July 7th, 2026
How to Make Slides Look Good: 31 Tips for Clean Decks
By Tyler Shibata · 19 min read
Knowing how to make slides look good can help save you a lot of trial and error. After building and reviewing decks for marketing, finance, and operations teams, I've pulled together 31 tips covering everything from font choices to data slide design.
What makes slides look good?
Slides look good when 5 design elements work together consistently:
Structure: How your content is organized before you touch a single design element. A clear structure means each slide has a purpose and a logical place in the deck.
Typography: The fonts, sizes, and spacing that determine how easy your slides are to read at a glance.
Color: The palette that sets the tone, guides the eye, and keeps your deck visually consistent from slide to slide.
Layout: How content sits on the page, including margins, alignment, and white space.
Visuals: Images, icons, and charts that support your message rather than compete with it.
How to make slides look good: 31 tips and tricks by category
Structure and content
Structure is the foundation that everything else sits on. A well-organized deck can communicate clearly before your audience reads a word, and skipping this step is one of the more common reasons a presentation doesn't land.
Here are 5 tips to get your content structure right:
Build your outline before you open any slide tool: Jumping straight into slides can lead to a deck that's hard to follow. I always write slide titles and key points in a document first so I can see the full shape of the presentation before making any design decisions.
Decide upfront whether the deck will be presented live or read solo: A live presentation can get away with minimal text because the speaker fills the gaps. A deck sent over email tends to need more context on each slide. Mixing the 2 approaches often produces something that works poorly for both.
Write every slide title as a takeaway instead of a topic label: "Q3 Results" tells your audience very little. "Q3 revenue grew 12% despite a slower market" gives them the point before they read a single chart. Takeaway titles tend to make slides easier to scan and harder to misread.
Give each slide one idea to communicate: If you need more than one sentence to describe what a slide is about, it may be trying to do too much. Splitting it into 2 slides can give each idea more room.
Move extra detail into speaker notes: If you find yourself adding a third bullet to a slide, consider whether that point belongs in the notes instead. Slides tend to work best when they support what you're saying rather than repeat it word for word.
Typography
Here are 6 tips to get your typography working for you:
Limit yourself to 2 fonts maximum: Using more than 2 fonts tends to make slides look inconsistent and hard to scan. One font for titles and one for body text is usually enough to create visual contrast without cluttering the deck. If I need to, I use bold, italics, underlining, and font sizes to differentiate my text within the slides.
Use 32-40 pt for titles and 18-24 pt for body text: These font size ranges keep your text readable on a projected screen or a laptop display. I find that anything below 18pt starts to lose legibility fast, especially in a live presentation setting.
Left-align all body text: Centered text forces the eye to find a new starting point on every line, which slows reading down. Left alignment gives your audience a consistent anchor and makes slides easier to move through quickly.
Set line spacing to 1.2-1.5: Tight line spacing makes text harder to read, especially in longer bullets. A spacing of 1.2 to 1.5 adds enough breathing room without making your slide feel loose or unfinished.
Avoid all caps in body text: All caps can work for short headings or labels, but full sentences in capitals tend to read as aggressive in a professional context and are harder to skim. Standard sentence case is the safer choice for body text on slides.
Start with proven Google Fonts pairings: Choosing fonts from scratch takes longer than most people expect. Some pairings that work well for business presentations include Montserrat and Open Sans for corporate decks, DM Sans and Lora for an editorial tone, Roboto and Merriweather for general business use, and Inter and Playfair Display for a contemporary feel.
Color
Color can shift how a deck reads almost as much as layout or typography. A well-chosen palette can make slides look intentional and consistent even if the design is otherwise simple.
Here are 5 tips for getting your color choices right:
Build a color palette with 1 primary, 1 accent, and 1 neutral: A primary color sets the tone of the deck, an accent draws attention to key points, and a neutral, like black, white, or grey, handles most of your body text and backgrounds. I find that starting with this 3-color structure gives you a solid base to build from without overcomplicating things.
Check text-to-background contrast before committing: Low contrast between text and background is one of the more common reasons slides become hard to read, especially on a projected screen. Tools like WebAIM's contrast checker can help you verify your combinations before finalizing anything.
Pull your palette from a photo or existing brand asset: If you're not sure where to start, extracting colors from a photo that matches the tone you want can be a quick way to build a cohesive palette. Tools like Adobe Color let you upload an image and pull colors directly from it.
Use a dark background on key slides to signal a shift in tone: A dark slide in an otherwise light deck can work well as a section divider or a moment of emphasis. It signals to the audience that something important is coming without needing any extra text.
