Many organizations treat their brand’s presentation template as “a slide with a logo and brand colors,” but in reality, a template holds the power to become your business’s communication infrastructure. A well-designed template saves hours of formatting, enforces brand consistency, ensures accessibility, and even influences how effectively ideas are understood. Let’s start with understanding the concept of branded presentation templates.
What is a brand template?
A branded presentation template is a framework that:
- Provides structure to your brand’s presentations
- Saves time by offering ready-made layouts for common content
- Maintains brand integrity across every deck
- Ensures accessibility and compliance for all audiences
- Reduces design bottlenecks, freeing up internal resources
When your brand template works, your teams focus on content and storytelling, not formatting. When it doesn’t, every presentation becomes a design problem.
6 key signs you need a better template for your brand
Here are the practical indicators that your current template is holding your organization back:
1. Low adoption across teams
Employees avoid the template and build decks from scratch- this is one of the clearest red flags. If people are saying things like “it’s faster to just make my own slide” or “the template is too restrictive,” it means the template isn’t serving real-world needs. A brand template should feel like a time-saver, not a burden.
In many cases, the layouts of the existing brand template don’t support the kind of content employees need, such as comparison slides, timeline graphics, or KPI dashboards, so they improvise.
The insight: If adoption is low, the template is either hard to access, too limited, or not aligned with actual workflows.
Fix: Conduct user interviews with different departments. A finance team’s needs will differ from marketing’s. Add layouts for their most common slides and make the template easy to access.
2. The need for excessive changes in the slides
Sales and leadership teams constantly send decks for “emergency design fixes”- when this happens often, it’s not about people being careless, instead it’s about the template system failing them. If every high-stakes presentation requires a designer’s intervention, the template isn’t doing its job.
The insight: A strong template should empower non-designers to build professional slides on their own. If design teams are always the bottleneck, you’re losing valuable time and productivity.
Fix: Create use-case-specific starter decks. For instance:
- A sales presentation template with pre-built case study and pricing slides
- A board meeting template with financial summary and appendix layouts (for corporate presentations)
- An investor pitch deck template with storytelling flow built in (related read: how to use storytelling in presentations)
These reduce reliance on last-minute design help and ensure that critical presentations don’t miss deadlines or consistency. Investing in a custom presentation template is always the best bet as it helps you get on-brand and easy to use template for all your teams.
3. Inconsistent branding throughout the template
Logos are misplaced, fonts are substituted, or off-brand colors creep into deck- this is one of the most visible signs of template failure. If every team’s decks look slightly different, your brand presence erodes. The problem usually stems from two issues:
- Brand guidelines exist but aren’t embedded into templates.
- Templates don’t “lock” critical brand elements.
The insight: A brand template is supposed to be on-brand, as the name suggests, and if it’s not consistent with branding, it can actively undermines your brand identity.
Fix:
- Lock logo placement so it can’t be moved.
- Embed brand colors and set them as defaults.
- Include only approved fonts, and if licensing is an issue, provide safe fallback options.
Consistency here builds trust with external audiences and makes your organization appear more polished and credible.
4. Accessibility
Accessibility is often overlooked, but it’s a legal and reputational necessity- if your template uses low-contrast text, untagged images, or complex color palettes, you risk excluding part of your audience, and a part of your users too. In regulated industries, missing disclaimers or disclosures can also lead to compliance issues.
The insight: If your template isn’t designed inclusively, you’re not reaching your entire audience, and may even be exposing your company to risk.
Fix: Build accessibility into the template itself:
- Pre-set high-contrast themes
- Placeholder prompts for alt-text descriptions
- Dedicated layouts for legal disclaimers and footnotes
5. Slides break when switching platforms
Decks built in PowerPoint don’t display properly in Google Slides or during Zoom sharing- remote work has amplified this issue. Many templates were designed years ago for desktop-only use in PowerPoint. Today, they’re opened on tablets, shared over Zoom, or converted to Google Slides. Fonts shift, animations break, and layouts collapse.
The insight: If your template doesn’t survive cross-platform use, it’s not future-ready.
