When people get invited to speak at a conference about their specific expertise and/or profession, they usually have no problem creating an industry story. It is easy to understand why: they are their home turf, feel very confident, have lots of interesting things to say and are in a relatively risk-free environment (there is no business proposal that could be rejected).

The draft presentations I receive from these type of clients usually need very little work. Here is what I usually end up doing:

• Switch to a big conference white on dark template, without any logos, banners
• Replace the standard Calibri or Arial font to something safe (i.e., no custom fonts that can cause trouble on foreign computers). Usual choices: Arial Black in all caps, or Century Gothic
• Replace cheesy stock images
• Replace low resolution images
• Replace images with copyright issues (Google image search, search tools, "labelled for re-use"
• Restore original image aspect ratios and stretch/crop images to full screen
• Spread out slides with multiple messages across multiple slides
• Cut text and reposition text boxes in the context of the underlying image

Art:  Johannes Moreelse, Democritus, 1630