Slidegenius, Inc.

4 Factors for Creating Info-Heavy Pitch Deck Slide Designs

Making arguments without providing evidence to back up your stand is a bad move in pitches. It is useless, however, to bombard your slides with unnecessary information. Designing your deck haphazardly only muddles the information-sharing process and confuses your audience.

To improve your deck for your next pitch, here are four important things to keep in mind when creating info-heavy pitch deck slide designs:

Accuracy

Facts, data, and other information presented in your slides should be correct, current, and relevant. When citing from the internet, make sure to properly fact-check and source your information. Avoid directly citing Wikipedia. Follow the citations if you want to refer to something you find interesting in wikis. Maintaining accuracy is important not only for the sake of your slides, but for your credibility as well.

You want to present data to inform and convince—not to misinform and deceive.

Clarity

It’s not enough to have accurate information. Your content should be displayed in a clear and organized manner that makes all the facts and numbers easier to understand. Cut down all the content to the bare minimum that you need to get your point across. Reducing them to the most pertinent and logical manner allows for easier transfer of information.

According to presentation trainer, Nancy Duarte, there are a number of ways to arrange your slides so they pass the glance test, or the audience’s first scan through your deck. Among these are keeping your layout simple, maximizing white space, using proper fonts, and emphasizing the important points structure your deck into something that’s easily digestible.

Meaningful

Correct and well-ordered figures aren’t enough. An important key is to inject some significance that relates to your audience. To best connect with your audience, it’s vital to do some advanced research and determine their interests, needs, and concerns. Knowing these will assist you in adjusting to optimize your pitch deck to their needs.

Presenting your slides as a story or in a narrative structure best engages your listeners. This is due to how we’ve come to recall memories and enjoy our entertainment: as a series of episodes with a chronological structure and thematic background.

Memorable

The best pitch decks are those that remain with the audience. Executing a memorable pitch requires getting on your listeners’ good will. It’s important to improve your credibility by looking enthusiastic, genuine, and creative.

Effectively communicating your own excitement regarding your topic also adds to your power to persuade. This assures your listeners that your topic is worth their time. Inserting a slice of yourself through a personal anecdote also increases your audience’s perception of you as a genuine person.

Lastly, a creative approach using a funny or poignant beginning and/or ending, or through a unique execution of your pitch, also makes your slides more memorable.

Conclusion

Being new at presenting or not having enough time is never an excuse to show up with lazily-made slides.

Always design your pitch deck slides like a professional to get the best out of your message, and maximize the impact on your audience.

References

3 Secrets to Make Numbers Interesting in Sales Presentations.” pitchdeck.com. May 13, 2015. Accessed August 20, 2015.
Duarte, Nancy. “Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test?Harvard Business Review. October 22, 2012. Accessed August 20, 2015.
Five Ways to Transform Your Overloaded Text Slides.Think Outside The Slide. September 14, 2012. Accessed August 20, 2015.

Designing a ‘How It Works’ Slide That Works

Do you find it difficult to explain to someone how a product, service, or process works? If your business involves selling new products or you’re constantly introducing new service features, then you’ll need an easy way to explain things. This is where the “How It Works” slides come in.

Explaining how certain things work is one of the most common uses of pitch deck slides. Done right, a “how it works” pitch deck can be effective for product demos, process flow illustrations, or pitching a business idea. To help you get started out, here are some ways you can make this type of slide work:

Lay it out

Pitch deck has several types of slide layouts. The default type comes with two boxes: The text box at the top, which is for the title of the slide, and the middle box, which is a multipurpose placeholder for text, graphics, or any content types.

For this purpose, however, you may choose the blank layout type and then simply insert the content that you need. Or better yet, as with the above slide, choose the Title Only template before putting all the other elements. To enhance the effect of your slide, feel free to choose from the Shapes and SmartArt Graphics.

Be consistent with colors

This one is pretty basic although there are still those who take it for granted. Buffer‘s Leonhard Widrich writes about how color schemes can affect our perception of a brand. The more recognizable colors have effectively been associated with specific brands, while those that were more difficult to point out didn’t have such a good color combination.

Similarly, pitch deck slides should have similar color schemes as they can affect the overall impact of your message.

Using varying combinations for different slides can confuse your audience. So for best results, make the color scheme of your How It Works slide consistent with the rest of your deck. This also applies to the slide itself. Looking at the above sample, you’ll notice that the color of the iVoteLIVE logo is consistent with that of the template. Apart from that, most of the imagery (i.e., photos and graphics) have similar shades of colors. This makes the slide pleasant to look at.

