Defining Your Visual Style: Key Decisions Before You Start Designing
The third edition in a special five-segment Before the Deck series that will help you take control of your slide designs, today’s topic is a very exciting VISUAL STYLE!
Like repeating notes in a musical composition, cohesive design choices create a sense of visual harmony throughout your presentation. Every stylistic element—photography, colors, graphics, shapes, and icons—contributes to a unified story.
These choices, when applied intentionally, weave a visual resonance through each slide, making your presentation feel polished and professional, even at a glance.
In this edition, we’ll delve into what it means to establish a visual style. We’ll focus on how to make these key decisions early in the design process, streamlining your workflow, supporting your messaging, and ensuring your designs direct the flow of attention as intended. In essence— empowering you to take control of your slide designs.
The Power of Cohesion: Why Visual Style Matters
Defining a visual style isn’t just a creative choice—it’s an intensely practical one. In an era of diminishing attention spans a cohesive style ensures not only that your presentation flows naturally from slide to slide but that it collects the focus of your audience and holds it.
You want the ability to direct your audience’s attention with visuals that reinforce your message instead of distracting from it. Inconsistent design elements, like mismatched imagery or too many colors, can make even the most carefully crafted content feel disjointed.
By taking a moment to establish your visual direction before diving into design, you’re creating a clear pathway that helps everything—content, visuals, and message—work together. Each element becomes part of the communication itself, helping to tell your story more effectively.
Presentation Development Framework
Remember this framework from previous issues of Beyond the Deck?
Setting and Style are at the core of your presentation development process, and more than ever, provide important insight when shaping the Visual Style of your designs.
It begins with asking these two essential questions:
1. What is the setting or venue for your presentation
i.e. Live, virtual, or hybrid?
2. What style of presentation are you building
i.e. Who is your audience?
Setting
The Setting of your presentation defines the environment in which your message will be delivered and received. Whether presenting live, virtually, or in a hybrid setting, visuals should enhance the message by being clear, cohesive, and tailored to the viewing environment.
Live Settings
In live presentations, your visual style should prioritize clarity and impact: Bold, high-contrast visuals with simple, recognizable shapes and minimal detail ensure everything is easily visible, even from a distance.
Virtual Settings
For virtual presentations, clean, minimalist visuals work best: Plenty of white space and simple color palettes that look good across different devices. Graphics and icons should be clear. However, you’ve got a little more flexibility within virtual environments to explore details that might get lost on a large screen in a big venue. This includes creative font choices, shape outlines, and iconography.
Hybrid Settings
Hybrid presentations require a balanced visual style: Design choices that work for both live and virtual audiences. Design for the live setting first—using large fonts and bold visuals—then test to ensure legibility on smaller screens. Keep your style consistent and adaptable, avoiding overly complex visuals that may lose impact for either audience.
Style
At the beginning of this series, we discussed overarching Styles for presentations, focusing on three audience archetypes: Corporate, Minimalist, and Interactive/Workshop. By grouping your presentations into these categories, you can hone your Visual Style to align with the primary lens through which your audience will experience your message.
Keep in mind that these are archetypes that frame the audience experience.
Corporate Style
Features formal layouts and traditional color schemes, projecting professionalism and reliability.
Minimalist Style
Emphasizes simplicity and clarity with clean lines and ample white space, highlighting essential information.
Interactive/Workshop Style
Encourages engagement through dynamic visuals and interactive elements, fostering collaboration and participation.
Eight Key Questions to Refine Your Visual Style
Before exploring individual design elements, consider these questions to help refine your Visual Style:
Who is your target audience, and what are their expectations?
What is the core message or theme of your presentation?
What emotions do you want to evoke in your audience?
How does your brand identity influence your design choices?
Which visual elements best support your content—icons, photographs, illustrations, or charts?
What is the setting of your presentation, and how does it affect legibility and design?
Do you prefer a minimalist or a more elaborate design style?
How can you use color psychology to enhance your presentation?
Creating Your Own Visual Style
Defining the Visual Style for your presentation involves a series of thoughtful steps. First, determine the Setting—whether your presentation will be delivered live, virtually, or in a hybrid format. Concurrently, identify your presentation's Style or archetype by selecting from Corporate, Minimalist, or Interactive/Workshop styles.
Next, reflect on your answers to the Eight Key Questions. These insights will guide you in aligning your design choices with your audience's expectations and your core messaging objectives.
Finally, with a clear understanding of your setting and style, begin to shape the specific visual elements of your presentation. The upcoming sections will delve into these components in detail, offering examples to inspire and guide your design process.
Visual Style ElementsNow that we’ve looked at the overarching direction of a presentation’s Visual Style, let's focus our attention on the specific elements that combine to create consistent, unified slide designs.
Color Palette: Choosing Your Color Story
Your color palette sets the visual narrative for your messaging. While PowerPoint offers immense flexibility with various color options within your palette, your challenge as the designer is to:
Narrow this down
Develop patterns that direct your audience’s attention
A well-chosen presentation palette creates the mood and evokes emotion—whether calm and professional, elegant and focused, bold and energetic, safe, playful, and so on.
