What’s changing on the big stage? Your presentation needs to do more than look good.

Storytelling, design and motion are changing the way we think about presentations for the big stage.

We’re entering that time of the year again. Calendars are filling up with conferences, summits, end-of-year events and stages that have probably been booked for months. Speakers are getting ready, teams are closing their content and, somewhere in between all of that, someone is finally opening the presentation.

And this year, that presentation has a bigger job to do.

For a long time, an event presentation was treated almost like a regular meeting presentation, just bigger. The stage got bigger, the screen got huge, a few animations were added and there you had it: a deck for a big event.

But look at conferences like Config or Google I/O and that approach is starting to feel dated. Presentations are taking on a much more strategic role on stage. They almost become a second arm for the person speaking, helping direct the audience’s eyes, create context, hold attention and, most importantly, make an idea click.

The speaker is still the focus, of course, but keeping thousands of people engaged is a lot harder when the screen isn’t working with what’s being said.

And that might explain why event presentations are changing so much.Are we saying less?

Well, that is what a 2025 survey of conference organizers found that 70% of main-stage presentations were 30 minutes or less, up from 66% in the previous survey. The same shift is happening across panels and other stage formats, with shorter time slots becoming more common in event programs. (Scarlino Speaker Strategies).

But “shorter” doesn’t quite describe what’s happening. More strategic might.

For a long time, a good presentation was confused with simply having a deck ready. You had to set the context, explain the company, introduce the problem, go through five pillars, include every important number and, of course, finish by summarizing everything everyone had just heard.

On stage, simply having this type of presentation is no longer enough. There’s a much harder question to answer: what actually deserves to be here and how to grab peoples fully attention?

Making that choice takes far more strategy than cutting a few slides or charts. You need to understand what deserves time and attention from you audience, what they needs to see, what should come from the speech and what needs to be on the screen?

Storytelling has changed too.Or maybe we’re finally understanding what it actually means.

Storytelling has become one of those words we use so often that it barely explains anything anymore. You don’t need to open with a childhood story, and a presentation about technology, business or data doesn’t need to become a hero’s journey.

You can talk about something complex without having half the room checking the time every two minutes.

In this context, storytelling is much more about how an idea unfolds and how it's told.

The content might be exactly the same. The way the audience enters the story is completely different. That’s when a presentation becomes interesting to follow. The slides start talking to each other instead of feeling like a collection of pages that happen to live in the same file. One piece of information sets up the next, a number answers something you’ve been wondering about, and the visuals help the audience reach the conclusion alongside the speaker. Developing a presentation this way changes the job completely.

You're organising content, but you’re also organising time and attention. So what happened to design?

There’s a clear move towards less information on each screen, but calling it minimalism would be too easy. The reason is actually very practical: if someone is trying to read a wall of text while listening to the speaker, at some point one of those things is going to lose.

That might be why we’re seeing more presentations where a image is allowed to take over the entire screen, a number is given a huge room, or a chart builds as the speaker explains it instead of giving away the whole story before they’ve even started.

And “less is more” doesn’t explain everything either. Sometimes more is more. One huge image can have far more impact than six perfectly arranged elements fighting for the same space. The important part is knowing why that visual is there and what it needs to do at that point in the story.

Design starts much earlier in the process. It becomes part of the narrative itself, because how an idea appears has a direct impact on how that idea is understood.

Animation has properly entered the conversation.Animation in presentation design is nothing new and it’s becoming more and more part of the process.

Config 2025 is a great example. Figma created a visual language based on shapes that transformed and reacted to one another, and that movement carried through the stage screens, event identity, opening film and other parts of the experience. Motion and design were developed together from the beginning because animation was part of the idea itself, rather than something added at the end. (Figma)

Google I/O 2025 pushed that integration even further. According to Google, 48% of the visuals in its main presentation were created with Imagen, while 80% of its videos used Veo or Imagen somewhere in the process. The team created 219 AI-assisted slides alongside videos, opening sequences and other content made specifically for the stage. (Google)

Does that mean everything needs to move now? God, no.

Motion can explain a transformation, build anticipation, connect different parts of a presentation or help control its pace. When there’s a reason for movement to be there, it stops being an effect and starts becoming part of the story.

So, you might be asking (or maybe not, haha): Ok, ok, but what’s the trend?

The truth is, I don’t think the current shift can be summed up by one visual style. Big typography, 3D, gradients, motion and minimalism will come and go depending on the brand, the event and the story being told, the focus should be in how we’re thinking about presentations in the first place.

They’re becoming more intentional because every minute of attention matters. More visual because the screen doesn’t need to repeat what the speaker is already saying. More dynamic because animation, video and live demonstrations can now carry parts of the narrative. And more connected to the event itself because that huge screen is becoming part of the stage experience, rather than simply the place where we open a PowerPoint.

So, for your next event presentation, ask yourself:

Does the audience need to understand this?

Do I need them to compare two things?

Am I making them curious?

Is this helping me hold their attention?

Storytelling, design and motion are built around those decisions.And maybe that’s the biggest change happening in presentations for major events.

We’re moving away from simply creating a sequence of slides, it’s less about what each slide looks like on its own, and more about how the whole story comes together on stage.

On stage, content, storytelling and presentation design have to work strategically as one, telling the same story and making sure it’s one people actually remember.