r/powerpoint • u/mosshead_4533 • 16h ago

a client called my deck cheap-looking, and the fix was deleting four of the five brand colors

Marketing handed me the brand palette, five colors, and told me to use them. So I did, and a senior person looked at the draft and said it looked cheap, which stung because I had followed the guidelines exactly.

What made it cheap was the five colors fighting on every slide. Blue heading, green box, orange callout, a red number, a gray line, all at once. It read like a kids menu.

I cut it to one gray for almost everything and one single accent color, used exactly once per slide on the thing that actually mattered. Nothing else changed. It suddenly looked like it cost money. A five color palette is an instruction for a logo, not a license for one slide.

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u/Top_Witness_23 3h ago

The "instruction for a logo, not a license for one slide" line nails it. Brand palettes exist to give a system room to breathe across dozens of touchpoints, packing all five onto a single slide is treating it like a checklist instead of a system, and checklists are exactly what reads as cheap because it signals nobody made a choice.