Presentation design tips: type, contrast, charts, masters and rights for a business deck

One idea per slide is a rule you can test

Presentation design tips tend to sound like taste, so start with the ones you can test. A slide holds one idea if you can say it in a single sentence without the word and. If you need and, you have two slides. The test works in the planning stage, before any colour is chosen, and it forces the content to be clear before it is made pretty.

A deck built this way is longer in slides and shorter in words, and that is the right trade. The audience reads a slide in seconds, then looks at you, and the slide should have given them a reason to listen. When a slide carries five points, they read all five, stop listening and remember none. When it carries one, the speaker can add the other four in speech.

Write each headline as a conclusion

A label such as Market or Results tells the viewer where they are. A conclusion such as Orders from repeat customers grew every quarter tells them what to believe. Put the conclusion in the title and use the rest of the slide as evidence for it. A person who reads only the titles should be able to follow the whole argument.

This also has an accessibility benefit. Microsoft’s guidance on making PowerPoint presentations accessible says one simple step is a unique, descriptive title on each slide, even if it is not visible. A unique title lets a viewer who cannot see the slide, or anyone scanning the outline, tell one slide from another. Duplicate titles such as Overview, repeated six times, help nobody, and they usually signal that the slide has no conclusion yet.

Type size and fonts, as Microsoft recommends them

The same Microsoft page gives concrete figures. It recommends a font size of 18 pt or larger, sans serif fonts, and sufficient white space, naming Arial and Calibri as familiar examples. It advises against all capital letters and excessive italics or underlines, and it recommends aligning paragraphs to the left.

These are guidelines for accessibility, but they also fit a meeting room. A slide that cannot be read from the back row is a handout, not a slide. If the text will not fit at 18 pt, the answer is to cut text or move to a second slide, not to shrink the type. Two fonts are enough: one for titles and one for body text. Leave generous margins and let the empty space separate one block from another, instead of drawing lines and boxes around everything.

Contrast: the 4.5 to 1 and 3 to 1 yardsticks

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Success Criterion 1.4.3 at level AA, require a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for text and images of text, and at least 3 to 1 for large-scale text. They were written for the web, but they are the clearest published yardstick for light grey text on white, or pale blue on a photograph. Free contrast checkers compute the ratio from two colours.

Microsoft’s guidance adds two cautions. Do not rely on colour alone to carry meaning, for example by marking a link or a warning with colour only, and add an underline to colour-coded links. And remember that an automatic checker can miss contrast problems, such as text in a transparent text box placed over a picture, so look at the real slide on a real screen.

Charts and tables that state their takeaway

A chart earns its place when the viewer can see the conclusion in three seconds. Name the takeaway in the slide title, remove everything that does not support it, and mark the one bar or line that matters. A chart with ten series and a legend is a report page, and it belongs in the send-ahead version. On the presented slide, show the two or three series the argument needs and label them directly on the chart.

For tables, Microsoft’s guidance says to avoid them where possible and present the data another way, and to keep the structure simple with column headers if you must. The same page asks for alt text on visuals: a short sentence or two describing the content and purpose, not beginning with an image of. If text appears inside an image, repeat it on the slide, because a picture of text cannot be read aloud as text.

A master slide or theme keeps a deck consistent

Consistency is the cheapest way to look professional, and it comes from a single place. Google’s Slides help defines a theme as a preset group of colours, fonts, background and layouts. A change made with the Add to theme option applies a colour to the entire presentation, and the Edit theme colours option changes the colours that make up the theme.

Microsoft gives the other half of the advice. Use the built-in slide layouts, which are designed so that the reading order is the same for screen reader users and for sighted viewers, and use an accessible template for consistent colours, contrast and fonts. Do not draw a text box in the middle of a blank slide. Pick the layout, type into its placeholder, and the title, order and alignment follow.

For a team, this matters more than any single slide. When the master carries the logo, the fonts and the colour palette, a new colleague can build a correct deck in an afternoon. When it does not, every deck is a one-off, and the cost of fixing them returns every quarter.

Image rights, speaker notes and the version you send ahead

A picture found online is not free to use. Creative Commons describes its licences as a standardised way to give permission in advance, and every one of them includes BY, which means credit must be given to the creator. The NC element permits only noncommercial use, and a sales deck is a commercial use. The ND element bars adaptations, so a cropped or recoloured copy may not be allowed. Read the licence of each image you keep.

Slides to be presented and slides to be read are two documents. The presented deck is sparse, with the argument in the speaker’s voice. The send-ahead version has the notes written out as short text and the dense chart restored, because nobody is there to explain it. Make the second from the first, and name the links in it by the page they lead to, as Microsoft advises, instead of writing click here.

Keep a short list of sources on the final slide of the send-ahead version. A claim with a named source, a date and a link is read differently from a claim without one, and the list shows the reader which figures you checked yourself.

A pre-send checklist and what to prepare for a studio

Before you send a deck, check ten things: one idea per slide, conclusions as titles, unique titles, text of at least 18 pt, contrast above the ratios, alt text on pictures, links named by their destination, image licences recorded, a reading order that matches the slide, and a file that opens on another computer. Print one slide at the size of a postcard; if you cannot read it, your audience cannot either.

If the deck matters more than the time you have to build it, Presentation design at VITON13 Studio gives you a sales narrative, a proof hierarchy and an editable master your team reuses. It costs from $53 AI-assisted or $73 human-led, with a turnaround of 2–4 working days. Bring your current slides, your proof, the audience and the meeting date, and the estimate follows from them.