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MonthNovember 2014

The New Corporate Template

Corporate Templates: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

To me, a corporate template is kind of like a pinstripe suit — professional and conservative, but (usually) not particularly exciting.

Most corporate templates are like a pinstripe suit: professional, but not exciting

Templates are like pinstripes: professional, but not particularly exciting

And let’s face it — the corporate template is as pervasive as bad PowerPoint in today’s business culture.

Nearly every company and brand has one, and in my role as Haiku Deck’s Chief Inspiration Officer, I’ve seen plenty of them — beautiful, bland, and downright hideous.

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This would fall into the latter category….

Now as a bona fide brand geek, I appreciate that there are plenty of great intentions behind most corporate templates — they keep brand expression consistent, they give presentations a cohesive, polished look, and (in most cases) they give presentation creators a leg up in terms of design, structure, and layout.

But I believe corporate templates also have a few drawbacks that are worth noting:

1. They take valuable space (and attention) away from the content being presented.

2. In the rush of presentation prep, slides from different templates are often combined into a single presentation, resulting in a mishmash instead of a polished whole.

3. Just like a presentation using endless header-and-bullet slides, corporate templates can set a tone of uniformity and, well, corporateness that subtly signals “This is going to be boring.” Especially in longer presentations, it gets monotonous.

Zooming out a bit, corporate templates do not exactly encourage creativity or inspiration on the part of the presenter, and I can’t help but feel that at some level they disrespect the intelligence of the audience. Putting a logo or a company name on every single slide seems to suggest that the audience is going to forget where they are, or who they’re talking to. It’s just overkill.

Putting a logo on every single slide seems to suggest that the audience is going to forget who they’re talking to.

Bottom line: It’s really only your company who cares about your company template.

A New Take on the Template

I love working with companies, large and small, to help them create beautifully branded Haiku Decks that loosen the tie, so to speak, on the typically stuffy corporate template.

Here’s one we created for our friends at OfficeNinjas:


The OfficeNinjas Story – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Here’s another example of a Haiku Deck that’s branded with a lighter touch:


Ideas that Stick – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

7 Strategies for a More Creative Corporate Template

You might not be able to abandon your corporate template wholesale, but perhaps you can experiment a bit. Here are my top tips to help you try out this new approach.

1. Try putting your logo on the first and last slides, not on every slide. (Tip: The new Haiku Deck logo layout is ideal for this.)


Haiku Deck: Startup Story – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
The new Haiku Deck logo slide layout makes this a snap[/caption]

2. Include boilerplate or legalese on one slide, not every slide.

3. Include your hashtag or Twitter handle at the beginning of your presentation (or sprinkle throughout), not on every slide.


Visual Storytelling with Haiku Deck – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Include your hashtag at the beginning of your presentation, not on every slide[/caption]

4. Include your contact info at the end of your presentation, not (you guessed it) on every slide.

New corporate template: Sample contact info slide

Sample contact info slide to close a presentation

5. Instead of repeating slide headings, try using solid-color, standalone slides to introduce new topics or sections. (Tip: In Haiku Deck, you can now create solid-color backgrounds to match your brand colors using the new color picker.)

New corporate template: Sample section break slide

Try a solid-color section break slide instead of repeating slide headers

6. Use creative imagery to evoke or illustrate your brand — you don’t have to resort to logos alone. You can include images of actual products, people, places, or symbolic objects that relate to your brand or company.

For example, when I give talks about Haiku Deck, I prefer to represent our brand with beautiful images of colorful origami instead of showing our logo over and over again.


10 Tips to Transform Your Presentations – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Try using evocative imagery to express your brand in place of logos[/caption]

7. Experiment with choosing photographs and colorful backgrounds that showcase your brand colors in a more stimulating way.  If your company colors are, say, blue and green, try doing an image search for “blue green,” “blue green abstract,” or “blue green pattern.” (Tip: You can now match your brand’s colors exactly using custom color slide backgrounds.)

