Why your design team fixes everyone’s slides
Your design team’s calendar is packed with slide clean-up tasks instead of strategic work. At least once a week, they’re fixing colour swatches, correcting fonts, and rearranging layouts that should never have left their desks in the first place.
And it’s not just once a week. It’s every day.
The hidden cost of slide fixes
Every minute your designers spend correcting misaligned logos or resizing rogue text boxes is a minute they’re not refining brand guidelines or building templates that work. Multiply that by the number of presentations rolling through your organisation each month and you’re looking at hundreds of billable hours lost to remedial work.
But it’s worse than the time. Every slide your team fixes that hasn’t been designed with brand consistency in mind reinforces the habit. Teams learn that poor slides are acceptable, that the design team exists to clean up messes, not prevent them. That culture spreads like a virus.
Why this keeps happening
The root cause isn’t laziness or poor intent. It’s usually one of three things:
- •Teams don’t know how to use PowerPoint properly. They’re not designers, but no one’s shown them the difference between a slide and a story deck.
- •The templates you’ve built are too complex. If a senior leader can’t confidently drop in their content without breaking the layout, the template has failed before it even started.
- •There’s no clear approval process. A slide lands on your designer’s desk without review, because no one else realises it’s a brand risk.
How to break the cycle
Start by asking your design team how many hours they spent last month fixing slides that should have been right the first time. Then ask them how many of those slides were created by someone with no training in PowerPoint or brand standards. The numbers will tell you everything.
Next, audit your current templates. Strip them back so only the essentials remain. If a team member can’t quickly swap a logo or update a font without calling for help, the template is still too fragile. Simplicity is your ally here.
Finally, introduce a “no slide left behind” rule. Any slide distributed outside the team must pass a two-minute design review. That doesn’t mean your designers have to approve every change. It means someone on the content team gives it a quick once-over before it’s shared. You’ll catch most issues before they reach your team.
The one thing you can do today
Pick one presentation that your design team has already fixed three times this quarter. Grab your brand guidelines and open it in PowerPoint. With your designer, strip out every element that doesn’t align with your guidelines. Save it as a new template. Then send it to the person who created the original slide with a note: “Next time, start here.”
That small action will save hours next week. And within a month, you’ll have given your designers back the time they need to do real work.