You can access it easily by going to the design tab in the PowerPoint ribbon and clicking the Designer button on the far right-hand side. This opens up a pane on the right of your screen, giving you a wide range of options to choose from.

And you don’t have to just stick with what’s there, as there is flexibility to change various elements of it, especially graphics, where you can simply click on the small lightning icons next to each graphic and choose an alternative from the options provided, or delve into the full menu.

This sounds great, you may say, and yet why do we still have lots of terrible slides? The reason could be that setting up PowerPoint slide Designer to accommodate your specific brand and style is somewhat trickier than just using the default templates in PowerPoint. If your PowerPoint template isn’t built suitably, then Designer can’t leverage it successfully to create the kind of slides that you and your branding team want. Microsoft has some guidance on this, but it tends to be simplistic, so I wanted to go in-depth on a few of the major components of a PowerPoint template that you should consider when setting it up appropriately for Designer.

1. Set Color Themes

Most corporate PowerPoint templates should have a color theme already in place, which are the colors that you see when altering the format of a shape, line, or text box, and are used for SmartArt and charts. But in many instances, it could be that old colors have been kept and not updated, or the ordering of the colors doesn’t really fit the use case for PowerPoint. So, it’s well worth taking a look at them to see if they are accurate and will work for you.

To update the colors, go to the View tab in the ribbon and select Slide Master on the left-hand side. From there, you’ll find the background group of functions, including colors, and if you click on that, you can choose to customize colors at the bottom of the list. The first four color options are for text and backgrounds. It’s ideal to use a dark color for the dark options and a light color for the light options, as PowerPoint uses this to assess contrast when creating content. The six accent colors should be your brand’s most prominent ones, as these are used to create content for charts, SmartArt, and other things automatically generated by Designer. Accent 1 should be your primary brand color, as this will be used most commonly. If any of these look wrong, you can use the dropdown menu for each of the color swatches and type in either RGB values or HEX codes to get the exact color required.

It’s worth noting that changing the theme colors will change your PowerPoint templates and potentially cause compatibility issues with other decks in old templates. It’s best to consult with your marketing or branding department to determine if a global update can be implemented, ensuring everyone uses the same template. If you want more details on various nuances of changing theme colors in PowerPoint, you can find them here. Once you’re happy with your theme in PowerPoint, you can apply the color theme to Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, too.

2. Create Suitable Layouts

PowerPoint templates consist of a ‘parent’ slide master and then various ‘child’ layouts that use the slide master as a base, and you can modify the content. The content is typically in the form of placeholders that allow you to add text, charts, SmartArt, icons, and images. Designer will leverage these layouts, and if you don’t have enough or they aren’t built correctly, you will have severely limited options, and the resulting slides may not look very good. Worse, Designer may create its own layouts, which then completely break your brand styles.

Although Microsoft recommends a minimum of 15 layouts, you should really be considering something in the region of 30 to 40. This gives Designer a range of options to consider when coming up with different design styles, and it gives you greater control over the style of slides being produced. It’s worth noting that more than about 40 layouts can sometimes cause issues, and it can be potentially overwhelming for users to create slides manually with so many choices.

The thing that a lot of people miss when creating multiple layouts is not providing variations on the same theme. Don’t do just one title and content layout, but instead, perhaps create several of them with different styles, positions, or formatting to provide a greater array of slide styles in the presentation.

When creating these different slide layouts, it’s definitely worth using a grid so that each layout feels as if it’s part of the same family. If your slide master doesn’t have a grid already, it can be somewhat tricky to do, although you can find a step-by-step guide to PowerPoint grids here. But once done, you don’t need to create it again, and it’s hugely beneficial for both Designer layout slides and custom content you might create.

3. Ensure Appropriate Placeholders

The Microsoft guidance on how to use placeholder content in different template layouts is a little vague, but there are some things that are really helpful to understand.

Despite manually being able to add images to general content placeholders, Designer will only add images to picture placeholders. That means a Designer-friendly set of layouts should include a lot more picture holders than you might normally expect. This has the advantage of pictures always being cropped to the placeholder, so you know the precise location and size of the image. It also means that you can customize the shape of the picture placeholder for different stylistic effects (use Shape Format > Merge Shapes to create custom placeholders in PowerPoint).

ou shouldn’t create custom shapes for other placeholders, though, as it can cause some issues when the content gets added. Fortunately, there is little value in trying either, so no great loss, just worth knowing.

Another potential pitfall is having footer placeholders with content already added. This might be common for a copyright notice or date. If you add something to the footer placeholder, then Designer will skip over that layout, which isn’t ideal. You are probably best to either add the appropriate content to a placeholder using Insert > Header & Footer > Footer if something is going to change from deck to deck or use a standard text box (not a placeholder) for things that won’t change each time.

If you can incorporate these ideas into your template, it can set up a really nice workflow for users to quickly and easily create presentations leveraging some of the AI tools built into PowerPoint. And if you’d like to see more of the AI tools you can use, check out my webinar, How to Use PowerPoint and AI to Create Better Presentations, Faster, where I’ll show you how to use Microsoft’s Copilot AI.