How to brand a presentation

To brand a presentation, set four things once at the level of the whole deck and do not touch them slide by slide: a logo in one fixed position, a theme that matches your brand colours, one typeface, and one consistent style of imagery. Then decide which slides should carry the logo, give each brand colour a single job, and leave charts, dividers and customer facing covers deliberately quiet. A deck looks branded because nothing in it is inconsistent, not because the brand appears everywhere.

The principle is the one behind a slide master. Microsoft’s help for PowerPoint describes it as the place where you set fonts and images such as logos once, so they apply to every slide, and recommends doing it before building individual slides. Every presentation tool has some version of that idea, and the checklist in the table under this article follows it.

Brand the deck once, not every slide

Branding slide by slide produces drift. Slide four gets a slightly different blue, slide nine has the logo a little lower, and by slide fifteen the deck looks assembled from three sources.

Set the brand at the deck level instead, before the content. What a slide master is explains the mechanism if it is new to you. In practice there are three deck level settings that matter: the theme, the typeface and the logo. Everything else should inherit from them.

The brand presentation is a useful model even though it is about a brand rather than branded for one. It is an eleven slide board paper for a fictional cider maker, and its argument is that the identity is a system of rules rather than a set of swatches. The same thinking works for a deck.

Logo: where and how often

Put the logo in one corner, at one size, and decide whether it belongs on the cover only or on every slide.

The rule for scope is about who is holding the deck. A deck you present live needs the logo once; after the cover the audience knows who you are. A deck that travels without you, as an attachment, a link or a forwarded page, benefits from a logo on every slide, because any single slide may be seen alone.

Keep the mark small and away from the content. A logo that competes with the headline has stopped branding and started decorating. If the logo is light and some slides carry photographs, add a soft shadow only for those, so the edge does not disappear into the image.

Prepare the file before you start. A logo exported as a PNG with a transparent background sits cleanly on any theme, while a JPEG brings its white box with it onto every dark slide. Keep a horizontal and a stacked version if the brand has both, because a wide mark in a narrow corner shrinks until it is unreadable. If the brand is really a name rather than a symbol, a typed wordmark is often cleaner than a small image, and it never looks blurry on a large screen.

Check the logo on the busiest slide in the deck, not the cover. The cover has space; a dense comparison or timeline slide is where a mark collides with content.

Colours: pick the closest theme and give each colour a job

Start from a theme that is close to your brand palette rather than recolouring elements one at a time. Google’s help for Slides defines a theme as a preset group of colours, fonts, background and layouts, which is exactly the set you want to change in one step.

Then give each colour a job. The brand presentation’s palette slide does this in three lines: one saturated red used only for the valley name, a warm paper white that is the object rather than a background, and a near black brown for all type, never pure black. A colour with one job is a signal the audience learns; a colour used everywhere is just a colour.

Check contrast on the colour you plan to use for text. The WCAG 2.2 minimum is a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, which it defines as 18 point, or 14 point bold. Many brand colours fail as body text and work perfectly as an accent.

Fonts: one family for the whole deck

Use one typeface family and let size and weight create the hierarchy. Two families that are almost the same look like an error; one family at three weights looks designed.

If the brand typeface is not available, pick the closest shape and apply it to the whole deck. If the brand name itself must be in the brand typeface, use the logo as an image rather than typing the name in a lookalike.

Resist setting sizes by eye. A deck that uses the same few size steps for titles, body and captions reads as one document even when its layouts vary.

Imagery and voice

Consistent imagery does more for a brand than a logo in the corner. Choose one photographic style, whether that is natural light, a particular crop or objects rather than people, and keep to it. The brand presentation’s gallery slide shows the identity on a bottle, a taproom, a van and a shelf, not on a white page, because that is where a system either holds or does not.

Voice is the part most decks forget. The same example writes voice as ten concrete lines: five sentences the brand says, such as “Pressed in October. Ready in March.”, and five it never says, including any tasting note. Adjectives cannot be checked in a review; specific sentences can.

The company profile presentation applies the same idea to values, writing them as four rules with the cost of keeping each one, rather than as words like integrity and excellence.

What not to brand

Some slides should carry less brand, not more.

• Charts. One series in the brand colour and the rest muted, so the colour points at the finding. The method is in how to present data in slides.
• Customer decks. The customer QBR deck opens on a plain cover naming both companies and the date, because the deck belongs to the customer’s meeting.
• Dividers. A divider’s job is to mark a change of section. A large number and a short title do that better than a logo.
• Every corner. A logo, a footer mark, a watermark and a coloured band on one slide is four brand signals too many.

Common mistakes

• Stretching the logo to fit a space instead of choosing a size and leaving room around it.
• Recolouring individual elements until nothing matches the theme.
• Mixing typefaces because a template came with a different one.
• Pure black text on a warm brand background, which looks harsher than a near black.
• Brand colours as body text without checking the contrast ratio.

Build it

In the slide builder, the brand settings take a logo, a text wordmark or both, arranged horizontally or vertically, with width from 80 to 700 pixels and height from 32 to 260 on a 1920 pixel wide canvas. The mark sits top right, has a shadow toggle for photographs, and its scope is either the first slide or all slides. The logo on slides page covers it in detail.

The theme panel offers 99 themes, the fonts tab sets one of 27 families or the theme default for the whole deck, and each slide can switch between four colour modes: spectrum, matching, outline solid and dark. The guide to changing your presentation’s theme, fonts and colours walks through all three.