In my line of work, I see all five of the following items missing or not set according to best practices when I redo or upgrade corporate templates. Here’s why each is important for your long-term presentation quality:
✔ Multiple useful layouts
Don’t settle for the 12 default PowerPoint layouts —those were not designed with your organization and your content in mind.
Make sure your designer reviews your typical decks to see the type of content and layouts that make sense for YOUR content.
✔ Examples of ‘what good looks like’
The most useful corporate decks include a variety of example slides using the provided layouts. These give staff an idea of how they can use the layouts build a variety of different slides and also gives them a sense of good text-to-visuals ratio.
✔ Properly set fonts, colors, and bullets
When you’re reviewing your template, make sure the colors, fonts, and even bullet styles are set up properly in the back-end to your brand defaults. I often see one of these items missing, most commonly, properly set bullet styles and sizes, all the way to sub-level 3 or 4.
✔ Set default text box
This is another item that designers can miss, particularly if you're working with a designer or design agency that does not specialize in presentation or PowerPoint design.
When a staff member creates a new text box, it should be set up to your default font and the correct size for body copy.
If it’s not, make sure to fix that in your revision rounds or it will introduce a huge amount of ‘Arial’ font in your presentations!
✔ Icon set
Getting an icon set may increase the cost of your corporate template, but it’s worth it if you want more visually engaging slides and to reduce an overreliance on heavy text.
Your corporate template’s ‘Appendix’ section can include approved icons, photography, and more.