New Corporate Template: Using abstract colors

Try using abstract patterns in your brand colors for a creative twist

New corporate template: Using abstract patterns in brand colors

Your Turn

What ideas do you have for loosening the tie on the corporate template? We’d love to hear your thoughts and see your examples — feel free to share your creations at gallery@haikudeck.com.

More Helpful Resources

If you found this article helpful, you might enjoy these as well:

Showcase Your Brand Identity Beautifully with New Logo Slides and Custom Colors

As more and more Haiku Deck users work with the app for selling products or representing their company’s vision, the need for slides to showcase a company’s brand identity with logos and custom background colors has become a top request.

Beginning today, iPad users can update Haiku Deck to version 3.3, and web app users can sign in to haikudeck.com, to give these awesome new features a try. Here’s how they work:

Creating a Logo Slide

Select the orange Text button on the left, then the Logo Slide type that now appears at the bottom of the “SELECT FORMAT” options.

haiku deck logo slide

Once you’ve selected the Logo Slide type, tap on the camera icon in the white circle on the slide to upload your image or logo. After importing your logo, enter your text and tap on the blue Image icon to search for a Creative Commons image, import your own photo, or use a solid color for your slide’s background.

Tip: For the best results, the optimal size for logo images in Haiku Deck is 600 x 600 pixels. If you find that the automatic zoom is cropping your image, we recommend resizing your image with free apps such as Canva to place your logo on a larger canvas, or PicMonkey’s collage feature to increase the amount of white space around your logo.

Selecting Custom Colors and Theme Colors

To select your background color, choose the blue background tab and then the solid color icon as shown below. Toggle “SOLID BACKGROUND” to ON. This gives you the ability to choose a preset background color or create a custom color to fit your brand exactly.

haiku deck solid colors

Custom Colors

When you tap on the eyedropper icon, you can customize the color of your slide background. Simply tap, or press, hold and move the small circle located on the color wheel to select a color. Pressing and holding the circle located on the square within the color wheel will adjust the color’s saturation and hue.

Tip: If you have the hex code for a color you’d like to use on your slide, tap on the hex code above the color wheel and type in the code.

haiku deck custom colors

Theme Colors and Haiku Deck Favorites

You’ll notice a few new options when you turn on solid background colors for a slide. Tapping on the color palette icon will provide you with a pre-selected group of colors specifically tailored to the current theme you have selected, as well as our Haiku Deck Favorites you’re already familiar with. Simply tap to select your desired color.

haiku deck color palette

Share Your Story

What’s the story behind your brand? Share your decks with us by dropping us a line at gallery@haikudeck.com — we’d love to see what you create! And if you ever have any questions, our support team is always here to help!

Power Tips: Optimize Your Haiku Decks for SlideShare

Haiku Deck for SlideShare

Uploading your Haiku Decks to SlideShare is a breeze — and now you can create them right from SlideShare! Here are a few things to keep in mind to make your Haiku Decks look their best for SlideShare’s 70 million monthly visitors (wow!).

5 Power Tips

1. Include an attention-grabbing title slide.

Make your first slide the title slide — think of it like a headline. This is the first thing your audience will see, and you want to grab their attention.

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 3.53.25 PM

Click here to view the full deck on SlideShare

2. Sprinkle in keywords.

Haiku Decks on SlideShare can draw some serious traffic! Be sure to include your important keywords in your deck title and throughout your slide content.

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 3.43.06 PM

Click here to view the full deck on SlideShare

3. Break out the multiline slides.

SlideShare is a great place to make use of multiline slides, which give you a bit more room to flesh out an idea, showcase an inspiring quote, or capture a mission statement. (Keep in mind that currently Public Notes are not uploaded to SlideShare, so you want to make sure you’re capturing a complete thought on each slide.)

