How to set-up a small number of PPTX or Google Slide templates to gain brand consistency 😎, high visual quality 👀, and time savings ⏱ through compounding.
TL;DR: This article is intended for people working on their own businesses or in early-stage companies, where they have the freedom to influence and the need to optimize their presentation workflow. I will focus on a project-focused / consulting-focused business, thus project proposals will be a major part. For early-stage product startups, this template will not be necessary, but the pitch deck will be more important.
The article is structured in three parts: the first part outlines why this framework makes sense, followed by the second part focusing on how to implement it with your use-case and finally the third parts discusses in detail what templates are created.
Why Standardize Your Presentations:
Standardizing your presentations is essential for two primary reasons: time-saving and brand consistency.
Let’s focus on time first: no presentation will be completely new, you will always build on already existing ones. The central idea of the framework are a small number of templates, that will serve as the ground truth for everybody working with or creating presentations. This approach not only streamlines the presentation creation process but also facilitates the systematic improvement of your slides while tracking changes and updates through predefined templates. As your company grows, the potential for scaling these benefits increases, provided that everyone adheres to the same system.
In addition to compounding time-savings, brand consistency across all your proposals, pitches, and project presentations will be a direct result of a common set of templates everybody is building from. Furthermore, inevitable changes to your design can be immediately propagated to everybody.
Building Your Main Templates:
To establish your main templates, you should create 4 presentations:
- Slide Master
- Pitch Deck
- Proposal Kit
- Time Saver
These templates serve as the foundation for various presentation types and form a quick start for marketing presentations and proposals. The ideal starting point is after a few months and several presentations of your company (pitch deck) and potential projects (proposal kit), as you would already have a basic design language (logo, colors, website) to build from. 👉 If starting from scratch, begin by selecting a few templates from sources like graphicriver.net, focusing on overall design alignment with your design language.
1st: Template
Choose 3 to 5 templates with designs matching your brand language.
👉 Focus not so much on the color and the number of slides, but on the overall design, so that it meets your design language.
To get the most out of it, the template should include at least one version of these slides:
- two or three headline + body text slide
- timeline or Gantt chart slide
- product showcase slide
- team slide
- about company slide
- agenda slide
- table and/or number slide
2nd: Slide Master
Create your Slide Master based on earlier presentations or selected templates.
Customize the theme colors to match your design language.
Build the layout of your basic slides. you want to add placeholders instead of the text, only placeholders can be edited outside of the theme.
👉 Make sure to include these layouts:
- blank
- divider with your main color
- blank & footer (company logo and page number)
- headline & footer
- headline & single body & footer
- headline & two bodies & footer
- headline & three bodies & footer
3rd: Pitch Deck
Based on your Slide Master, create necessary default slides for all future presentations, ensuring alignment with your design language.
👉 Take the famous Sequoia Capital Pitch Deck as a structural guide:
4th: Proposal Kit
👉 I recommend including all the slides necessary for the most scaled-down version of a project proposal since this is usually a good guiding structure to build from.
5th: Time Saver
Store all your created presentation as resources for potential future use in an organized way, and if necessary redacted (e.g. clients name and exact numbers). Resources are categorized into Sales, Marketing, and Projects, all following the established slide master.
In addition to these categories, I always use a single presentation called timesaver as a data dump, where I put every new slide layout I think can be useful further down the line. This presentation tends to grow bulky, but it is an enormous time saver.
In summary, the initial time and effort invested in creating a standardized presentation framework will yield significant time savings and ensure consistent branding. By adhering to this common process, everyone in your organization will benefit from a streamlined and efficient presentation creation process.