Presentation design blog

You've probably been here before: someone from the sales team sends over a deck for review and it looks nothing like your set brand. Wrong blue. A font you don't recognize. A chart style that belongs in a 2014 annual report. You ask how it happened, and the answer is always the same: "I just used the template." And that's the real problem with most PowerPoint templates. Sure, they look great when they leave the design team, but then they hit the hands of 10, 20, or 50 differe

The problem isn't that your team can't design slides. It's that without a real system, every person who touches a deck makes a different set of decisions. Most organizations have something they call a branded PowerPoint template. It has the logo in the corner, the right colors applied, maybe a custom font. And then someone opens it under deadline pressure, can't find the right layout, grabs a slide from an old deck, tweaks the font size, and suddenly the presentation looks li

Most PowerPoint templates don't fail at launch. They instead fail three weeks later, when someone on the sales team adds their own font, someone else pastes in an off-brand slide, and then suddenly nobody's sure which version circulating around is current. And that's the real problem with how most organizations approach templates. They treat them as just a design deliverable rather than a full system, building a polished master file, sending it out to the team, and then assum