Why Your Pitch Deck Needs Zero Design Skills

Search "business handshake" on any stock photo site and count how many results look identical.

Same gray suits. Same overly firm grip. Same crop at the wrist, so you never see whose hands they actually are. Same smile that says nothing in particular. There are millions of these photos, and they are, for practical purposes, interchangeable.

Nobody designed this. It just happened, because enough photographers pointed enough cameras at enough people shaking hands that the internet arrived at a kind of visual consensus. This is what a business deal looks like, apparently. Two forearms and a firm grip.

I used to think this was a problem — evidence that stock photography is lazy, that everyone's pitch deck looks the same because everyone's using the same five images off Unsplash.

Then I realized that's fine. It's actually the point.

Investors are not evaluating your Photoshop skills. They're not scoring you on whether your background gradient is on-brand. They're trying to find five things fast — your team, your edge, your market, your traction, your ask — and they're taking notes while you talk. A generic photo that doesn't distract from that is doing its job perfectly. Spend zero hours on it. Grab something free, license it right, move on.

The exception is if the brand is the product — a game, a clothing line, something people buy because of how it looks and feels. Then the visual work isn't decoration, it's the pitch.

For everyone else, the real design work isn't happening in the slide software at all. It's happening in the order you tell things — the problem, the hero, the moment it clicks. Investors remember stories, not stock photography. They will forget your background image by the next founder. They will remember whether your story made sense.

So no, don't hire a designer. Don't spend your weekend picking a font. Spend it figuring out which version of your story a stranger will still be able to repeat an hour later.

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More on this in The Pitch Deck Book.

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