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 4.02.31 PM

Click here to view the full deck on SlideShare

4. Optimize your layouts.

Haiku Deck’s different text layouts allow you to customize the placement of your text. For Haiku Decks shared on SlideShare, we favor layouts that place your text toward the middle and top of your slides (this keeps the Creative Commons licensing information from overlapping with your slide text).

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 3.35.15 PM
Click to view the full deck on SlideShare

5. Include your contact information on the last slide.

When creating and publishing your Haiku Deck on SlideShare, the normal final slide with your contact information will not be displayed. So be sure to add a wrap-up slide with any contact information you’d like to share with your audience. (We actually like to do this for all of our Haiku Decks!)

Screen Shot 2014-06-11 at 4.06.33 PM

Click to view the full deck on SlideShare

Your Turn!

Now that you can easily create and share Haiku Decks from either site, there’s no reason not to set your story free! If you’ve shared a Haiku Deck on SlideShare, we’d love to see it — just leave us a comment below.

SlideShare and Haiku Deck Team Up for Presentation Creation and Sharing

Millions of Users Can Now Create Beautiful Visual Presentations Directly from SlideShare


Announcing Haiku Deck for SlideShare – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Click to view a version of this announcement created with Haiku Deck for SlideShare

Seattle, WA — November 6, 2014 — Haiku Deck today announced that its popular presentation creation software will be integrated into SlideShare.net, allowing SlideShare users to publish beautiful Haiku Decks quickly and easily to the platform’s 60 million global monthly visitors without leaving the site.

SlideShare, a LinkedIn company, is the world’s largest community for presentation discovery and sharing, and Haiku Deck has won a passionate global following for making it fast and simple to produce stunning slides. This new integration brings together the best of both worlds: Create standout slides quickly with Haiku Deck and publish directly to SlideShare. The streamlined login experience keeps the focus on creating outstanding presentation content.

“Our goal at Haiku Deck is to make it 10 times easier for professionals to create decks that are 10 times more effective, in 1/10th the time,” said Adam Tratt, co-founder and CEO of Haiku Deck. “We’re thrilled to help SlideShare users express their ideas and share their expertise through beautiful presentations.”

Haiku Deck for SlideShare makes powerful digital storytelling available to professionals from all disciplines. Presentations are no longer confined to a particular time and place — increasingly they are vehicles for circulating ideas, showcasing expertise, and building thought leadership. Haiku Deck’s streamlined design templates, high-impact visuals, and vast image library — with more than 40 million free, beautiful Creative Commons images — make it easy to communicate ideas powerfully, without design skills or a big budget. Plus, SlideShare’s avid, rapidly growing community makes presentation content instantly visible to the widest possible audience.

Haiku Deck for SlideShare extends and deepens the partnership announced in December 2012, when Haiku Deck added the ability to upload decks  to SlideShare. Since that time thousands of Haiku Decks have been uploaded to SlideShare, and many have been featured on the SlideShare home page.

Screen Shot 2014-06-02 at 3.55.10 PM.png

This Haiku Deck by content marketing agency XPLAIN has received more than 275,000 views on SlideShare.

Try Haiku Deck for SlideShare for free at SlideShare.net/create.

About Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck makes it simple and fun to create flawlessly beautiful presentations. Headquartered in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, Haiku Deck is a privately held company with the backing of prominent investors, including Trilogy Partnership, Madrona Venture Group, Founder’s Co-op, and Techstars. The Seattle-based startup was founded by Adam Tratt and Kevin Leneway. Haiku Deck has been embraced by creative communicators from a wide range of disciplines worldwide; for examples of how people are using Haiku Deck to pitch ideas, teach lessons, tell stories, and ignite movements, visit the Haiku Deck Featured and Popular Galleries, Blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and Pinterest boards. For additional information and company images, visit www.haikudeck.com/newsroom.

Media Contact

Nicole Brunet

408-770-9380

media@haikudeck.com

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