Somebody Chose Your Colors. Make It You.

Paint companies employ people whose entire job is naming colors.

Not mixing them. Naming them. This is because almost nobody walks into a store and buys grey. They buy Morning Fog, or Cathedral, or Elephant's Breath, and they pay more for it than they would have paid for grey.

The color is identical. The name did the work.

What's interesting is what happens when nobody names it. The paint still has a color. The room still gets painted. Someone just made the decision by not making it.

Decks are the same. Yours has a palette right now, whether you chose it or not.

Usually the story goes: someone downloaded a template at eleven at night, the template was blue and orange, and the deck has been blue and orange ever since. Nobody decided. It just set.

That's fine until you're in a room with people who see forty decks a month. They know the templates. They've watched that exact orange highlight a growth curve twelve times this year. It doesn't make them think less of your company, but it does put a small tick in a column you'd rather not have ticked: first draft.

The fix is genuinely small. Pick two colors and use them the same way every time.

One carries your brand — the color that will be on the product, the site, the thing that exists after this meeting. One is the accent, and the accent has exactly one job: pointing. It goes on the number that matters, and nowhere else. The moment it appears twice on a slide it stops meaning anything.

Everything else is text and space. A deck can be almost entirely black type on white and look expensive, because restraint is the thing that's hard to fake.

Then check it on a projector, not your laptop. Projectors eat contrast for breakfast. Grey on slightly-different-grey looks refined on a retina screen and vanishes in a conference room, and you'll be the last person to know, because you'll be reading from your own display.

Your colors are already saying something. It costs about twenty minutes to make sure it's what you meant.

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More on the deck as a designed object in The Pitch Deck Book.

Composite characters, invented companies. The mistakes are real; the people aren't.