How to Make Your PowerPoint Look Better: 8 Fixes for a Deck You Already Wrote

Most decks don't look bad because of the wrong font or color. They look bad because every slide gives every element the same weight, keeps the boxes PowerPoint added by default, and says in five bullets what one headline could say. Below are the eight fixes we apply most often when redesigning real business decks. None of them require rewriting your content — they change how it's presented.

1. 01

   Give each slide one focal point

   Decide what the audience should look at first — a number, a photo, a chart — and let it take most of the slide, roughly 80% of the visual weight. Everything else gets smaller and quieter. A slide where four items are the same size has no starting point, so the eye wanders.

2. 02

   Turn the bullets into a headline that states the point

   Replace topic titles like "Q3 Results" with the takeaway: "Q3 revenue grew 18%, led by the APAC launch." Then keep only the bullets that support it. Your words stay yours — you're choosing which sentence does the headline's job.

3. 03

   Delete the boxes

   White cards, colored side bars, underlines under every heading — they're usually leftovers from a template, and they make a slide look busy and dated. Remove them and separate items with whitespace and one thin line instead. The content looks more confident with less around it.

4. 04

   Use one structure color, and one highlight per slide

   Pick your brand color and use it for one kind of element across the whole deck — say, all the section numbers or all the chart bars. That's what makes a deck look designed. Then allow yourself one highlight per slide for the single thing that matters most. If everything is highlighted, nothing is.

5. 05

   Make the numbers big

   If a slide's point is "1,200+ engineers" or "34% fewer defects," set the number large and the label small underneath. Executives scan for numbers; burying them mid-sentence in a bullet wastes your strongest evidence.

6. 06

   Treat every photo the same way

   Team headshots shot in different rooms look messy side by side. Crop them to the same shape and size, and give them the same background and treatment. Replace clip art with a real photo or remove it — a missing image looks better than a generic one.

7. 07

   Choose light or dark based on the image, not the template

   When a photo is the hero of a slide, set the background against it: a bright product shot reads better on a dark background, a dark factory photo on a light one. Don't force every slide into the same template background when the image is fighting it.

8. 08

   Split crowded slides instead of shrinking the font

   If a slide only fits by dropping to 12-point text, it's two slides. Set a ceiling on how much text one slide can hold and split when you pass it. Shrinking the font keeps the clutter and makes it unreadable from the back of the room.