Have you ever wondered how some people come up with great slides with slick designs really quickly? You might even have one of the free or paid resources too but somehow, those design elements don’t convert seamlessly into your slides? I’ve been there too. But you don’t have to stay there! 

One tip I received from other gurus to start planning my escape from slide jail was to create my own archive to scrap designs that I liked. To this day, this is probably the best tip that I can think of. I just started with an empty slide deck that with some company template slides and started shamelessly stealing slides that others designed. One mistake I made in the beginning was to copy everything that looked descent. If you do this, you’ll end up with a pile of junk (but pretty junk) cluttering your archive deck that never gets used. So I decided to break down the elements that I will end up using often. Because let’s be real, you’re almost never going to copy and paste an entire slide as-is, nor should you. Here are a few design elements that I started looking for.  

Personally, breaking the elements down helped a lot since I could mix and match them as I needed. As mentioned above, you rarely end up with a perfect slide that can be used as is. So feel free to experiment on that blank canvas. You might take a 3 pointer slide template and copy the design components to make it a 5 or  6 pointer deck to illustrate something complex. I’ve also tried combining bullet point slide designs with flow designs or complex pictures. An empty slide is a canvas for your testing and it doesn’t cost anything to create multiple iterations. And the more you experiment with the slide designs, the better you’ll get at creating an effective and aesthetically accomplished slide. 

As these design drafts and templates started stacking up, I realized that I needed an organizing method for the slides so I can quickly find the designs I need. An effective way of organizing that I currently use is as follows.  

The volume of slides in each section won’t be equal in case you find one section to grow larger than others but that’s just the nature of things. Your style and preferences will also influence what gets added to your deck and how it grows. So have some fun! 

Oh and of course, when you feel like all this slide building gets old and would like a ‘hand’, consider using napkin.ai. If you’d like few tips on getting started with napkin, take a look at this past post.  

This was a short one but I hope you found this to be helpful! If there are any specific topics that you’d like to see more of, please leave a comment below!