Better PowerPoint Layouts with Slide Master - Part 1

PowerPoint layouts can help you and your team maintain a consistent brand image across all reports.

You can use them to preserve your brand’s visual integrity and convey information in a way that increases brand recall and engagement.

Managing PowerPoint layouts has never been easier. Through the Slide Master feature, you can define and customize the layout and style of all the slides in one go and make report-wide changes quickly.

In this two-part article, we’ll show you how to use Slide Master to create winning layouts.

Let’s get started.

1. Create layout templates for different aspect ratios

LCD and plasma monitors generally use the 16:9 aspect ratio while projectors may use 4:3 or 16:10.

Use the Page Setup in Slide Master to choose the optimal aspect ratio for your layout.

Top tip: ensure you close slide master view before saving your template.

2. Focus on the key placeholders

Keep your layout clean and easy to visualize by using only a few essential placeholders.

We recommend the following:

• Content / chart placeholder for visualizing data.
• A text placeholder for question text.
• A text placeholder for base information.

Adding too many text placeholders to the master slide can lead to formatting changes that can be hard to manage. Often, it’s easier to add additional text placeholders manually where needed.

3. Apply the right color scheme

With Slide Master, you can maintain consistent coloring across all slides to increase the emotional impact of your presentation.

• Choose a custom color scheme that reflects your brand identity.
• Customize the color scheme according to your brand style guide.
• If you don’t have a brand style guide, use colors inspired by your logo and website.

4. Don’t let your logo get in the way

You can use Slide Master to add a subtle version of your logo to content slides. For example, you can use a small vector logo with a higher transparency.

You can also use the Hide Background graphics option to remove the logo from specific slides.

Consider adding your full-size logo only to the title slide and last slide of the presentation to establish your brand identity.

5. Choose a background style that strengthens the layout

When you define the background color and style for the slides, remember that solid colors or soft gradients are safe choices.

More complex backgrounds featuring textures or images can create harsh contrasts and make parts of the layout seem confusing.

Choose a background style that reinforces your layout. Use Slide Master to apply it to all slides.

Stay tuned for more tips

We hope you found these tips useful.

In our next post, we share with you five more tips for creating professional PowerPoint layouts.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t tried Indico Labs yet, you may want to give it a go.

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