The request we get most often is “Can you make this look better?” Almost always, the slides are not the problem. Someone has presented the deck, it did not land, and design is the first thing that looks fixable.
But a deck that looks better and says the same thing gets the same answer, in nicer typography. Design is an amplifier. It makes a clear argument land harder, and a muddled one look expensive.
What an argument is: three parts
- Claim: one sentence you want the audience to believe.
- Evidence: the smallest amount of proof that makes it credible.
- So what: what it means for the decision in front of them.
A slide missing any one of these is decoration. Many decks we are sent are missing all three, on every slide, and still look fine.
The five-minute test: read only your slide titles
Open your deck and read the titles top to bottom, nothing else. Compare these two sets from an illustrative pitch deck:
| Labels (say nothing) | Claims (make a case) |
|---|---|
| Overview | Mid-size fleets still dispatch by hand |
| The Market | 4,000 depots, none served well |
| Our Product | Setup in a day, not a quarter |
| Competition | Incumbents can’t serve them profitably |
| Traction | Q4 grew 68% as churn halved |
| The Team | We ran this depot before we sold to one |
| The Ask | $2M gets us to Series A metrics |
If your titles do not build a case on their own, no amount of design will rescue the slides underneath.
Why the order matters: editing first, design second
On a typical deck, the design takes an afternoon. Working out what each slide is arguing takes longer, and it is the part that changes whether you get the meeting.
If you cannot say the slide out loud in one sentence, it is not ready to be designed.
This is also why a cheap deck can cost more. You pay for the afternoon, and then pay again when the argument still is not there. For a step-by-step way to build that argument before you design, see Open PowerPoint at Step 6.
The slide titles above are an illustrative example.
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