Deck Design

General Design Principles

This phase generates concrete slides from the outline. Every slide should respect the design principles in slide-design-spec.md Section 11, including:

• Signal-to-Noise Ratio — remove anything that does not encode information
• The Big Four — Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity
• Picture Superiority Effect — pictures beat words for retention; replace decorative text with concrete imagery when possible
• Empty space is active — default to asymmetric layouts; don't fill margins with logos or templated decoration
• Rule of thirds — anchor primary subjects on the 3×3 grid intersections, not dead-center
• Faces and eye-gaze — orient face-direction toward the focal text/chart, never away from it
• Full-bleed images — default to images that bleed off all four edges
• 2D for 2D data — never apply 3D effects to flat data
• Logo discipline — first and last slide only (this aligns with the speaker's existing footer convention; the footer is not a logo)
• Minimum font size — body text ~24pt or larger at 16:9 conference resolution
• Visual relationships — when an outline slide contains bulleted content, identify which of five relationships the bullets express (flow / structure / cluster / radiate / influence) and convert the bullets into a diagram form rather than a list. Bullets are the fallback only when none of the five relationships fit. See slide-design-spec.md §11.13.
• Image juxtaposition — when content is comparison-shaped (any of the contrast types from sparkline's middle), prefer paired-image slides over single-image slides. Place two images side-by-side at equal weight, or use before/after with a transition arrow. See slide-design-spec.md §11.14.
• Numerical narrative — for data slides, choose one of three framing techniques: Scale (anchor against familiar magnitude), Compare (cross-domain comparison), or Context (annotate why the chart's bumps and trends look the way they do). Raw numbers without one of these framings are forgettable. See the "Numerical Narrative — Making Numbers Land" subsection in vacation-photos.md.

Speaker-style data in slide-design-spec.md Sections 1–10 (extracted from the speaker's actual deck corpus) takes precedence where it exists. The principles in Sections 11.1–11.14 are the default for layout decisions where the corpus is silent.