of the slide, people will look at this. Is that animation important for the information you want to bring across to your audience? If not (for example your presentation is not about fountains), then don’t put such a distracting animation on your slide. Animations are distracting, so be aware of this impact. If you do want people to focus on something specific on your presentation slide, adding an animation to that point may be helpful.

 

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