A pitch deck is an argument told in order, to a person who has little time and many other decks. Design helps by making the order clear and the points easy to remember. It cannot repair a story that is not yet settled. The best use of a designer starts with a brief that settles the story, the audience and the ask.
Settle these before you brief
- Who is the deck for? An investor, a client, a partner, a lender and a hiring candidate want different things. One deck for all of them usually serves none.
- How will it be used? Presented in a room, read on a phone after a message, or sent as a file with no one to explain it. A deck that is read alone needs more words on the page than one you talk through.
- What is the one decision you want from the reader? A meeting, a trial, a yes, an introduction. Everything in the deck should lead there.
- What is the one idea they must remember? If it takes a paragraph to say, the deck is not ready.
A structure that usually works
The exact order depends on the audience, but most decks answer the same questions in much the same sequence. Start with who you are and the problem you solve, in one clear slide. Show what you offer and who it is for. Show proof you can stand behind. Show how it makes money or how the work is delivered. Say what you are asking for and what happens next. Keep each slide to one point. If a slide needs a paragraph of explanation, it is two slides.
What to cut
- Anything the audience already knows. Do not explain the market to people who work in it.
- Claims you cannot support. If you cannot show where a number comes from, leave it out or say it is an estimate.
- Logos and names you do not have permission to show.
- Decoration. Stock photographs of handshakes, globes and arrows add length, not meaning.
- Slides kept 'just in case'. Put them in a separate appendix.
What to hand the designer
- The story in your own words, as plain text slide by slide, even if it is rough.
- The brand files: logo in vector form, colours, fonts. If you do not have them, say so, because the deck may need them made first. See logo files every business should own.
- Real images you are allowed to use: product, team, premises, work. Say which are final and which are placeholders.
- The facts and figures, with where each came from.
- Three decks you admire and one you do not, and why. This tells the designer more than adjectives.
- The date and how the deck will be shared: file size limits, whether it must open on a phone, whether it is printed.
How the work usually runs
Expect a short conversation about the story, a rough outline of slide order, a design direction on two or three slides, and then the full deck. Give feedback in one round, in one place, from one person, because contradictory notes from several people are the most common reason a deck takes longer than it should. Ask for editable files and a PDF, and for the fonts or a note of which ones were used, so you can fix a typo yourself later.
Be clear on what is included before you start: the number of slides, the rounds of feedback and who owns the files at the end. Our design brief template covers these in six short sections, and the timeline estimator gives a realistic sense of how long creative work takes.
When the deck is also the brand
A deck often reveals gaps in the brand: no clear logo files, no agreed colours, no single description of what you do. It is cheaper to fix those once than to work around them in every deck. If that sounds familiar, the brand health check shows where the gaps are, and the brand audit checklist walks through them. If you would like us to design the deck, send a short brief with the audience, the ask and the date.
