The grayscale-first method that finally fixed my cluttered slides
I used to build slides in full color from the first second, and every deck ended up looking like a cluttered yard-sale flyer. Six colors, three of them "brand" colors I'd half-remembered, and a chart with a rainbow nobody asked for. It always felt busy and I could never figure out why.
A while back I started doing the whole deck in grayscale first. No color allowed until the structure is finished. Just black, white, and a couple of grays. It sounds boring and it changed how my slides look more than any template ever did.
Here's what it forces. When you can't use color to separate things, you have to use size, spacing, and position instead. The important number has to be big because you can't make it red. The two sections have to be physically apart because you can't tint one blue. By the time the deck reads clearly in gray, the bones are actually good.
Then at the very end I add color back, but only one. One accent for the thing that matters most on each slide. That's it. The chart that used to have seven colors now has one highlighted bar and six gray ones, and people's eyes go exactly where I want.
The side effect I didn't expect: it's faster. I stopped wasting twenty minutes per deck fiddling with color palettes, because color stopped being a decision I made on every slide. It became one decision at the end.
It's not real presentation design training or anything, just a constraint that stops me from cluttering things up. But it's the only thing that consistently gets me a clean deck.
Does anyone else use a deliberate constraint like this, or is starting in color just me?