Hello! Vini here from the Slidebean Team. Today, we’re gonna be looking at the slides
Canva used to pitch their company to investors.
Welcome back to pitch deck design!
dull. Like if it was for a highscool assignment instead of an investor pitch. It needs to
be sooo much more visual, so much more engaging! After all, these guys are selling design
so the presentation has to reflect those values all the way through. Part of the problem
is that the original color scheme of their brand, which consisted only of black, green
and white, wasn’t a very rich palette, to begin with. Brand guidelines should help you create
instead of limiting you. If your brand colors feel too narrow, try adding complementary
colors in order to add more variety to your slides.
The second thing I notice is the explanation of The Problem takes way too long. Around 5
or 6 slides to be more precise. The screenshots from the Google Docs promo video are really
hard to understand when presented so small, and they only add noise to the slides. Little
tip here: If you want to use the resource of a user persona, meaning, telling a story
from an imaginary user’s perspective who suffers the problem; it has to be a super
compelling and clear story. These things usually work better in video format, so unless you
want to go that route I would encourage you to explain this in a shorter, easier way.
Always simplify The Problem as much as you can. They say sell the problem, not the solution.
The next thing that calls my attention is that there are virtually no visual queues
or hints, to Fusion Books’ interface, or brand, until slide 9. Literally at the very
middle of the pitch deck! You need to throw a bone to people, and it needs to be way sooner
than this. People tend to have pretty short attention spans, so make sure you capture
their attention with a teaser during the first couple of slides.
Another thing to notice here, when we finally reach The Solution slide, the image
and copy are pretty underwhelming. A bolder image, with a more compelling tagline, would
have generated a greater impact. Also, using a product mockup is in fact a great way to
showcase your product, just make sure you make it a little more photo-realistic, and
always with the latest version of the device in which it is shown.
Finally, many of the slides are too text-heavy, and, again, this is a graphic design pitch.
The information needs to be either summarized or split in order to avoid clutter, and using
more visual resources in order to highlight the story that is being told.
So after this revision, our changes list looks something like this:
After I have my list, it’s time to start editing the slides. I begin by creating a
more compelling, edgy cover that feels a little more tech-related. I love using background
images because they are hard to ignore, and a good quality photo can make your pitch deck
shine from the very beginning. Depending on the content on the foreground, and the image
itself, you may or may not require to increase the opacity of the background, in order
to help improve readability.
I then took the liberty of splitting the summary slide, into several slides. The reason is
that, while all of this information might be important, jamming it up into a single
slide heavily compromises the importance of each section. I’ll never get tired of saying
this: if there’s absolutely no way to summarize a text-heavy slide, at least split it into
several ones in order to make the info more digestible. Your audience will appreciate it.
After this, I also took the liberty of creating a Problem slide, which tries to summarize
the original 5 slides. I understand this is a risky move, but if you can’t explain a
problem, or a solution, in a few words, this will get really complicated when pitching
to investors. Believe me, we’ve been there!
I took some assets from Canva’s current website in order to create the Solution slide.
This slide needs to be super compelling and Canva has obviously come a long way in terms
of their visual output, so the new image works wonders. The new tagline is also so much cleaner.
There’s a saying that if you can’t explain your solution in 7 words or less, you need
to go back to the drawing board. Design anything, Publish everywhere.
Always include real images of your product when possible, or mockups if you don’t have
real images yet. This validates the concept and helps viewers envision how your product
works, and what kind of things you can do with it.
You’ll notice that I created a pretty playful color palette. I got some inspiration from
Canva’s most recent branding, but this is something that I encourage you to do regardless.
There’s some misconception that a professional presentation can’t use too many colors,
but I don’t think this is true. A professional presentation can come in many shapes and colors.
It is a matter of implementing them in a balanced and pleasant way.
Finally, I played around with several slide layouts in order the make the slides more
dynamic. In some slides, a two-column layout works really well, especially when contrasted
with a full bleed image. In others, I used a combination of rows and columns to create
a more complex composition. Play around with this. Taking risks with the layout always
pays off!
After I’m done with all this, I do a new revision of all my redesigned slides, and
I see if anything needs some fine-tuning. I love how this redesign turned out. Canva
is such a cool and fresh brand, it provides great inspiration to rethink some of their
former work.
If you want to check this and any other pitch deck redesigns, visit the link on the video
description. And if there are any other presentations you would like us to review, let me know in
the comments section. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next week!