How to brief a designer on a PowerPoint template
How to brief a designer on a PowerPoint template
To brief a designer on a PowerPoint template, you need to provide: your brand guidelines (including colour values and approved fonts), your logo files in vector format, examples of the presentations your team actually creates, a clear description of who will be using the template and what for, and any specific layouts or slide types you know you need. A brief that covers these five areas gives a designer everything required to build a template that works — not just one that looks good on the handover call.
Why does a good brief matter so much for template projects?
A PowerPoint template is not a poster or a brochure. It is a functional tool that will be used by non-designers, probably every day, for several years. A brief that focuses only on the visual look — “make it feel modern, use our brand colours” — produces a template that might look right but does not serve the people who have to use it. The best template briefs combine brand direction with operational context: what types of presentations does the team create? How technical is the content? How many slides does a typical deck run to? Who is the audience?
When operational context is missing from the brief, the template designer has to guess. The layout library will not cover the right scenarios. The slide structure will not accommodate the types of content the team actually produces. And the template will quietly be abandoned within three months as staff find their own workarounds.
What should a PowerPoint template brief include?
Brand guidelines and assets. The brief should include the current brand guidelines document, the approved colour palette with exact hex, RGB and CMYK values, the approved font families with licensing confirmation, and the correct logo files in both colour and white-on-dark versions as EPS, SVG or high-resolution PNG.
Examples of existing presentations. Sharing three to five real presentations from your team tells the designer more than any written brief can. They reveal which slide types are used most frequently, where the current template is failing, and what the content density looks like in practice.
A description of the template’s purpose and users. Is this template for internal reporting, client-facing proposals, board papers or all three? Are the users confident in PowerPoint or cautious? Do presentations typically run to ten slides or one hundred? This context shapes the layout library, the level of structure built into each slide and the degree of flexibility the template allows.
A layout wishlist. If you know you need a two-column content layout, a timeline slide, a team page and a full-bleed photography slide, say so. Designers will make their own recommendations, but any specific requirements should be in the brief rather than surfacing as revision requests after the first draft.
Technical and deployment requirements. Where will the template be stored and how will it be distributed — email, SharePoint, OneDrive? Are there IT restrictions on custom fonts? Will the template need to work on both Mac and Windows? These questions matter to the technical build and should be resolved before the project starts, not after.
What are the most common briefing mistakes?
The most common mistake is providing a brand guidelines PDF as the entire brief and expecting the designer to extrapolate everything else. Brand guidelines tell a designer what colours and fonts to use, but they say nothing about slide structure, content density or user behaviour. A second common mistake is not sharing existing presentations, on the grounds that they are too messy or off-brand. The messier they are, the more useful they are — they reveal the real problems the template needs to solve. A third mistake is treating the brief as a one-time document rather than the start of a conversation. The best template briefs are refined through a short discovery conversation with the designer before the project starts.
Should you include a budget in the brief?
Yes, and doing so tends to produce better outcomes. A designer who knows the budget can propose a scope that delivers the best value within it, rather than producing a proposal that the client has to cut down. Template projects vary significantly in scope — from a focused rebuild of the Slide Master to a full suite covering multiple template variants for different audiences — and the budget shapes which is appropriate.
A well-written brief is one of the best investments in a template project. It shortens the project timeline, reduces the number of revision rounds, and dramatically increases the chance that the final template is one your team will actually use.
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