11+ Aesthetic Backgrounds for Presentations

When was the last time you paid attention to a presentation with a blank background? While complex PowerPoint backgrounds can be distracting, using aesthetically pleasing backgrounds with a balanced color tone can help make your presentation more attention grabbing. For best aesthetic backgrounds to use in presentations, including free PowerPoint templates, see our collection of templates in this post.

Why do People use Aesthetic Backgrounds in PowerPoint Presentations?

Aesthetic backgrounds can help improve the chances of a presenter getting his/her message across to an audience. Since death by PowerPoint is a reality faced by millions of presenters on a daily basis. You might have heard people asking at the end of a presentation to simply share the slides with the audience via email. This is usually due to a lack of interest in the presentation, where people prefer to skim through slides later to actually understand what the presentation was about.

If your presentation is good enough, people might have little or no need to ask for slides later. Since they would grasp the gist of the presentation. However, when people in the audience are bored or find it hard to keep up with the slides, they would rather look at slides later on their own. Many class lectures, corporate presentations and slide decks presented during workshops and trainings can suffer from this dilemma.

While you would need to ensure a number of factors to keep your audience glued to their seats, aesthetically pleasing backgrounds can be part of the formula for delivering a successful presentation. To learn about other factors, see our post about 8 Key Must-Have Elements to Make a Professional Presentation.

aesthetic backgrounds for powerpoint

Pros and Cons of Using Aesthetic Backgrounds in PowerPoint Presentations

There are a number of benefits and potential disadvantages for using aesthetic backgrounds in PowerPoint. Before we explore our list for the best aesthetic PowerPoint templates, let’s explore a few pros and cons of using aesthetically pleasing backgrounds in PowerPoint presentations.

Pros

A few of the benefits of using aesthetically pleasing templates can be to make attention grabbing slides, make your content memorable and to highlight key parts of your content.

Attention Grabbing

Unlike blank backgrounds and dull slide elements, aesthetic backgrounds can help make your content more attention grabbing. Someone making a presentation on environmental issues might find it useful to use attractive nature themed background slides, whereas a corporate presentation might help make your content stand out with a vibrant corporate theme with your company’s branding.

Memorable

When was the last time you remembered content from a slide with a blank background? Using infographics, animations and slide elements which pop out can enable you to make your content memorable. You can use clipart, animated objects and other types of content to make your PowerPoint slide decks easier to remember for your audience.

Useful for Highlighting Content

It is a scientifically proven fact that making visual connections can enable people to memorize and recall details better. You can help your audience create visual connections by attributing symbols, clipart and vibrant slide objects to highlight your content and also make it memorable.

Cons

There can also be some disadvantages of using slides which are aesthetic. Your slides can become distracting, the loading time might slow down and you might require better system resources to run your slides.

Distracting Slides

Even a balanced PowerPoint template with vibrant slides can become distracting if its cluttered. Some aesthetically pleasing slides can become quite distracting and the audience might get attracted towards unnecessary slide details instead of your content.

Slow Loading of Slides

Some aesthetically pleasing templates can make your slides heavy due to per-configured animations, transitions and heavy imagery within slides. This can lead to a lag when you try to switch slides.

Require More System Resources

You might have seen people’s PowerPoint presentations hanging during a slideshow. This often happens when the system isn’t good enough to run the presentation slides smoothly due to a lack of system resources. This might happen because the system is old or if too many applications are simultaneously open. Either way, you might want to keep your presentation slides manageable and lightweight, while maintaining aesthetics.

Best Aesthetic Backgrounds for PowerPoint

We have created a list of the best aesthetic backgrounds for PowerPoint that you can pick templates from to create optimized presentations that are visually appealing, lightweight and can help make your presentation content stand out.