Take it easy with texts

This is another common concern and when it comes to How It Works slides, we can’t stress enough its importance. The purpose of slides is to describe visually something you can’t explain verbally. Why spend 15 minutes explaining a new feature, when a couple of images will take you just a few seconds, right?

If you’re going to include some texts, make sure not to mix up the fonts and font sizes just for the heck of it. Otherwise, your slide will appear visually confusing. Take a look at the sample again. While the format of the texts describing the consumers is different from the texts indicating the features (iVoteLive computer interface, Live Program Broadcasts), they still work because each group has specific purpose.

In short, they are not randomly mixed up.

The Takeaway: Engage with imagery

In general, images can make it easier for people to understand and remember ideas. So use relevant imagery instead of text in parts where you think a visual element would work better. When using images, though, be sure that they are of appropriate quality.

For scanned images, the ideal resolution is between 150 dpi (when precise color reproduction is not required) and 300 dpi (if you need higher quality images).

As much as possible, do not take images from the Internet as they usually of a very low quality and might pixelate when projected on a screen.

Reference

Widrich, Leonhard. “Why Is Facebook Blue? The Science of Colors in Marketing.” The Huffington Post. January 16, 2014. Accessed May 20, 2014.

How Much Should a Pitch Deck Cost?

“How much does it cost to hire a graphic designer to create a pitch deck presentation for me?”

This is a common question we often get right off the bat from potential clients looking for a pitch deck specialist, but it’s not a simple question to answer.  First, we need to know about your business needs, your resources, and your goals. Are you a small startup or a Fortune 500?  Basically, it’s a very personalized process, and there’s no blanket answer for it.

It’s a lot like asking, “how much does it cost for you to make me a website?”

How much does a pitch deck cost?
Pitch Deck Designer Cost

There are a myriad of factors that go into the cost:

How big of a business are you?

How high-end do you want your website to be?

Do you already have a website to use as a foundation?

What kind of functionality do you want the website to have?

Just like web design, there are quite a few factors that we custom tailor to the needs of each client when landing on the price for their deck. That means what your pitch deck costs can be a little… or a lot.

The Low End Pitch Deck ($1,000 to $3,000)

Prices in this range fall into two categories, returning clients looking to improve a deck they’ve already had designed, and they’d like to perform relatively minor improvements to it.  A complete overhaul of a pitch deck requires much more time and effort.

The other group that falls into this category are those looking for a new, custom-designed deck, but are only willing to pay the bare-bones price for it, which we highly discourage.  Having a solid visual aid is the second most important part of a pitch deck.  The first is showing up.  You don’t want to skimp on your pitch deck presentation, because that’s sure to leave a bad taste in the mouths of potential clients or investors.

Remember, a professional pitch deck presentation is an investment.  An investment that will surely produce an ROI and help impress and attract new clients, which is the opposite effect that a mediocre pitch deck will have.  A bad impression is worse than no impression at all.

Mid-range Pitch Deck Design ($3,000 to $10,000)

Most of our clients fall into this range. This involves either significantly revamping a previous pitch deck, or doing a new pitch deck involving a significant amount of animation and custom graphic design.

How much does a ppt deck cost?
Pitch Deck Cost

The wide amount of variation in this range depends largely on the quantity of slides in your deck and the amount of graphic design and animation needed on each slide. Again, costs here can be greatly leveraged depending on how much copywriting, design, and multimedia is being brought to the table by the client.

The Upper End Pitch Deck Services ($10,000 to $50,000)

If you’re a young startup looking to breaking in to a competitive, high-end market and you don’t have much to show for yourself concerning branding or multimedia, we can do it all for you, but it will be a significant cost. Building a public, corporate identity through a pitch deck is a huge task, so it’s best to do it right the first time.

This range also includes multi-deck projects and large decks nearing the triple-digit slide count.  Also in this range are the custom-designed slide libraries, which are essentially an interchangeable database of slides that can be catered to the individual needs of sales teams with in larger companies, while maintaining a consistent set of slides controlled by management.

We’ve found the most satisfied clients are the ones who view presentation and pitch deck design as an evolving, ongoing relationship.  While a small startup may initially only have the resources for a fairly basic pitch deck, they are able to continue working with us, and improve the professionalism, appeal, and selling power of their pitch deck as their business expands, and they have more to invest in a pitch deck’s power to attract new clients.

This allows the client to not only spend just the resources they have available, they’re able to constantly pinpoint and customize exactly what they want out of a pitch deck, and consequently, as pitch deck designers, we’re able to figure out over time exactly what optimizes your business from a pitch deck point of view.  We work best when our process and your business grow alongside one another.