Most slide deck design happens with only one audience in mind: the room where it’s presented. Someone stands in front of the slides, narrates the content, answers questions. The slides are a backdrop – they support the speaker, they don’t have to stand alone.
But that’s not always how they get used. Decks get emailed to funders who weren’t in the room. They get forwarded to decision-makers who weren’t at the meeting. They get shared with boards, partners, senior stakeholders – people who will look at them without any of the context the presenter would have provided. In those situations, the deck is doing the speaking. And if it wasn’t designed to work without you, it often doesn’t.
What a deck signals before anyone reads it
The first impression a slide deck makes is almost entirely visual. Before anyone reads a word of the content, they’ve already registered whether this looks like it came from a credible, organised, professional outfit – or whether it looks like it was put together the night before.
That assessment is not fair. It doesn’t reflect the quality of the thinking behind the deck. But it happens anyway, in the first few seconds, and it shapes how everything that follows is received. A deck that looks scrappy creates a small but persistent doubt about the rigour of the organisation behind it. A deck that looks considered creates a baseline of trust that makes the content easier to engage with.
For research organisations presenting findings to policymakers, charities making the case to funders, or education providers pitching partnerships, this matters. The deck is a proxy for the organisation. When it looks underprepared, that perception transfers.
The most common reasons decks fall apart
Templates nobody maintained.
Most organisations have a PowerPoint template. Most of those templates were set up at some point – possibly years ago – and then modified incrementally by different people, for different purposes, without anyone updating the master. The result is a deck that looks inconsistent even when everyone thinks they’re using the same template: slightly different fonts on different slides, margins that don’t quite align, logo placements that vary between sections.
This is a brand system problem.
The template is part of the brand, and if it hasn’t been maintained, it will produce inconsistent output regardless of how carefully individual presentations are made.
Too much on every slide.
The instinct when building a presentation is to be thorough – to include all the relevant context, all the supporting evidence, all the caveats. The result is slides with too much text, which do one of two things: force the speaker to read from them (which is painful to watch), or become impossible to follow when the deck is read without the speaker.
A slide deck that’s going to travel needs a different approach.
The key point should be visually dominant. Supporting detail can be in presenter notes or in a separate document. If someone has to read a dense paragraph on a slide to understand what it’s saying, the slide isn’t doing its job.
Brand colours that don’t work in presentations.
The screen-to-screen colour problem is different from the screen-to-print one, but it’s still real. A deck designed on one monitor, presented on a projector, and emailed to be viewed on a laptop can look noticeably different at each stage. Projectors in particular reduce colour saturation and contrast. Colours that look vibrant on a laptop screen can look washed out on a conference room wall, and text that reads clearly on screen can become difficult to follow when projected.
No clear visual hierarchy per slide.
The same hierarchy principles that apply to reports apply to slides. If every element on a slide is visually equal – same size, same weight, same treatment – there’s no signal about what the reader should look at first. A single slide should have one dominant visual message, one layer of supporting detail, and nothing else. Anything that doesn’t contribute to that structure is noise.
Designing for the room and for the inbox
The honest answer is that a deck designed to be presented and a deck designed to be read are different things, and the compromise between them is often neither.
The most practical approach for most organisations is to build a primary presentation deck – designed for a room, with big visuals and minimal text – alongside a leave-behind document that contains the full detail. The leave-behind can be a PDF, a well-designed one-pager, a short report. It doesn’t have to be the slide deck with speaker notes visible.
This is a design decision, not just a practical one. It means thinking from the start about which format serves which purpose – and building both to do their job properly, rather than asking one document to do everything.
The typography and colour decisions that make slides legible in a room connect directly to the same decisions in reports and PDFs. I’ve written about both in the font credibility article and the colour palette article. The underlying principle is the same: design for the conditions your work will actually be experienced in, not the ideal conditions it was created in.
A quick audit for your current deck
Open your most recent presentation. Now answer these:
- Does every slide have one clear visual priority – something that draws the eye immediately to the main point? If not, the hierarchy isn’t working.
- Does the deck look consistent throughout – same fonts, same margins, same logo placement, same colour use? If not, the template has drifted.
- If you remove all the text, do the slides still communicate something? If they collapse into meaningless backgrounds, the design isn’t doing enough work.
- Could someone follow the argument of the deck without a presenter? If not, and the deck is likely to be forwarded, that’s worth addressing.
Most decks fail at least two of these. That’s not a crisis – it’s a starting point. If you’re building a new deck template, or if an existing one has drifted beyond the point of easy repair, get in touch. A well-built presentation template is one of the most-used assets an organisation has, and it’s worth getting right.