Fix: Design with a cross-platform mindset. Use safe fonts (like Calibri, Arial, or Google-safe alternatives), test layouts in multiple tools, and offer both PowerPoint and Google Slides versions. This ensures decks look consistent in every context.
Related reads: 15 best fonts for presentations, the ultimate guide to designing a presentation
6. Employees struggle to use the template
This comes into play when Non-designers take longer than five minutes to create a slide- a template should make their life easier. If employees feel intimidated, confused, or slowed down by it, they’ll revert to improvising. The issue often lies not in the template itself, but in the lack of resources to guide them on how to use it.
The insight: A template without guidance is like software without training, people won’t use it effectively.
Fix: Pair your template with:
- A quick-start guide for common tasks
- Short video tutorials (2–3 minutes)
- A library of FAQs and “how-to” screenshots
The goal is to make non-designers feel empowered, not overwhelmed. We, at Crappy presentations, provide a user guide for all our custom presentation templates to help guide teams and make the best out of a branded template.
How to audit your presentation template
This checklist is designed to help organizations evaluate whether their presentation template is a scalable communication tool or simply a branded slide file. Each criterion highlights a distinct dimension that directly impacts efficiency, consistency, and effectiveness.
1. Accessibility and Version Control
- Is the official template easily accessible to all employees without reliance on internal requests?
- Does a central repository or template library ensure that only the most current version is in circulation?
2. Alignment with Organizational Workflows
- Does the template provide structured layouts for the presentation types most frequently produced (e.g., sales proposals, investor updates, board reviews, training)?
- Are standardized flows available for these use cases, or do teams repeatedly design them from scratch?
3. Communication Support
- Do slide layouts encourage clarity of messaging and logical flow, rather than dense text and unstructured content?
- Are there specialized layouts to emphasize insights, highlight data-driven arguments, and reinforce key takeaways?
4. Usability and Efficiency
- Can non-designers create professional, on-brand slides within minutes using the available layouts?
- Does the template reduce decision fatigue by offering only essential, well-structured options rather than an overwhelming number of variations?
5. Data Consistency
- Are there standardized chart and KPI layouts that enforce consistent formatting, scale, and branding across departments?
- Do embedded chart styles automatically apply brand-approved colors and typography?
6. Adaptability Across Presentation Contexts
- Has the template been tested for multiple settings, including virtual meetings, large-screen presentations, printed reports, and one-page handouts?
- Are layouts designed to remain legible and effective across different display formats and environments?
7. Accessibility and Compliance
- Does the design meet accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG contrast ratios, readable font sizes, support for alt text)?
- Are there built-in placeholders for mandatory disclosures, disclaimers, or multilingual requirements where applicable?
8. Governance and Template Management
- Is there a designated owner or team responsible for template maintenance and periodic updates?
- Is there a formal process to collect user feedback and incorporate it into new versions?
Rolling out a new brand template
Even the best-designed template will fail without a proper rollout. Here’s a six-step playbook:
1. Discovery
Interview teams, audit existing decks, and identify high-value use cases.
2. Design and Build
Develop master slides, chart packs, and starter decks with accessibility baked in.
3. Pilot Program
Test with one team (often sales or investor relations). Gather feedback before scaling.
4. Migration
Use slide converters or guided migration sessions to update old decks.
5. Training
Host webinars, create tutorials, and appoint template champions in each department.
6. Governance
Track adoption rates, audit decks quarterly, and release template updates with notes.
Final Thoughts
Poor presentation templates can lead to wasted hours, brand drift, and inconsistent messaging within the organisation. If your teams are struggling with inconsistent, time-consuming decks, it’s time to upgrade.
By identifying the signs, auditing your current system, and rolling out a well-designed replacement, you can empower your organization with on-brand templates that function like a design system.
We’d be happy to help you design a brand new presentation template that checks all the boxes on the a good template’s checklist. Talk to us if this is a requirement!
For more insights, tips and tricks about all things presentations, explore the Crappy presentations blog.
You might also like:
