Artboard sizes for Presentations

Keep in mind that Adobe products use 72 dpi where as the MS OS uses 96 dpi, so you'll need to enlarge your graphics by 33.33% in Illustrator to fit without resizing in an office product.

Hi Lorie

Tons of great info in this thread! For something like this I usually go with the Web profile, 1280x1024 preset. I find it looks great on phones and projectors. I've also started using 1920x1080 for displays with more pixels to play with.

Sounds like you're on the right track, best of luck to you!

Figure out what slide size you are going to use

Change the size of your slides - PowerPoint

then create your Illustrator artboard to that size.

So set your artboard(s) up at that size. In my experience, make it the 16:9 widescreen format.

No when you are designing your slides, zoom out so that it the size of the artboard on your screen matches the physical size of a phone or device you would hold in your hand next to the screen. That's your Quality Test for legibility, etc. Now, note the percentage you are viewing it at. Let's say it's 25%. Now, when you zoom in, and the artboard increases in size relative to your monitor, take that growth rate, and move yourself farther away by that amount. So if it's at 25% and that size matches the physical size of an iPhone, great. But if when you blow it up to the size of your monitor that is at 125%, then you know that's 5x bigger. So you need to increase your distance by 5x and see if you can still read the content on the screen.

I run a presentation design service bureau, and this is one of the Quality tests all our designers use to check legibility and scale. It doesn't always grant us the beauty and sophistication of type designs we love, but it insures information design is successful, and that's priority number one.

Presentation sizes will vary greatly with each devices, like you mentioned.

But our standard applications, like PPT or Keynote, build them in either 4:3 aspect ratio or 16:9 aspect ratio.

Powerpoint doesn't work in pixel dimensions so you'll have to calculate your sizes in inches.

10" x 7.5" is the (4:3) standard size
13.33" x 7.5" is the (16:9) standard size

It's never a bad thing having extra slides and not cramming them full. And audience distance to screen is more relative than what device it's on. This dictates point sizes for fonts, etc. Someone can read an 14pt font on an iPad, but you can't read an 14pt font on a big auditorium screen from 50' away.

My advice, design for the smallest screen you know will be used, and as that scales up, it's likely the audience will be scaling "up" by moving a further distance from the screen.

It's difficult to prepare one size of presentation best for all media, projectors, screens, TV

I hope preparing HD 1920x1080 size is a good choise. Most modern TV, Projectors, screens uses HD dimiensions

You can also try to use smaller size - best for laptops: 1366x768

Use wide margins and background color same as your presentation background. If you scale screen a little bit it wouldn't be a problem

Pawel