1. Yellow Aesthetic Backgrounds for PowerPoint

A template with a yellow color tone which is balanced to perfection is hard to find. This yellow aesthetic background for PowerPoint gives the perfect mix of shades of yellow with whitespace to give you just enough visually appeal to highlight your content. This is a lightweight template with a simple, yet aesthetic design which can be great for all kinds of presentation topics.

yellow aesthetic background for powerpoint

Go to Download Yellow Aesthetic Background for PowerPoint

2. Glow Day PowerPoint Template Aesthetic Background Design

Glow Day is another yellow aesthetic background for PowerPoint with a sunshine themed design. The blue sky and sunshine style layouts can be easy on the eyes and enable you to create aesthetically pleasing presentations.

glow day powerpoint template

Go to Download Glow Day PowerPoint Template

3. Red Aesthetic Background for PowerPoint

Inspired from the Amaranth plant, this template contains subtle reddish color tones. The template gives various types of layouts to highlight your content. You can opt for an abstract reddish or white content slide design with an Amaranth design on the right.

free amaranth powerpoint template

Go to Download Red Aesthetic Background for PowerPoint

4. Blue Aesthetic Background for PowerPoint

This blue aesthetic background provides a simple, yet eye-catching layout. You can use this free template to create minimalist presentation slides with a bit of color to help your content pop out. While the template might not seem much on its own, once you add content to the blue background, it can pop out due to the template design. Adding a few animations might help to further make your slides memorable and attention grabbing.

free blue aesthetic background for powerpoint

Go to Download Blue Aesthetic Background for PowerPoint

5. Pink Aesthetic Background for PowerPoint

This pink aesthetic background for PowerPoint provides whitespace in the middle of a vibrant pink layout to enable presenters to highlight their content. The template has been designed in a manner that the audience is directed towards the center of the slide by the dark pinkish header and footer.

pink aesthetic background for powerpoint

Go to Download Pink Aesthetic Background for PowerPoint

6. Abstract Aesthetic Backgrounds for PowerPoint

This is a background template with a northern lights design. The title slide is quite vibrant and the content slide comes with a light overlay to help highlight the added content.

abstract aesthetic background for powerpoint

Go to Download Abstract Aesthetic Background for PowerPoint

7. Northern Lights Themed Aesthetic Background Template for PowerPoint

This is another northern lights themed aesthetic background which can be used for highlighting your presentation content with the aid of a vibrant background design.

free northern lights powerpoint template

Go to Download Northern Lights PowerPoint Template

8. Cute Aesthetic Backgrounds for PowerPoint

Sometimes one needs a few cute aesthetic backgrounds for making slides for children’s events, PowerPoint storyboards and educational presentations. Here are a few cute aesthetic backgrounds that you can use for this purpose. Below is a cute sheep design with generic layouts which can be moulded to your needs.

cute powerpoint template

Go to Download Cute PowerPoint Template

9. Animated Green Aesthetic PowerPoint Template

This is an animated presentation template with a green design. This green aesthetic PowerPoint template gives animated slides with a variety of interesting layouts which can be used for making slides related to finance, business growth, environmental issues and other topics.

green aesthetic powerpoint template

Go to Presenter Media – Animated Green Aesthetic PowerPoint Template

10. Animated Black and White Aesthetic PowerPoint Template

Black and white aesthetic templates for PowerPoint can help leave a lasting impression on your audience. There are many templates which are designed to attract the audience at a glance. With the aid of animations, transitions and infographic style layouts. The template below is one such template that you can adopt for a range of presentation topic. It comes with some space themed imagery which can also be replaced with your own to change the overall concept of the template.

11. Animated White Aesthetic PowerPoint Template

If you’re looking for a unique presentation template with a novel design, this animated template can help add some novelty to your presentation. The template starts with an animated character writing on the screen. This text is editable and can be changed by the presenter when editing the template.
There are a range of interesting slide designs which can be used for covering any presentation topic with the aid of diagrams, tables, infographics, charts, comparisons and the like.

Final Words

Using aesthetic backgrounds for PowerPoint and Google Slides with a mix of your content can be a good strategy for creating slides which are easy to grasp for your audience, memorable and can help you achieve desired objectives of your presentation. You can download a range of other free aesthetic backgrounds for PowerPoint from the link below, or alternative browse our collection of other good presentation backgrounds compatible with Google Slides and PowerPoint.

About Farshad

IT professional, communications specialist and Blogger!

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