Avoid busy patterns or gradients behind body text: Patterns and gradients behind text tend to reduce legibility, even when the contrast looks fine at first glance. A solid background is usually the cleaner and more readable choice. I still like using patterns, pictures, and gradients, but I prefer them as accents.
Layout and white space
Layout is where a lot of decks quietly fall apart. Inconsistent margins, drifting titles, and misaligned elements are easy to overlook slide by slide but obvious when you step back and look at the full deck.
Here are 7 tips to tighten your layout:
Keep margins consistent across every slide: Inconsistent margins make a deck look unfinished, even when the content itself is strong. Set your margins once and apply them across every slide using your master slide settings.
Treat empty space as intentional: Negative or empty space gives your audience room to process what they're reading. A slide with breathing room is often easier to follow than one that fills every corner with content.
If you're running out of room, cut content, don't shrink the font: Reducing font size to fit more text tends to make slides harder to read without actually solving the problem. If a slide feels overcrowded, the content probably needs to be split across 2 slides.
Use no more than 2-3 text sizes on a single slide: Too many text sizes create visual noise and make it harder for the eye to find a hierarchy. Stick to a title size, a body size, and an optional callout size if you need one.
Lock your title position so it doesn't drift between slides: A title that shifts position from slide to slide is distracting, even if the movement is subtle. I suggest fixing your title to the same position across all slides to keep the deck feeling stable.
Use alignment tools to line up every element: Eyeballing alignment rarely works as well as it looks in edit mode. Most slide tools have built-in alignment and distribution tools that take seconds to use and make a noticeable difference.
Zoom out to grid view to catch inconsistencies across the deck: Inconsistencies in spacing, alignment, and layout are much easier to spot in grid view than slide by slide. I make a habit of doing a final pass in grid view before sharing any deck.
Images and graphic elements
Images and graphic elements can add a lot to a deck when used carefully, but they can also work against you if they're inconsistent or low quality.
Here are 5 tips for getting visuals right:
Use only high-resolution images: Blurry or pixelated images can undermine an otherwise clean deck. Free high-resolution photos are available on sites like Unsplash and Pexels, so there's rarely a reason to use a low-quality image.
Mask images into shapes to keep slides clean: Cropping images into shapes like circles or rounded rectangles can make them feel more intentional and less like a raw photo drop. Most slide tools have a built-in shape mask feature that’s quick to apply.
Replace bullet points with icons where it makes sense: Icons can communicate a point faster than text in the right context, and they break up the visual monotony of a bullet-heavy slide. The Noun Project has a large library of free icons that work well for business presentations.
Use one consistent icon style throughout: Mixing flat icons with outlined icons, or illustrated icons with photographic ones, tends to make a deck look patched together. I recommend picking one style and applying it across the full presentation.
Match your image tone to your slide color palette: Images that clash with your color palette can make slides feel visually disconnected. I find it helps to choose photos with tones that complement your primary and accent colors, rather than pulling random stock images that happen to be relevant.
Data slides
Data slides are where a lot of otherwise well-designed decks lose the plot. A chart that's poorly labeled or hard to read can undermine a strong point faster than almost any other design mistake.
Here are 3 tips for making your data slides work harder:
Choose the right chart type for your message: A bar chart works well for comparing values across categories, a line chart suits trends over time, and a pie chart is best saved for simple part-to-whole relationships with no more than 4 or 5 segments. Using the wrong chart type can make even clean data confusing.
Label data directly on the chart: Legends force the eye to travel back and forth between the data and the key, which can slow comprehension. Labeling data points or series directly on the chart keeps everything in one place and makes the slide faster to read.
Use color to highlight one key finding: Assigning a different color to every bar or line tends to create visual noise without adding meaning. A more effective approach is to use a single accent color to draw attention to the one data point or trend you want your audience to focus on.
What about slide animations?
Animation is worth addressing separately because it's one of the easier things to overdo. Most slide tools offer dozens of transitions and animation effects, but the ones that tend to work best in professional presentations are also the simplest.
"Appear" or "fade" are reliable choices for revealing content without pulling attention away from what you're saying. Anything more complex can distract from your delivery and slow the pace of a live presentation.
💡 Tip: If you plan to export your deck as a PDF or share it as a static file, it's worth skipping animation entirely since none of it will carry over anyway.
Get your data slide-ready and create your presentation in one place
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Data search: Julius can search the web for public datasets or pull structured financial data for 17,000+ companies via its Financial Datasets integration, so you can start from a question rather than an upload.
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Quick single-metric checks: Ask for an average, spread, or distribution, and Julius returns the numbers with a ready-to-use chart.
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