Lastly, it's helpful to cover some short and sweet recommendations for you to consider when building your deck:
Do NOT overload your deck with text
- Remember that your deck is there to accentuate the words you’re speaking, not replace them
- Unless your deck is specifically designed as a leave-behind, limit paragraphs to just short bits of text/sentences
- If it would take you longer than a few seconds to read a slide that’s a good indication you may lose your audience
Make sure the size of your fonts (and the fonts themselves) are legible
- Remember that your text should be readable whether it’s on someones personal computer or being viewed on a projector from the back of a board room
Know how long you have to pitch and plan accordingly
- Too often you’ll have a deck that 20+ slides long with an appendix that stretches even further
- Optimize how many slides you can realistically present in the time you have
- Know the 5-8 slides you must present and move around the rest according to time
Make sure everyone in your organization who is editing your deck has the same fonts
- It can get messy if only one person has the correct fonts for the deck and the design suffers because your presentation program defaults to something else. This breaks consistency and looks amateurish.
- A good way to avoid this is to have your fonts as well as all other brand assets on a shared cloud server or folder.
In conclusion, I hope this information helps guide you towards making a more effective pitch deck that puts you in the best position when presenting to investors and clients alike.