How to Create a Custom Theme in PowerPoint for Branding

Have you ever wasted hours trying to jazz up a presentation or make it look unique? You shouldn't be spending your time on this end of content creation!

Several customers have asked me how to make their Content Sparks slides have a branded look without spending a lot of time, so I decided to put together a little tutorial for you.

It's FAR easier than you might think!

In fact, it's surprisingly simple to brand your slides once you have a theme or design you like. Especially with PowerPoint, though I'm sure other programs are similar.

The idea is to create a branded, custom look to your slides, and then apply that design to every one of your presentations (past, present, and future).

Here's the quick approach:

Step 1: Create a custom theme

In the Design tab, you can create new theme colors, new theme fonts, and even the effects you want.

Start from the basic ‘Office' theme, or pick another by clicking the down arrow, and then play with the details.

If you go into View > Master Slide, you can also add other graphics, logos, etc that will appear on every slide of that layout.

Step 2: Save your theme

When you're done creating the branded look for your presentation, click the down arrow for Themes in the Design tab and Save Current Theme.

That will save your new branded theme to a local folder so that it always shows up as an option in Design. Usually it will be one of the first ones shown.

Step 3: Open your presentation

Now open any presentation that you want to brand, such as generic ones from ContentSparks.com.

Step 4: Apply your branded theme

Click on the Design tab and pick your branded theme to instantly apply it to your presentation.

Step 5: Adjust where needed

You'll probably have a few places in the presentation that need to be tweaked, so look through all the slides.

If there's anything that's on all slides, it's probably in the Slide Master.

For example, the ‘Your Logo' placeholder we normally put in to show you where to insert your own logo needs to be deleted (or just replaced, if you don't have it in your theme).

To get rid of it, just go back to View > Slide Master.

Then click on the top slide, click on the object, and delete it.

Once you've done Steps 1 and 2 one time, you have very little to do each time you have a new presentation to create or customize.

If you'd like to see these steps in action, watch the video below:

UPDATE:

Since recording the above demo, I did another in PowerPoint 365, the latest version. You can watch that short video here:

The hardest part you might have to do is move some things around if they conflict with your new theme.

That's why we try to keep the slideshows from Content Sparks as simple and generic as possible.

If you try to apply your branded theme to a presentation that has a lot of complicated designs in it, you might have more fiddling to do.

Here's my biggest tip for speeding up your branding…

Outsource the design of your theme!

I paid a designer one time to create a branded theme for my slides.

And now I just apply that theme every time I create a new presentation.

I literally don't even have to think about design and branding AT ALL.

Do you have a custom, branded theme for your own slides yet?

We've created an in-depth, step-by-step checklist to cover everything we've gone over in this post. Download a free PDF copy below!