5 Steps to Design a Killer Pitch Deck

Creating a killer pitch deck to win investors over can take time. You need to decide on the structure of the content, design the pitch deck and finally work on delivering the pitch.

According to a study by DocSend, investors only spend an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds looking at pitch decks.

It’s essential to win investors over at first glance and here’s a quick 5 steps guide to design a killer pitch deck (no design skills required).

 

1. Pick the Right Fonts

If your startup has a branding guideline, stick to those chosen font

If your startup has a branding guideline, stick to those chosen fonts. Otherwise, choose one serif (those with decorative tips) and one sans-serif font(those without) for readability. Typically, serif fonts for the headlines, and sans-serif fonts are used for the body text.

Pick fonts from Google Fonts, or you can stick to commonly used Sans Serif fonts such as Open Sans, Helvetica and Avenir. For Serif fonts, you can use Droid Serif, Minion or Garamond. After you’ve picked two fonts, stick to them, and vary the style and size.

 

2. Choose Colors that Represent Your Brand

It’s best to use your current company colors for your killer pitch deck. When in doubt, you could use blue, which creates a sense of trust and warmth. It’s in fact the most popular color on the internet. 

Choose 2 primary colors and one accent color, use them in the ratio – 60%, 30% and 10%. We like to use Paletton and Adobe Color to pick the colors. You can also combine it with black or white for the text.

It’s also important to pick the right shade, you might want to increase the brightness and saturation if you want to convey a more energetic image. Conversely, you’d want the shade of the colour to be less bright and desaturated, if you want to convey a more serious image.

 

 3. Keep Icons Consistent

Icons are a great way to explain your concepts, especially when you’re trying to illustrate your unique value proposition. You can use icons8 or thenounproject to search for icons. Keep the icons consistent by using those that come from the same package.

Recently we’ve found that Dribbble is also a great resource because illustrations available on the platform are very eye-catching!

 

4. Simplify Numbers with Graphs & Charts

This Airbnb slide is a great example how the circles help to support the point – the largest circle also represents the greatest number.

Use shapes and simple charts to illustrate your point by including statistics in shapes. You can use Canva or Keynote to create simple shapes to illustrate your point.

 

5. Use Powerful Images

A picture speaks a thousand words. How do you fit images in a slide?

Use the rule of thirds and keep it to one corner of the slide

Overlay with another color and write text on top of it

Use Multiple Images in one slide

We’ve seen lots of stock images, if you could, use original images from your product, or search for less known images from pexel or unsplash in your pitch deck.

Summary

We hope this has given you concrete tips on how to design your killer pitch deck quickly, no more stressing out over the design.

 

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