How to Design a Pitch Deck

Big pitch deck coming up and want to maximize your chances of locking in investors? We can help.

You only have one chance to make a first impression. While investors sit in front of you, eager to dip their hands into new stakes, it’s up to you to wow them. You feel strong about your ideas, your content is fresh and creative, the business plan is ready, your structure is organized. 

You’ve never felt better about your product and you’re ready to make a final push for funding. The one thing that you may not have is a strong pitch deck design. That’s what we’re here for. 

Hello world! I’m Mike Ploger here with Visme – the digital platform that can turn your pitch deck dreams into reality. 

Over the next few minutes, I’m going to share 13 tips that are guaranteed to wow your investors. The best part, all of the tips include design templates that are available in Visme right now. 

Shall we?

1. Your Design Should Communicate Your Message

From the moment you begin designing your pitch deck, you should be thinking about the visual hierarchy. 

I’m talking, the colors, fonts, element sizes, spacing, alignment. If you’re unfamiliar, check out our video on the 12 visual hierarchy principles that all designers should know. 

Nonetheless, you want to ensure that every decision you make when it comes to your design has a purpose. Why that font? Why those colors? These decisions should fall in line with your message. 

Our first template example takes a minimal approach using just white, blue and that popping red for color. Why that red? Red demands attention and elicits passion and action. 

2. Visualize Data and Information

Turning a list of numbers into beautiful data visualizations is key when it comes to informing or even persuading an audience. What do I mean? 

Well, rather than pull up a spreadsheet, show the differences in data with charts or graphs. Viewers will see the difference more clearly rather than have to piece it together themselves. 

We’ve put out a video on the several ways you can use data visualizations in your professional life. And if you’re not sure where to begin on building one, Visme can help with a huge selection of data visualizations just like these. 

3. Appeal to Investors’ Emotions

Okay, so you’ve hooked the fish, AKA the investors and they’re interested after you’ve shown them the numbers. Now, you must reel them in. But how? 

It’s time to tug at their heartstrings a little bit. Numbers can only get you so far before you need to appeal to their emotions. 

This template here uses a variety of methods. You can share a story, incorporate tweets or quotes, and you should definitely include imagery through static images or even videos to really bring it to life. 

Bringing emotion into a pitch deck is one of the best ways to take a presentation to the next level. 

4. Use a Readable Font Color

This may go unsaid, but too many times have we seen font colors that blend in with the background color in a presentation. They’re difficult to read. 

Don’t get too fancy when deciding your colors. Stick to 2 or 3 throughout the entire pitch deck and make sure there are strong contrasts between them. A dark text should fall on a light background and vice versa just like we see here in this great example. 

The same goes for your font as well. Keep it simple and easy to read. Nobody is going to say no because your font was simple and clean, but they might if it is bizarre and sloppy. 

5. Be Consistent With Your Brand

With any newsletter or email from a major company, the design fits their branding. Target will use their strong red, Starbucks sticks with green and Twitter would be surrounded by blue. 

All of your presentations and public material should be the same, especially for a pitch deck. If your brand is, say, blue and yellow, use blue and yellow. 

Don’t go overboard and start using reds and greens or other colors. Stay consistent to your branding. 

All of Visme’s templates are fully customizable. While this example uses shades of purple, they could easily be changed to blue or yellow or whatever color fits your needs. 

6. Get Creative

I bring our next tip with a touch of caution. Get creative, yes! Show potential investors what’s between those ears and how you are different from past pitch decks that they’ve already seen. 

However, don’t fall back on those ridiculous fonts and 10 different colors that I’ve already mentioned. There are other ways to stand out. 

Maybe you include GIFs, maybe you add interactive charts like we see with this template here. Or maybe you even add animated characters or audio to your pitch deck. 

There are endless options to get creative and I’ll actually share even more of these here shortly.

7. Design to Your Audience’s Interests

Understanding your audience is key. Everything from their wants, needs, lifestyle – you name it. 

If you’re pitching to someone who is more old school, a design like this might not be your best bet considering it was aimed at millennials when it was being designed. 

Your content can be the same but have two very different looks depending on who you are talking to. What’s going to click with your audience? Loud and colorful or simple and straight to the point? Consider who you’re talking to and their tastes before stepping in front of them. 

8. Include Attention Grabbing Elements

Okay, back on the topic of getting creative. Let’s look at a couple great ways to do so, in turn locking your viewers in. 

First, try adding charts. I know I mentioned this already but emphasizing is key to get a point across. 

Visme has over 30 types of charts to select from and they’re already made for you. All you have to do is plug in your own data. One of those charts is this flow chart here right next to me. And if it’s not what you’re looking for, that’s fine. 

Maybe this timeline here is more your style. Here, it’s used to show the growth of a company and the milestones reached over time. You could use it for the same thing, including the times your grand idea came to mind and the evolution to where it is now.

Still not doing it for you? Well, this Visme template here uses shapes in its design which is a great way to stand out and rather than using triangles in one slide, circles on the next, squares in another, they used triangles throughout the entire pitch deck. 

Smart when it comes to maintaining visual consistency. Take some time to think about it and draw some inspiration from the world around you.

9. Use Background Images

Going back to something I mentioned earlier, adding images to your pitch deck is a great way to draw emotion and really bring a pitch deck to life. 

Really, these images don’t even need to be in the forefront as they can make for powerful background images. Choose photos that you feel will make the biggest impact. 

One idea – use photos of your teammates hard at work. Adding a human element to a design and a pitch deck can be incredibly impactful to a viewer.

10. Add Unique Testimonials

If you have positive testimonials regarding your idea already, use them. Recommendations and reviews are incredibly strong persuasion tools. 

Think about it. Do you go to a new restaurant without looking up reviews or hearing a recommendation from a friend? Personally, I don’t. 

Visme has templates where you can easily embed tweets or other quotes from users. Use this to your advantage. 

11. Used Tiled Layouts for Complex Information

One thing about pitch decks, they have to be brief. No more than 19 slides, okay? One way to combat this is by fitting a few mini slides into one. This template here allows us to do just that. 

I get it. Sometimes your information is pretty complex, however, you must try to compress that information into the most pertinent bits of information and lay them out like so. 

It’s important that your information isn’t overwhelming and is easily digestible. You don’t want to lose a viewer halfway through your pitch deck, and templates like this are sure to help. 

12. Keep Your Design Consistent

Have I mentioned consistency yet? I think I may have a time or two and here’s another. A big bonus of using a template is the visual consistency from beginning to end. 

The overall look of the slide doesn’t vary much from slide to slide. And you don’t have to start fresh every single time you create a new slide, which actually brings me to my last tip. 

13. Choose One Theme With Varying Looks

You should’ve noticed that all of our templates have individual themes. Now, this doesn’t mean that each slide features the same exact design because that would be terribly boring and dry out very quickly. 

Instead, our templates follow a theme throughout each slide. Colors remain mostly identical, fonts are the same, images are consistent and data visualizations follow the same idea. 

I can not emphasize enough keeping your pitch deck clean, organized and consistent. Your professionalism can go right out the window if you don’t follow that one simple rule. 

With that, my work here is done and yours is just beginning. If you haven’t learned, Visme is your home for pre-built templates and they’re waiting for you right now at Visme.com. 

If you have any further questions, our channel can likely assist you. We’re always here to help, making videos on everything, in presentation and design. 

Feel free to share below what you learned in the comments. We’ll hope to catch you again soon and until then, I’m Mike Ploger with Visme helping you Make Information Beautiful.