Pitch Deck Presentation Design: how to create a pitch deck that stands out
Hi! I’m Vini and I’m the CDO of Slidebean. In this article I’m gonna give you a behind the scenes look, on how we pitch deck presentation design process.
Pitch deck presentation design: Mint Pitch Deck
To show you our process, we’ll be using the slides of a company called Mint. If you’re not familiar with Mint, it is a web service that lets people manage their own personal finance. It syncs the financial data of all your bank accounts; and provides information on your monthly spend, your due payments, your credit score and so on. Super recommended if you wanna to give it a try!
Mint went from being a regular startup in 2007, to being acquired by Intuit just two years later for $170 million dollars. So they know a thing or two about pitching.
Let’s jump into the slides redesign
So the first thing I do is, I take a general view of the presentation. I scroll through the slides and get a quick sense of what the company does; what’s their value proposition what are they trying to communicate here. The most critical thing, when I’m doing a pitch deck presentation design, is that I need to understand the content first. Otherwise it takes me twice as long to make changes to it.
I already knew Mint, but I need to judge this as if I know absolutely nothing about this company. I noticed, for instance, that this pitch deck doesn’t have a “problem slide”. What the heck people?! I took the liberty of adding one, and I think it flows so much better. If I had to mention the one problem about presentations, in general, it’s not even how they look, but what content they have. Lack of information or the excess of information can make or break a presentation. So, lesson number one: you cannot make a slide pretty unless the content is relevant, short, and easy to understand.
“You cannot make a slide pretty unless the content is relevant, short, and easy to understand.”
Make a change of the changes you want
The second thing that I do is that I do a rundown on all the slides, and I write down a list of all the changes that I want to do on every single slide. It’s not super detailed, but it gives me a sense of how much work the presentation will require, and what slides are gonna be trickier than others.
For instance, on Mint’s pitch deck, creating the list can look something like this:
The Cover
The original cover looked awful! I need to change it altogether, throw in a cool image and update the logo to the newest version. This slide needs to be super catchy in order to engage your audience early on, so I like to go the extra mile here, using the most engaging visuals the client or company can give me. For this video, I cheated a little bit, and used Mint’s current website to gather some cool assets.
Related Article: Pitch Deck Examples
Product Slide
I know slide 2 is really outdated and I should probably replace it with a product mockup that can make the slide stand out. Btw, product mockups are a great way to showcase your product or service and you can do them on a bunch of different tools. I love Place it because it lets you create one by simply uploading an image, and it literally places it on a number of devices and even on different perspectives. Insane
Team Slide
On the team slide, I instantly feel like I need to change the layout so it doesn’t look like a freaking Word document. And, I need to add photos of the team members to make this a little more interesting. Literally, put a face on the people that are working on this thing.
The Market Slide
The Market slide is loaded with information, so the first thing to do here is to reduce the amount of info. The second thing that I would like to do is add some visuals in order to make this a little nicer.
The Busines Model
The Business model is a case of what I like to call an unnecessary use of graphics. This diagram barely helps explain this information, and it hardly provides any hierarchy, so it just adds noise. It needs to go! I know this is a critical part of the pitch deck so I like to dedicate some extra luv to it.
The Financial Slide
The financials slide on the original pitch deck is a complete disaster. It’s messy, overcrowded, unreadable and absolutely hideous! So I know I’m gonna have to dedicate some time in understanding this information, and finding a way to keep only the most relevant stuff.
This I keep on doing until I have a list that looks like this:
After I have my list, I begin editing the presentation hands-on. This is a process that I enjoy a lot, because every deck represents a different challenge and it’s very rewarding to see a presentation slowly improving.
How to design your presentation
I usually begin by changing the presentation defaults, and crafting a custom look for my deck. We have all seen thousands of presentations that are literally a white PowerPoint with black Calibri fonts, and that’s just a sad sight. It makes you look like you did your presentation in a hurry. So, avoid this situation at all costs. We have some cool articles about how to avoid these rookie mistakes: Presentation Design Inspiration
Create a Custom theme
Anyway, I create a custom theme with the brand that I’m working with, just to make sure I have a consistent look through the pitch deck. This theme helps me keep the presentation attractive while and it saves me time and effort on having to decide what colors to use on every single slide.
I then dig deeper into each slide. I move stuff around. Rearrange the content blocks. I try different layout combinations to see what works best. I increase the text size in some paragraphs, and reduce it on others. I play with different effects and shapes.
Experiment with Backgrounds
I like to play around with the backgrounds too. I think this is one of the easiest ways of making your presentations more dynamic and interesting. Using images as backgrounds is a great way to make a slide look super cool, obviously making sure you have enough contrast so that the information is still readable.
This is a process that after redesigning hundreds of presentations comes very naturally to me, but it can take a couple of hours, depending on the length of the presentation. Slidebean is a huge help though, because many of the decisions that I would normally do as a designer, Slidebean does them for me.
After I’m done with all this, I do a new revision of all my redesigned slides, and I see if anything needs a little more work. If I’m satisfied, it is a wrap, and we proceed to ship it to our presentation redesign service’s clients. Although, since this wasn’t a client request, we might turn the updated version into one of our pitch deck templates instead.
This is the first article on this redesigns tips. Please let me know what you guys think, and if there are any pitch decks you would like us to tear down and redesign, let me know!
