How to Make a Design Board with Google Slides

Design School 101

Nov 30

Demo Room - Design Board Google Slides.png

What’s the secret to knowing your home is going be beautiful before spending a single dollar on it? Make a design board to see what it’ll look like!

This is something all designers do in some way, shape, or form to show their clients the direction of the design as well as specific pieces. It’s incredibly helpful because as we know, interior design is SO visual. You can describe a space in words until you’re blue in the face, but seeing it is a crucial step in making confident decisions. Does this take a little more time and effort? Yes. It’s so worth it though - trust me.

While there are all sorts of complicated programs out there that you could use to visualize the design you put together, you don’t need to go that route. A really simple, easy to use program is one that’s available to anyone, for free - Google Slides. And since it’s cloud-based, you can easily take your designs with you to reference if you’re out and about. You could also use Apple Keynote or Microsoft PowerPoint to do this if you’re familiar with those. The process will be pretty similar to what you see here in my Google Slides tutorial - you’ll be able to take the concepts you learn and apply them to your preferred presentation software.

In this video tutorial, I’ll show you how to use images from online retailers to build a lifelike “room” so that you can see how those pieces would look in your home in real life. It won’t be a perfect representation (you’d need a program like Photoshop to do that!), but it’s a tremendously helpful visualization tool. You can build a room pretty quickly, which is a major perk of going this route! We’ll be recreating the room you see in the image at the top of this lesson.

Takeaway Tips:

If you’d like to change the size of your slide, do that FIRST, otherwise the images you’ve added will get distorted when you change it.
Images with a white background and have a straight-on view are easiest to work with and make for a more realistic look.
Remove as much of the background as possible using the crop tool.
Keep the dimensions of the pieces in mind as you resize them. Do your best to stay true to the actual scale for the most realistic results.
Build your room in the same way that it would look in real life. E.g. place your rug underneath the sofa, and throw pillows on top of the sofa. You can send an item backward or forward by using the Order tool, which you’ll find by right clicking an object and using the options you see under Order to rearrange your pieces.
Rotate and flip objects as needed by right clicking an image and using the Rotate tool.
Add a back wall (use the color you currently have or plan to use to paint the walls) and flooring to your board for a more realistic look. You’ll be amazing at what a difference it makes compared to an all-white background. To find hardwood flooring (or carpet) that’s similar to your own, use Google Images to search for a “hardwood flooring seamless texture” and copy and paste an image of one that matches.

This tutorial will show you one perspective of a room, but you can of course make as many as you need to see the whole space! For example, here I showed the bed wall, and I could go on to show the dresser wall next if that was helpful for my decision-making process.

Bonus Tip:

Want to get real fancy and remove the backgrounds of your images? Try remove.bg. The basic version is free to use, and it allows you to quickly and easily remove backgrounds with just a click. It’s an extra step, but if it helps you better visualize your design, go for it!