What is a read deck?

A document in slide form

A read deck borrows what slides do well, a clear unit per page, strong headlines, charts and tables placed prominently, and adds what presentations normally leave to the speaker: explanation. Nancy Duarte's Slidedocs describes the format as a visual document, developed in presentation software, that is intended to be read and referenced instead of projected, combining visual communication with short chunks of written copy. The key word is intended. A read deck is designed for reading from the start, not a presented deck with notes pasted onto the slides afterwards.

Where the idea comes from

The read deck grew out of consulting and banking, where reports are delivered as landscape slide documents that clients read at their desks. The informal word slideument is usually used as a criticism of decks that try to be slides and documents at once and do neither well. Edward Tufte's essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint argued that slideware templates can weaken analytical reasoning. Duarte's slidedoc work took the opposite position: accept that many decks are read, and design them properly for reading, with enough text to carry the argument and layouts built for a closer viewing distance.

How to design one

Give every slide a headline that states its conclusion, since the headlines together should summarise the document. Use more, smaller text than a projected slide, set for a laptop screen or a printed page. Place explanatory copy right beside the visual it explains, not in a separate bullet list. Number pages and include a contents slide if the deck is long. Put sources and definitions where a careful reader will look for them, such as footnotes or an appendix. And keep one idea per slide in the sense of one main message, even when several supporting points sit beneath it.

Common mistakes

The first is presenting a read deck to a room, which forces the audience to read dense slides while ignoring the speaker. Kevin Hale's advice for Y Combinator demo day warns against exactly this, calling a slide heavy talk a visual essay and asking founders not to make one. The second is the reverse, sending a sparse presented deck to be read. The third is paragraphs so long the slide becomes a page of a memo with a coloured bar on top. The fourth is breaking a subtle argument into fragments across slides when a two page memo would carry the reasoning better.

When a memo beats a deck

Some decisions are better served by prose. Reasoning with several conditions, trade offs that depend on each other, or a recommendation that needs its caveats stated precisely all read more clearly in paragraphs. Many organisations use both: a short memo for the argument, with a read deck or appendix of charts and tables as supporting evidence. The test is whether the reader needs to follow a chain of reasoning or scan a structured set of findings. A board deciding whether to close a site needs the reasoning; the same board reviewing quarterly performance needs the findings. Choosing the format per decision, rather than defaulting to slides for everything, is often the single biggest improvement an organisation can make to its internal documents, and it costs nothing but the habit of asking.

Where it shows up in the product

A read deck built here usually travels by link or PDF. The share link opens a read only viewer that advances with clicks or arrow keys and always shows the last saved version. The PDF export is free and places each slide as an image, which preserves the design exactly, but its text cannot be selected, searched or read by a screen reader, which matters more for a read deck than for a projected one; the editable PowerPoint export, on a paid plan, rebuilds text as real text. The Series A example on this site is built to be read as often as presented, with a report style cover and a closing slide of five summary points.

Questions people ask