Build your slide template

The corporate template

If you work at a large enough corporation, your employer may have provided a corporate slide template. There are good reasons for this. Most people aren’t adept at assembling slides, so it helps to codify some default layouts in a template. People often use colours and fonts that may clash with the brand’s aesthetic, and a template can place some guardrails to avoid these errors.

The trouble with standard templates is that everyone uses the defaults. Before you know it, everyone’s slides look the same. People ignore boring things, so there’s value in breaking that monotony.

Now, if you can understand what your marketing colleagues are trying to achieve with their prescribed templates, you can adhere to your corporate brand and assemble slides that look unique. Through the rest of this article, I’ll show you how to build your own template, but you can also use that advice to unpack the key elements of any corporate slide template.

Start with a colour palette

As a self-taught designer, I’ve often struggled with making colours play well with each other. For some people, colour choice is intuitive. When you reuse the same colours in all slides of your presentation, the visuals gain a cohesive identity.

It’s helpful to understand the basics of colour theory, so you know which colour palette might work for your presentation style. The colour wheel is a good starting point. Think of it as an abstract illustration of the colour spectrum that helps you understand which colours work well together.

Figure 2: A basic colour wheel.

When you examine the wheel, you’ll notice that the closer the colours are to the centre, the less intense they are. Colours at the periphery are more saturated. There lies lesson one. If your slide background will be white or light, choose colours that sit at the periphery. If you want your slide background dark, choose colours that sit close to the centre.

Figure 3: Colours at the periphery work well with light slides. Those towards the centre work well with darker backgrounds.

There are many ways to choose colours and build your palette.

Approach	What it is	Colour wheel
Complementary colours	These colours sit on opposite ends of the wheel. Placing them together creates a strong, high-contrast colour scheme.
Analogous colours	These colours sit close to each other on the wheel. When you use them together, you’ll end up with a minimalist, elegant colour scheme.
Evenly-spaced colours	If you choose colours evenly spaced across the colour wheel, you’ll end up with a colourful scheme with reasonable contrast between them. This approach is a variation of the complementary colours approach.
Triads	By choosing shades that form a triangle on the colour wheel, you get a tight variation on the evenly spaced colour scheme approach.
Tetrads	You can extend the concept of triads by drawing a square on the colour wheel and adding another colour to your scheme.
Monochromatic	If you want a super-minimalist approach, choose different shades of the same colour by drawing a straight line on the colour wheel.

Adobe provides you with a free, interactive colour palette generator to play around with the colour wheel and land on a theme you like. You can build your palette from scratch, browse trending palettes, and even generate them from a photograph that represents the content you want to present.

Figure 4: Generating a colour palette from a representative image.

The advantage of working with palettes is that software like PowerPoint lets you swap themes across your entire presentation without updating every diagram. Choose a new theme, and PowerPoint recolours all your diagrams and slides. The interactive demo below shows you how you can swap your colour palettes in PowerPoint.

But here’s a word of caution. Resist the temptation to invent a new colour palette for every presentation. As a corporate presenter, I’ve found it helpful to find or create a palette that I like and then stick with it for months, often years.

If you work for a large corporation, someone else has likely already defined a colour palette. For example, at Thoughtworks, our corporate palette has six colours, plus black and a light grey shade. Since most of these colours are dark, I use them on a light background.

Figure 5: The Thoughtworks colour palette.

Over the years, I’ve built a diagram library that reuses the same colour palette, so if a presentation references one of my core ideas, I incorporate a representative diagram into a Thoughtworks slide deck. It’s the compounding benefit of using the same, boring colour palette.

Figure 6: A reusable diagram library for my book that leverages the Thoughtworks palette.

Novice designers often use too many colours in the quest to build colourful slides. Now that you know a bit about colour theory, you’ll realise that if you pick too many colours from the wheel, you’ll struggle to establish a theme and a visual identity that’s evident across your slides. So, choose a restricted colour palette instead. Limit yourself to six colours, then add black and white to the palette. Less is more. As a bonus, consider all shades of grey as free additions.

Next, pick the fonts you’ll use

As presenters, we needn’t be experts in the dark art of typography. Most presentations need only two or three fonts. Sometimes, one font face is plenty. Consistency beats variety.

But here are the basics. There are two types of fonts, each with its own merits — serif and sans-serif. Serif fonts have little feet, i.e. the serifs. Sans-serif fonts literally lack serifs. The image below shows the difference.

Figure 7: Serif fonts have little feet and extensions. Sans-serif fonts don’t have them.

If you’re reading this article on martinfowler.com, you’ll notice the website’s serif typeface. And that’s a great use of serif fonts. They’re more suited to reading and paragraph text. This is also why newspapers still use serif fonts.

Sans-serif fonts, on the other hand, suit billboards and signage better. When you drive around your town, look at the fonts on large advertisements. It’s likely they employ sans-serif fonts. Presentation slides are more like billboards than magazine pages.

