What Does a Freelance Presentation Designer Do?
Updated: 1 day ago
After 11 years working professionally in PowerPoint, I’ve learned that presentation design goes far beyond making content look good.
Most people hear PowerPoint and think back to school projects, excessive bullet points and the awfully dull meeting that nobody wants to attend. But after more than a decade designing presentations, it still surprises me how often PowerPoint’s capabilities are underestimated.
Back in 2015, when I saw a job advert for a Presentation Designer, I had no idea that clicking ‘apply’ would eventually lead me here. What started as a junior role grew into a senior position, then six years leading a presentation design team, and now a move into freelancing.
Over that time, I’ve been lucky enough to work with hundreds of different clients, from start-ups to global brands, and work across almost every kind of presentation purpose imaginable. I’ve designed slides for CEOs speaking on stage, sales teams pitching secret new products, companies launching eLearning programmes, looped animations for restaurant screens and plenty more in between.
Presentation design isn’t just pixels and slides. It’s about helping people communicate important ideas clearly and confidently, and PowerPoint is just the beginning.
It’s Never Just About Making Slides Look Nice
When people ask what I do for a living, I still struggle to explain it. Most of my family barely understood my Graphic Design degree, so with all the misconceptions surrounding PowerPoint, saying I spend my days working in it doesn’t really do the role justice.
The other day my dad told me he’d explained my job to a friend by saying: “You know when Boris used to do the Covid updates and there were screens behind him? She makes the pictures on those screens.” Not quite, Dad. But good try.
In reality, as a presentation designer, I combine graphic design, storytelling and technical PowerPoint expertise. Depending on the project, that might mean:
structuring and refining content to improve clarity and flow
transforming complex information into clear visual narratives
developing presentation concepts that reflect a brand's identity
building interactive features, animations and motion graphics
visualising data through charts, diagrams and infographics
developing presentation systems that are easy for teams to maintain
troubleshooting PowerPoint issues and improving usability
The end result might be a PowerPoint file, but there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes.
Day to day, I might be creating a template toolkit that needs to work consistently for hundreds of employees, a pitch deck that helps a sales team land an opportunity, an investor deck that visualises financial data, or a highly animated presentation designed to grab attention at a conference. Each requires a completely different way of thinking.
Beyond that, I design for what happens after the file leaves my hands. PowerPoint files are often used and adapted every day by people with varying levels of experience, so I make sure they not only look great, but are intuitive, robust and easy to maintain without needing a designer every time something changes. That balance between great design and real-world usability is what sets specialist presentation design apart from traditional graphic design.
How I Learned PowerPoint Inside Out
I’d roughly divide my PowerPoint background into three parts: 30% formal training, 30% hands-on experience and 40% relentless troubleshooting.
When I first started, the formal training blew me away. Suddenly I was seeing advanced templates, automation, layered animations and features that most users never even discover. As someone who tends to hyper-fixate on things, that was enough to pique my interest. That initial training was like digging the soft ground. Hard work in its own right, but only the beginning of the hole.
The next 30% came from experience. Working directly with presenters taught me how slides actually need to function, how visuals can support a story rather than distract from it, and how to engage an audience. Most importantly, I learned that a presentation can look great and still fail if it doesn’t communicate effectively.
Then, in 2020, things became even more interesting. As Head of Presentation Design at an agency, I was the person others turned to for answers. If something broke, behaved unexpectedly or seemed impossible, it landed on my desk. That’s when the other 40% developed. I spent a lot of time reading forums, testing features, pulling files apart and figuring out all the reasons why Microsoft had created the software in a particular way.
I genuinely enjoy troubleshooting PowerPoint. I’m the type of person who won’t sleep if something gets past me without understanding why it happened and finding a solution. And I believe that’s a big part of what has made me good at it.
The PowerPoint Rabbit Hole Never Ends
Because presentation design sits between design, communication and technical problem-solving, every brief is completely different. Clients require templates that need to function in very specific ways. They need bespoke slide layouts that behave consistently across different users. They have varying font compatibility issues, accessibility requirements, brand restrictions or AV technical limitations that all need working around.
Over the years, I’ve found myself researching everything from placeholder architecture to XML coding hacks and obscure formatting behaviours that most PowerPoint users will never realise exist.
The funny thing is, every time I think I’ve reached the bottom of the rabbit hole, I discover another tunnel. Even recently, a client requested a template with a very specific restriction. At first, I couldn’t understand why they needed it that way. A few hours of research later and I’d uncovered yet another incredibly niche detail about how PowerPoint handles shapes under the hood.
After 11 years, I genuinely thought I’d seen everything. Apparently not.
PowerPoint Deserves More Credit
One of the biggest misconceptions I hear is that because PowerPoint isn’t considered traditional design software, you can’t create proper design using it. But why not?
In the right hands, PowerPoint can produce work as polished as an InDesign document, with animation you’d probably expect to have been created in After Effects. You can build detailed design systems, enforce brand consistency, improve accessibility and create genuinely engaging visual experiences.
But one of its biggest advantages is also much more practical: the final product can remain editable by the client. A beautifully Adobe designed piece of content isn’t always much use to an organisation if every tiny change needs to go back through a designer.
Where appropriate, I build PowerPoint templates and presentations so that internal teams can update and reuse them themselves. That helps extend the life of the work, maintain consistency and reduce the need to pay a designer every time a date, statistic or piece of copy changes.
The challenge isn’t PowerPoint itself. The challenge is knowing how to get the most out of it.
Why I Still Love Presentation Design
Every presentation design project is a different adventure, bringing together an understanding of how presenters communicate, how big organisations work and how PowerPoint behaves to create something that’s as functional as it is beautifully designed.
It’s why I’m such a strong advocate for the software. I know its limitations. I’ve encountered plenty of them over the years, but I’ve also spent more than a decade figuring out how to work around them, push beyond them and occasionally persuade PowerPoint to do things it probably wasn’t intended to do.
And while I’ve learned a huge amount along the way, I’m fairly certain I’m still not at the bottom of the rabbit hole yet and that is why I still enjoy it!
Need Help With a PowerPoint Project?
I help organisations create presentations and PowerPoint templates that look great, communicate clearly and are built around the people who actually need to use them. From one-off presentations to complex company-wide templates, everything is built around your brand, your audience and how your team needs it to work.
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