Presentation Title on Left or Center of the Slide: Where to Place It?

PowerPoint Presentation is a relatively known presentation tool nowadays. From school projects to business conferences, this tool can be employed to serve all spheres. It is in fact a great means to use your creativity to make a personal tribute in order to make an occasion really special.

Striking the right cord to make that perfect first impression with your presentation is of utmost importance. Hence titles play a vital role. Of course it is essential to have a title for the presentation, but it is equally important to have a title for every different slide. The one question regarding titles that often remains unanswered is how a title must be placed.

A title must be bolder than the rest of the text to strike the viewer distinctively. Use of different colors, fonts and styles can be employed to make each title appealing, but one must not overdo it. The next concern is the positioning of the title; whether it should be placed on the left hand side or placed centrally.

Traditionally a centrally placed title is what has always worked. The central positioning:

The easy default setting

By default PowerPoint will insert the title in the center of the slide. Traditionally this was the way it worked in the default PowerPoint template that opens every time you open PowerPoint. Ellen Finkelstein mentioned this in his post about how to create better PowerPoint templates and here is an interesting excerpt explaining why it is better to left align the titles instead of using the title in the center.

Titles are usually centered by default; and because they are different lengths, their left side is different for each slide. It’s better to left-justify the titles and they’ll stay in the same place and give the magical appearance of changing without moving. Click in the title placeholder, and click the Align Left button in the Home tab’s Paragraph group.

Source: Ellen Finkelstein’s blog post 10 steps to create a better PowerPoint template.

Draws attention immediately

The center bias is recognized in the field of psychology as one of the natural human biases. It is concerned with being appealing to our aesthetic sense and our understanding of what is important. We humans like harmony in whatever we see. Thus a centrally placed title is more appealing to us as against a title that is placed to the left hand side. Most of us also believe in the idea of placing what is most important right in the center. This too contributes in making a centrally placed title more appealing to the audience.

Makes the title more distinctive

Every paragraph, every list of bullets starts from the left hand side as we follow the left hand rule of alignment as per the English language. A title starting from the extreme left appears to be as if monotonous with the rest of the text. That sure appears a little boring. A centrally placed title on the other hand can be easily distinguished and triggers more interest.

Lead to a harmonious sync with any graphics or images used

Use of images, diagrams, graphics, etc adds to the appeal of any presentation. All these too appear most appealing when placed in symmetry while maintaining the right and the left side balance. Thus a centrally positioned title obviously appears more synchronized with the symmetrically positioned graphics or diagrams. If you are looking for free images for PowerPoint presentations there are several resources you can check starting from our own website with free PowerPoint backgrounds, but also considering to use the new image search features available on Google Images that let you search by license or use type.

Yes, it is not much of a technical issue with the title positioning for a presentation. It is rather about human psychology and our tendency to go by our biases. But there definitely is no harm in considering this psychological aspect to strike success with your PowerPoint Presentation.