So, if you had to default to one kind of typeface for your presentations, I’d recommend picking a sans-serif font. They work well for online presentations, where the resolution is often a maximum of 1080p or 720p, and just as well for keynotes in large auditoriums with state-of-the-art projectors.

However, there’s no harm in mixing and matching fonts. You could use a serif font for titles and a sans-serif font for the rest of the text. The key is to stay consistent and avoid what Neal Ford calls the “fontaholic” antipattern.

A Fontaholic is someone who believes using a cacophony of fonts will “jazz up” a presentation. Disharmonic fonts are jarring. They make presentations gruesome and more difficult to read.

Here’s an example of a slide that uses a serif font for the title and a sans-serif font for everything else.

Figure 8: Mixing and matching serif and sans-serif fonts.

Limiting the number of fonts in your presentation shouldn’t limit your creativity. Modern, variable-weight fonts allow you many variations for the same typeface.

Figure 9: Variable-weight fonts offer you a lot of versatility.

Aside from serif and sans-serif fonts, I’ll advocate for two more font types.

Handwritten fonts

I suggest using these fonts only for annotations. They’re excellent at breaking the pattern and monotony of your standard fonts, and that’s handy when you want to draw your audience’s attention to a specific part of your presentation. For example, in the slide below, the red, handwritten font appears after each part of the diagram builds, drawing the audience’s attention to the compounding benefits of the AI flywheel.

Figure 10: You can use a handwritten font for annotations and break the visual monotony.

Monospace fonts

If you’re a developer and you often show code snippets in presentations, I suggest adding a monospace font to your repertoire. In code, spacing is part of the meaning. A monospace font gives every character equal width and helps you maintain indentation, columns, and structure. Your code is easier to scan and far easier to explain on a slide. Here’s an example from Phillip Schmid’s presentation at the AI Engineer conference, where he explains how to invoke Antigravity as a remote agent.

Figure 11: Using monospace fonts to show code (credit: Phillip Schmid).

Even non-technical presenters can use monospace fonts to explain some concepts. For example, when explaining Slack channel naming conventions, I use the following slide.

Figure 12: Even non-technical presenters can leverage monospace fonts.

For those of you who are curious, here are some of my favourite fonts.

Font choice aside, pay attention to how you use fonts. Sometimes fonts don’t work well out of the box. To make them look right, you may have to adjust kerning (a.k.a. character spacing) and leading (a.k.a. line spacing).

In the example below, notice the extra gaps between the letters A and V, V and A and T and A. Now drag the slider to see how I’ve adjusted the kerning between the letters, so the characters have an even distance between them.

When you’re showing quotes in a presentation, you’ll often run into issues with leading. In the example below, you’ll notice that the gap between each line is too wide. When you drag the slider, you’ll see how a leading adjustment brings the lines together and makes the quote look cohesive.

If you understand these fundamentals of font choice and typographic spacing, you have enough typography knowledge to build a slide template. All that remains is your slide layouts.

No layout is the best layout

I’ve struggled to adopt slide layouts and failed. In the last decade or so, I’ve found myself rejecting cookie-cutter layouts and starting with a blank slide each time. I follow some slide construction principles, which I’ll show you in a future article, but my template itself is quite simple. When you see my slides, you’ll notice why it’s difficult for me to follow the standard layouts that come with slide templates.

Figure 13: I find it difficult to adapt my design approach to standard slide layouts.

So, I’ve deleted all prescribed layouts that come with our corporate template. My template has three layouts, and I use the blank slide almost all the time. I’ve set up the Thoughtworks corporate palette on my system, so I can choose the colours when I need them for diagrams. I’ve also set up a few font styles based on a serif-and-sans-serif font combination. I use handwritten fonts and monospace fonts on a case-by-case basis, so you won’t see font styles for them. The interaction below will show you different components of my standard presentation theme.

You’ll notice that my template is uncomplicated, and that simplicity lends me a lot of flexibility and power when constructing slides. My slides don’t have page numbers, copyright notices, or even company logos, except on the title slides. Slides are not documents, so slide numbers are irrelevant to my presentations. I don’t want to sue anyone for copying my slides, so I usually leave out the copyright notice. And I want to introduce myself and my employer once at the start and leave it there. From that point on, the logo is an avoidable visual distraction. Taking away these floodmarks (credit: Neal Ford) affords me the luxury of designing an empty slide.

A note about conferences

At conferences, people often photograph your slides. You could add a copyright notice to each slide, but people can remove these floodmarks using phone-based editing apps. I’m not fussed if they reuse the content or design, or if they attribute it to me. So, in the spirit of minimalism, I don’t add a copyright notice. I do announce at the start of the talk that I’ll share a whole bunch of leave-behinds. When I’m taking questions at the end of a talk, I throw up a slide with QR codes (example below), so people who need related resources can access them.

Figure 14: Use QR codes to share resources with your audience.

If you’re concerned about copyright, you can provide a set of watermarked slides through your QR codes. Your slides will be useless without you, but those who want to reference them can have them. The watermarked download will obviate the need for floodmarks on your slides. Win!