How to Design a Compelling Pitch Deck

Essential design tips for creating a better presentation

Many startups are realizing their runway is shorter than expected and are looking to raise capital right now in a challenging market. The most critical asset for startups in this position is their pitch deck, and it is the centerpiece of marketing. It needs to catch the audience’s eye and heart in the first 30 seconds — the mind comes later. The use of color, images, and graphs makes or breaks first impressions for people to make the decision of whether they want to invest time to read the rest of the deck. At Prime Movers Lab, we see thousands of these every year, many of which have the same problems. In addition to great storytelling, here is what we look for and a few design tips to make your presentation stand out from the crowd.

Context

First of all, a good presentation will have to consider the context. The audience and industry will dictate a lot of things, from colors to style. If your investors are tech-savvy experts in your domain, then by all means go all-in and science the heck out of your presentation.

Legibility

First golden rule: Make it legible and straightforward. A lot of design work is actually copy editing. Cut the text in half, then cut it again. Keep it concise. Try to have under 20 words per slide. That will make it legible for the audience. If you can’t tell your story in a few slides, you don’t know your value proposition well enough. We all have a lot of things we want to discuss, but if nobody can read it, they won’t be able to take away anything.

Imagery, Illustrations, Videos

Couple that with the use of imagery. Photos, illustrations, and videos are all a great way to help you explain complex concepts. In a TED talk by one of our venture partners, astronaut Chris Hadfield had only one word in the entire presentation, which is a credit to the author of a photo he used. But you most likely do not have the luxury to get away that easily, so use images as a visual aid for your story but don’t force yourself to insert too many images into your presentation. If your product is still in development or you want to protect your IP, using generic illustrations is just fine and it’s very versatile way for you to make them as detailed or as generic as you need to show your vision.

Type

Just using large type with non-fancy fonts will get you far. Assuming your branding is still in its infancy, in which you wouldn’t have a specific font selected to be the face of the company, the forever overused Helvetica font is actually one of the most incredible fonts designed in history. There is a reason why it’s selected as the default font for modern computers.

Contrast

You can create dynamic contrast on content and graphic elements with color, shape, size, and placement to further increase the legibility. If your brand isn’t established yet with brand guidelines on how to use these graphic elements, don’t be afraid to experiment a little. You can use unexpected colors or size to surprise the audience, like a huge neon mint green slide title or a hot magenta background, even for the most serious industries.

Three

It is said that “3” is the magic number for our mind’s ability to comprehend in a short time. The late Steve Jobs would always introduce three main things of a product; in fact, Apple usually introduces exactly three new products at a given event. One example would be breaking down a wall of text into three sections.

Graphs

Pitch decks are usually packed with data; you should have numbers to prove your points. Use graphs instead of tables whenever you can. People are junkies for beautiful data.

Consistency

Last but not least, design is actually the work of organizing chaos and when you focus on one slide at a time, the presentation ends up in extreme disorder. Don’t be afraid of reusing graphic elements to create cohesion. Repetition creates order, and order of complexity is beauty.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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