The Blank Slide Problem - How to Move Forward
- May 5
- 4 min read
Introduction: The Blank Slide Problem When Designing
Most people who've had to build a presentation from scratch know the feeling. You open PowerPoint or Keynote, you see the empty slide staring back at you, and you have absolutely no idea where to begin. What colours do you use? What fonts? Where does the layout come from?
In her Present to Succeed session, Katya Kovalenko — presentation designer and brand identity specialist — argues that this paralysis is almost always avoidable. Her solution isn't a design trick or a shortcut. It's preparation. As she puts it, 90% of presentation design happens before you ever open the software. Here's how she approaches it.
Starting with a Brand Manual
For anyone working within an existing company, the brand manual is your starting point — and probably an underused one.
A brand manual is essentially the bible of your company's visual identity. It's usually created by the same agency or designer who built the brand in the first place, and it covers everything from logo usage and colour palettes to typography rules and visual style. Katya walks through each section and explains what's actually useful when you're designing slides.
Brand essence and tone of voice set the context. Even if you know the company well, a quick read reminds you what you're representing — and how you should be communicating. A brand that positions itself as playful and modern calls for a very different presentation than one that's elegant and formal.
Logo usage is more nuanced than people think. Katya's view: you don't need the logo on every slide. A small icon on the cover and closing slide is usually enough. What the guidelines will tell you is how much breathing space to leave around it, the minimum size it should appear, and — her personal favourite — the misuses section, which lists everything you shouldn't do to it.
Colour palettes come with hex codes that you can copy directly into your software before you start designing. Doing this upfront means you're always working with the right colours and never hunting through the guidelines mid-project. The key rule with brand colours: use them as accents, not as wallpaper — especially if they're bright.
Typography tells you which fonts to use and where to find them. If you're lucky, there'll also be a text hierarchy showing the relationship between title sizes, subtitles, and body text. It doesn't need to be followed to the letter, but it's a solid starting point.
Visual style is where it gets interesting. This section shows the photography style, illustration approach, and any custom icon libraries the brand has developed. These are all directly relevant to the kinds of images and graphic elements you'll use in your slides.
If the manual is thin or doesn't exist, don't panic. Reach out to your brand team or an in-house designer and ask for guidance. You don't have to figure it all out alone.
Starting From Scratch: The Mood Board Method
For personal projects, pitches, or conference talks where there's no existing brand to work from, Katya uses mood boards — and she's evangelical about them.
A mood board is a visual framework built from references that already exist. Before designing a single slide, you build a picture of the visual world your project should live in. It's creative, it's genuinely enjoyable, and it gives you a clear direction before you touch the software.
Step one: is choosing your keywords. Think about your project and come up with three to five words that describe it visually — things like futuristic, ecological, playful, or minimal. These become your search terms.
Step two: is collecting references. Katya's platform of choice is Pinterest, using the search term plus the word "design" to filter out recipes and outfit ideas. When you find an image you like, save it to a folder. Pinterest's ability to surface visually similar images means you can go deep into a particular style very quickly — sometimes dangerously quickly.
The goal at this stage is collection, not curation. You might start saving dark, dramatic images and end up gravitating towards something softer and lighter. That's fine. Follow the instinct.
Step three: is building the board. Katya does this directly in Keynote or PowerPoint — eight cropped squares on a single slide, filled with the references she's collected. The cropping tool lets her pull out exactly the element she wants to highlight: a colour, a typographic detail, a layout idea. The mood board is finished when it reads as a single coherent piece rather than a collection of separate images.
Step four: is extraction. Once the board is done, the design decisions are essentially already made. Use the eyedropper to pull colours from the images and save them as your palette. Find a font on Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts that matches the typographic style you've been drawn to. Note any shapes, textures, or compositional ideas you want to carry through into your slides.
At that point, all that's left is the layout — and you've already got a visual identity to work with.
Q&A Highlights
The session drew questions about the "Frankenstein deck" problem — when different team members each build their own slides and then stitch them together. Katya's answer was straightforward: a shared presentation template is worth the investment, and a brand manual is a good stopgap until one exists. Consistency across slides is consistency across the company's image.
Final Thoughts: Preparation Is the Work
The blank slide stops being frightening the moment you've done your preparation. Whether that's reading through a brand manual before you start, or spending an afternoon building a mood board on Pinterest, the work you do before opening the software is what determines how good the final slides will be.
As Katya puts it: your presentation is the face of your company. It deserves more than a last-minute scramble.
Join the Conversation
When you sit down to design a presentation, where do you start — and what's the part you find hardest? Share your approach in the comments below!
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