A pitch deck is a document read under pressure, often on a phone, often forwarded without you in the room to explain it. Good design is not decoration. It is the discipline of making each slide instantly legible so the idea lands before the reader loses patience. The rules below are deliberately strict, because constraint is what makes a deck read as confident rather than cluttered.
Constrain the visuals
- One typeface. Pick a single clean, readable font and use weight, size, and bold to create hierarchy. Mixing typefaces makes a deck look assembled by committee.
- One accent colour. Choose one accent on top of black, white, and a neutral grey. Use the accent to draw the eye to the single most important thing on a slide, not to paint everything.
- One idea per slide. If a slide argues two things, split it into two slides. A viewer should grasp the point of each slide in a few seconds without reading every word.
The 10/20/30 rule
Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple chief evangelist and venture investor, proposed the 10/20/30 rule in his book The Art of the Start. It states that a pitch should use about ten slides, run around twenty minutes, and never use a font smaller than thirty points. The slide count forces you to prioritise, the time limit keeps investors engaged and leaves room for questions, and the large font stops you from cramming dense paragraphs onto a slide. The font rule has a useful side effect: if your text does not fit at thirty points, you have too much text, not too small a font.
Make charts legible
Charts are where good intentions go to die. A chart on a pitch slide has one job: to make a single point obvious at a glance. Apply these rules:
- Label the axes and state the units. An unlabelled line that rises invites suspicion.
- Show one story per chart. If you need to explain what to look at, simplify until the point is self-evident.
- Use direct labels on the important line or bar rather than forcing the reader to decode a legend.
- Never truncate or distort an axis to exaggerate growth. Sophisticated investors notice, and it costs you credibility.
Words on slides
Slides are not your script. Use short phrases and let your spoken words carry the detail. Headlines that state the conclusion, such as "Revenue tripled in two quarters," work far better than neutral labels like "Revenue." A reader skimming only the headlines should still follow your argument. Full sentences and paragraphs belong in an appendix or a separate memo, not on the main slides.
Substance over decoration
Stock illustrations, heavy animations, gradients, and busy backgrounds rarely add credibility, and they often signal that a founder is compensating for a thin argument. The most respected decks tend to look plain: plenty of white space, a clear headline, one visual, one point. Spend your effort on the clarity of the idea and the honesty of the numbers, then present them cleanly. If you are not a designer, a simple, consistent, uncluttered deck beats an ambitious one you cannot execute.
Finally, design for the two ways decks are consumed. In the room, you talk over sparse slides. Over email, the deck must explain itself. Many founders keep a slightly denser version to send and a sparser version to present. Whichever you build, test it by handing it to someone cold and watching where they get confused. Their confusion is your design brief.