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Crafting the Perfect Pitch Deck for Your Startup: A Guide
We talk about the single most piece of brand material to every startup – the pitch deck.
In a previous article, we provided a comprehensive guide to crafting a memorable brand identity. In it, we discussed the many elements that make up a strong brand identity – your logo, color palette, typography, illustrations and imagery, etc. In this article, we will talk about the single most crucial piece of brand material to every startup – the pitch deck.
As a first-time founder, creating a pitch deck is one of the most important steps in bringing your startup vision to life. It’s the bridge between your idea and securing the investment you need to grow. And while the content of your pitch is critical, strong graphic design can significantly impact how your message is received.
As an experienced brand agency, we’ve helped a number of startups tell their story through custom-designed pitch decks. Working with professional copyrighters who distil your message into a most appealing form, we proceed to wrap it in the best possible visuals. A well-designed pitch deck doesn’t just look professional—it guides investors through your narrative in a way that is clear, compelling, and memorable.
By crafting design elements such as custom charts, icons, graphics, and a consistent visual style, we strive to create a presentation that truly stands out.Let’s explore how great design can amplify the message of every key slide in your pitch deck.
Your pitch deck should tell a cohesive story that grabs investors’ attention from the start and maintains their interest. To do this effectively, we believe that every pitch deck should include a series of essential slides that cover the core aspects of your business. Here’s a breakdown of the most important slides and how custom design can elevate them.
Your introduction is the very first impression you make, so make it count. This slide should clearly present your startup’s name, tagline, and logo. It should also be the place to introduce your audience to your typography and color palette. If you’re using custom fonts, this will be a good place to show them. From then on, to keep the pitch deck consistent, every subsequent slide will have to conform to the main visual style set in the introduction slide.
To make it pop, you can add a visually compelling image or illustration that encapsulates your brand’s identity. To do this right, it needs to be consistent with all other brand elements on the slide. For example, an aggressive, jagged font won’t work well with an illustration consisting of soft, round shapes. In our work, we have used anything from basic geometric shapes to more detailed illustrations of people. We love to sprinkle geometric shapes on slides because they add flavor, balance out larger graphic elements and show attention to detail.
On this slide, you’ll explain the problem that your product or service is solving. Investors need to understand why your startup matters and what pain point you're addressing. A custom infographic can be an effective way to highlight this problem visually.
In addition, should you need to list items, rather than using bullet points, you might opt for custom-designed icons to represent the different pain points. This transforms a potentially dry explanation into an engaging visual narrative.
While free icons are readily available, industry and problem-specific ones are difficult to find. Paid icon sets do exist, but they might not align with your branding. Although it typically represents the most expensive option, hiring a designer to create custom icons can be a great way to elevate the brand.
The solution slide is where you show how your product or service addresses the problem. You can use custom-designed product mock-ups, process diagrams, or even before-and-after graphics to illustrate the impact of your solution. If you’re explaining a multi-step solution, consider using a flowchart to show each phase of your process.
Surprisingly, flow charts and process diagrams, to name a few, are especially difficult to design beautifully with standard office software. This is usually where the clunkiness of the software really shows – in stiff ugly arrows and connecting lines, in shapes that look rough and unpolished, in text that is not exactly in place, and in diagrams that look aged. A single ugly diagram can hurt the overall look and feel of the entire deck. That is why we recommend entrusting the task to a designer.
To show the size and potential of your market, custom charts and data visualizations can be incredibly effective. Once again, rather than relying on default templates, you can work with a designer to create visually engaging charts that show market growth, segmentation, or competitive landscape in a way that’s easy to understand at a glance.
Color-coded bar graphs or pie charts that match your brand colors can make this data pop while still looking professional and cohesive. Instead of simple bars, you can also use custom shapes in your chart to visualize the data. These can be geometric shapes like bell curves or illustrations of something relevant to your startup, such as pencils, drops of water, batteries, etc.
Investors will want to know how you plan to make money, and this slide should communicate your revenue model clearly. To do this, simplify complex information with custom-designed icons to represent different revenue streams, whether it's subscription models, product sales, or service fees. Icons paired with brief, concise text make this slide much more digestible than a text-heavy explanation.
In addition, a custom layout that divides your business model into clean sections can make it easier for investors to follow.
If you have metrics that show early success, such as user growth, partnerships, or revenue, the traction slide is where you will want to highlight them. As before, custom-designed charts, graphs, and visuals make your data stand out and feel more trustworthy. For instance, a timeline infographic can show your progress over time, with key milestones clearly labeled. This adds a professional polish and makes your achievements feel more tangible and impressive.
Investors often invest in people just as much as they invest in ideas. On the team slide, you introduce your core team members and their expertise. Rather than simple headshots, you can customize the design by using uniform, stylized portraits of each team member, with icons or small graphics that indicate their specific roles or skills.
There are many great ways to go about this. You can place the team member pictures in custom placeholders such as geometric shapes, you can use hand-drawn portraits, bobbleheads or even caricatures to show that you don’t take yourself too seriously. Whatever you choose, a clear layout with cohesive colors and design elements can reinforce the idea that your team is unified and ready to execute the vision.
This slide is all about your startup’s financial future. Custom-designed financial charts help to present this information clearly and professionally. Use clean, easily readable graphs to display revenue forecasts, profit margins, and growth trajectories.
A designer can ensure that your financial data is presented in a logical, visually attractive format that doesn't overwhelm but still emphasizes the numbers that matter most. Some ways to be creative here include presenting the data in a minimalist way, removing as much detail form the charts as possible.
Your final slide should leave a lasting impression. Use it to thank your audience and provide your contact details, all within a design that reinforces your brand. A simple, bold design with your logo and a call to action can tie it all together and encourage follow-up discussions. Custom typography and design elements that have been consistent throughout the deck should appear here as well to create a cohesive end to your presentation.
As we have shown in this article, the pitch deck is perhaps the most important piece of branded material for any startup. It represents an opportunity to make a great first impression. Conversely, doing it wrong can cost you.
In addition to the startup’s message and mission, ideally created or edited by a professional copyrighter, great graphic design can be the difference between a pitch deck’s success or failure.
We believe that each of the core slides of a pitch deck can be greatly improved by custom design elements. These include custom graphics, illustrations, icons, fonts, graphs and charts, diagrams and infographics. When used within the guidelines of your brand identity, these elements can complement each other to create an overall look and feel of the pitch deck that creates value and shows attention to detail, as well as a willingness to invest in quality presentation.
Your goal with a pitch deck is to create a compelling, visually engaging presentation that tells the story of your startup in a way that captivates and convinces investors.
If you need a professionally designed pitch deck for your startup, send us your brief!
Get in touch today!
