Its late. At around 12:45 your eyes are slowly starting to close involuntarily but you fight to stay awake. Your big presentation is in just a few days and your promotion might just depend on the impression you make on your boss.

If you only had some resources to draw on for inspiration, some ideas on how to display all this complex data and some better imagery than this terribly cheesy smiley faced lightbulb clipart. With some help, just maybe, you could be a hero and a star.

Never fear! What follows is some of the best the web has to offer for the aspiring Presentation Guru. I have used these resources to create presentations that have won clients and sealed the deal on new jobs. If you are new to the idea of presentation design, the work and resources on these sites will blow your mind. Let your success begin now.

1. Duarte

In my opinion, Duarte is just about the best in the business when it comes to presentation design. The company’s founder and owner, Nancy Duarte is the author of the best presentation books I have ever read and her company has designed presentations for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth Documentary, HP, Twitter, Citrix and many more. I urge you in the strongest possible terms to buy her two books Slideology and Resonate right now.

OK, although this site is great for inspiration, one of the best resources is their Diagrammer template shop. There are PowerPoint templates for a wide range of data and concepts that save time (and in the long run money). When you have data to display or a complex concept that you need help visualizing check out the Diagrammer.

2. Note & Point

Note & Point is “A gallery devoted to making your Keynote & Powerpoint presentations look that much better.” and has become a real favorite of mine. The presentations are creative and beautiful and I often borrow design and slide concept ideas from the work I see here. The presentations are usually available for download in PDF format. Take note of how many of the presentations here use bold imagery and fonts and usually contain very little text per slide.

3. iStockphoto

Great photography and other imagery is one of the single most important aspects of a great presentation. When people see presentations like the ones mentioend above they often assume a graphic designer must have put them together. However, a well placed image and bold sentence placed just right looks about as good as it gets. iStockphoto sells high quality stock photography and other graphics (icons, vector art, illustrations, etc.) for a reasonable price. Although there are a number of other stock photo sites you can use I find iStock to be the easiest to use and I really like their user interface. Create an account and then purchase some credits that you then use to buy imagery. iStock also has a free image for download on their homepage every so often and I have been collecting them for a while now.

So, get inspired, download some templates, buy some incredible photography and make the best presentation you have ever crafted.