3 Tricks When the Picture Won’t Fit

Sometimes your picture fits awkwardly on the slide, leaving an unfinished-looking section of slide. What do you do? Here’s my three favorite tricks.

1. Use a background color from the picture. Find a color that matches the picture using Color Cop, and use that color to fill the side box. Now this slide looks like it was “designed” rather than thrown together.

 2. Make the picture smaller. Crop and resize the picture, and then put a wide border around it and tilt it to look like a Polaroid photograph (video demonstration). Add a drop shadow behind it. Use Color Cop to find a background color that matches the photo.

3. Make the picture bigger. Increase the picture size and crop it so it fills the entire PowerPoint slide. Make sure the text fits the contours of the picture. In this example, the text curves around the eagle’s head (left). Text that is justified left creates an invisible border that cuts this picture in half (right).

Good: text sweeps around the image

Poor: text cuts image in half

Amateurish slides dent your credibility. Spend the extra time with your pictures so they look designed into the slide, and not just slapped awkwardly into place.

About the author: Bruce Gabrielle is author of Speaking PowerPoint: the new language of business, showing a 12-step method for creating clearer and more persuasive PowerPoint slides for boardroom presentations. Subscribe to this blog or join my LinkedIn group to get new posts sent to your inbox.