Once you’ve got a sense of what this means for your slides, begin testing your choices. Thread these colors consistently—through images, graphics, lines, text, and icons—to guide attention and create visual hierarchy.
There's no single way to use colors; it depends on your audience, presentation length, and tone. Let's not forgo personal preference; working with a palette that you love makes designing so much more enjoyable.
A couple tips:
For shorter presentations, a tighter visual hierarchy with one (or two) primary color helps maintain focus.
Monochromatic schemas can provide variety while keeping the visual energy clean.
For longer training decks consider color-coded sections, building in topical distinction.
In all cases, ensure your colors complement each other and tie back to your presentation's overall theme.
Photography Style: Setting the Visual Tone
Photography greatly influences your presentation's mood. Consider how your imagery will make your audience feel: sleek and corporate, bold and dramatic, or playful and lighthearted. The style should reflect the tone you want to convey and resonate with your audience.
Consistency is key. Use photos with common elements like lighting, color tones, or composition. For example, if you choose minimalistic images with lots of white space, maintain that look throughout. Also, use the same photo treatments such as transparency, reduced saturation, or consistent placement on the slide.
Tips:
Use the same photographer or source (platforms like Pexels or Unsplash make this easy).
Search by primary colors (Adobe Stock and Unsplash allow searching by HEX codes).
Tools like Midjourney (subscription required and well worth it) offer control in creating custom AI images through prompting.
Shape Language: Edges and Outlines
Shapes influence how your audience perceives your designs, whether through sharp, modern angles or soft, approachable curves. Outlines also play a crucial role in creating visual definition.
Consider what you want your shapes to convey. Sharp edges feel modern and structured; rounded shapes are softer and friendlier. Don’t forget about PowerPoints ‘Merge Shapes’ feature to create your own unique edge, just make sure you keep your shape language consistent to unify your designs.
Borders:
Line Width: Thin outlines (e.g., 1 pt) offer a refined look, while thicker outlines (e.g., 3 pts) give shapes more weight. This is also where your presentation Setting is important. If you’re delivering live, you’ll need a 2pt+ line weight simply in order for the line to be seen.
Line Color: Use secondary or accent colors for outlines to create depth and contrast.
Something to think about: Do your shapes need sharp definition or subtle borders to match the overall tone? Line thickness and color can communicate structure, elegance, or even playfulness.
Also, if you use borders around images or text boxes, use the same style and thickness throughout all your designs.
Iconography: Consistency Is Key
Icons help represent ideas visually and are a strong way to direct your message when stylistically consistent. Additionally, because icons are often scaled down, it becomes extremely important to pay attention to the Setting in which your presentation will be delivered.
From the list below, glyphs are a good choice for Live presentations as they include fewer fine details. Hand-drawn can be fun for Workshop/Interactive presentations. It can be helpful to reflect on your answer to the questions about the emotions you want your audience to feel, and how this aligns with your primary and secondary messaging.
Choose one icon style that aligns with your presentation's tone:
Resources:
Reshot, The Noun Project (my personal favorite), and Font Awesome.
Textures, Gradients, and Effects
Subtle details like textures, gradients, watermarks, or effects (such as shadows) can enhance your presentation if used thoughtfully. The idea is to ensure these elements complement your color palette and support your message without competing with your content.
Apply these elements carefully—as they can overwhelm if overused.
Textures: Can add depth but may distract if too bold. Enhance background areas with subtle textures.
Gradients: Useful for indicating movement or progress. Stick to gradients within your color palette.
Effects: Shadows or reflections can make elements stand out but should be consistent and minimal.
Simplicity is key. Always ask whether an element enhances or distracts from your message.
Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity is intentional. Regardless of the style choices you decide on, approaching your designs with an inclusive mindset will invite as many people in your audience as possible to engage with your message. It’s never been easier to find imagery and icons that reflect various ethnicities, genders, ages, and abilities both through searches as well as websites that cater specifically toward diverse imagery. PowerPoint also has an accessibility checker to ensure that your color choices are accessible to all audience members, including those with visual impairments.
Resources:
There are numerous platforms offering diverse icons and imagery, such as Illustrations Gallery, Black Illustrations, and The Noun Project.
Creating Your Own Visual Style
One way to define the Visual Style for your presentation is to:
First:
Determine your presentation Setting (Live | Virtual | Hybrid)
Determine your presentation Style or archetype (Corporate | Minimalist | Interactive/Hybrid)
Next:
Consider your answers to the Eight Key Questions
Then:
Decide, category by category, the direction of your visual designs:
Colors | Photography | Shapes | Outlines | Icons | Additional styles (e.g. textures, gradients, effects…)
Visualize it:
Create a Mood Board to bring your ideas to life!
Design:
Use your visual style as your design guide as you create your slides!
I know this was a lot! Thank you for sticking with me.
At the core of design is connection. When thoughtfully arranged, each element within your design is a note in your presentation's rhythm.
These stylistic details create the visual harmony that supports your storytelling, inviting your audience to connect deeply with your branding, messaging and intent.
You’ve so got this!
Thank you for joining me 🤍!
