5 Ways to Make Your Presentation Theme Pop

A bad deck can present itself in a variety of ways. But one of the main characteristics is inconsistent design. To avoid the chaos of too many fonts in one deck and mismatch colors, we recommend creating a custom theme for your presentation. This will act as the north star for your design, ensuring consistency across every slide.

In Beautiful.ai, custom themes allow you to upload your own brand colors and fonts to create an aesthetic unique to you and your story. Once you create a theme, you can set it and forget it— it will automatically be applied to each slide in the deck so that everything is clean and cohesive.

When choosing your presentation theme in Beautiful.ai, here are five tips to make your design pop.  

Gradient background

A gradient color background can add depth and dimension to your slides without overwhelming the content. You can choose from a wide range of gradients, such as shades of a single color, warm or cool color palettes, or even a custom color scheme that matches your brand’s theme. A gradient background looks put together and professional, without looking like you tried too hard.

Intentional color combinations

The most obvious ways that color impacts your presentation is visual appeal and readability. The background and text colors you choose for your presentation directly affect how legible your slides are. Is your audience straining their eyes to read what’s on the screen, or is the message obvious and easy to see? By making your presentation more legible, you’re controlling the focus of your audience and improving chances of retention. If they can easily read, and digest, your content they’re a lot more likely to remember what they saw. 

We recommend optimizing your slide design with a contrast between the background and text colors. You might choose a bold background, but that should be countered with a lighter, or softer, font color. The goal here is to make your key points pop. 

Uploading unique fonts

Fonts are more important than you might think. For starters, it can be the difference between a digestible presentation and one that your audience is struggling to follow along with. But it’s more than that. Typefaces can evoke different emotions just like colors do. Is your font cheeky and fun, or serious and professional? The fonts you choose for your presentation can impact how it is received by your audience.

Background images

Using a relevant image as a background can make your presentation more engaging and visually appealing. However, things can quickly take a turn to cluttered and distracting if you don’t choose the right photo. To ensure that the background image doesn’t overpower the content of your slide, you might choose one with one with ample negative space or lower the opacity for better legibility.

Expand your brand palette

While your brand colors should always lead the charge, you can take creative liberties with expanding the palette. By using hues that are connected on the color wheel, you can add more options to your theme without straying too far from brand guidelines. If your brand color is royal blue, you might add a lighter, softer blue within the same family to create some dimension and variety in the design.