Pitch Perfect: 7 Design Mistakes Startup Founders Make in Pitch Decks (Again and Again)

In the last four years, I worked a lot with pre-seed and seed-stage startups. Usually, as a designer, I'm commissioned to make an MVP, a user research, a design concept, or a purely marketing landing page. I’m never asked to help with a pitch deck, though.

As a rule, when I join a project, the pitch deck has already been created by the founder. A pitch deck is a common way to introduce a startup to investors and everyone else, including employees, freelancers, and even family. When a founder reaches out to me, they always share their pitch deck.

To be fair, awfully designed pitch decks are few. Still, in almost 100% of cases, they have the same design mistakes, even if created by serial founders. I realize that it's often faster and easier to make a presentation yourself and then alter it yourself if need be. However, the design qualities of a pitch deck directly impact its readability and clarity for investors.

Also, taking into account design rules, you can avoid a potential lawsuit. If you are a startup founder who prefers to make their own pitch decks, avoid the following design mistakes that I repeatedly find in such presentations:

#1. Fancy Fonts Overexploitation ​​

Showy, eye-catching fonts are good, but in limited amounts. Firstly, if you want to use one of those, choose a font that is easy to read, no matter how intricate it is. In no way should it look like another metal band logo.

Secondly, apply such fonts to headings only, not to the body text. Long pieces of text are especially hard to read when, prior to figuring out the message, your brain needs to spend extra energy on identifying what exact letters your eyes see.

#2. Copyright Licensing Infringement

The internet has corrupted us all by providing easy access to whatever pictures and fonts that we may wish for. However, not all things that we can download freely can be legally used in a pitch deck. Moreover, it's not nice to steal from creatives, even if right now you are a penniless startup founder on the edge of changing the world for the better.

Check the licensing agreement when you want to use a font, a photo, or an illustration, and be ready to either reject the idea of using it or pay for it. I have mixed feelings about AI image generators because, currently, they are stealing from creatives, but legally, you can generate pictures for your pitch deck.

The worst happens when a founder gets used to the assets that they were using illegally with no intention to pay for them. A pitch deck may never go beyond the eyes of investors, but when your company goes live, you can’t be careless. Sometimes, I have to explain to founders that they can’t just take any font from Google Fonts and use it everywhere in any way they like.

#3. Lack of Contrast

From conversations with founders, I know that for pitch decks, they often randomly choose the colors based on odd images from the internet that they like. Unfortunately, random colors may lead to a lack of contrast between the text and its background, thus making the presentation hard to read.

To assess the contrast in your pitch deck, you can use online color checkers. For instance, this one from WebAIM. The fact that this tool was initially created to improve accessibility of the web should not stop you. Be exceptionally careful with contrast when using an image as a background for text.

#4. Poor Information Hierarchy

In the world of presentations, not all words and phrases are created equal. Some of them must be put in bold or in a different color to jump at the reader when they haven’t even read the whole text yet. Visually emphasize all the keywords and numbers that scream to investors that your startup is a good catch.

#5. No Graphs

Sometimes, a pitch deck is a wall of text with a few images. Key performance indicators and other crucial numbers, at most, may be put in bold. It's not a disaster. Nonetheless, using graphs to show visually, for instance, the consistent growth of your daily active users (DAU), may be more impressive and memorable for an investor than reading it as a part of a long piece of text.

#6. Typos and Duplicate Words

It’s not exactly about design, but among designers, it’s supposed to be a sign of good manners to proofread layouts. There are a lot of AI tools for that now, but they are not always perfect. If possible, always search for somebody to look through the text of your presentation with a fresh eye.

#7. Unreadable File Formats

Use whatever software that you like for creating presentations, but remember that others may not use it. It seems that today, the most universal format for presentations is PDF. It can be opened by users of all devices and operational systems with ease.

I suppose if investors see a startup worthy of their money, they don't care much about the design of the pitch deck. However, they are more likely to understand that they see a worthy investment if the pitch deck is easy to comprehend and design helps with it a lot.