PPT Deck Designer

PPT Deck Designer turns a rough outline — bullet points in a text file, a paragraph of notes, or a loose agenda — into a slide-by-slide deck spec ready to render as .pptx. It is built for founders assembling a seed pitch under deadline and for sales engineers who need a repeatable, on-brand deck structure rather than a blank template. The output is a structured plan (copy, layout, chart type, image direction, speaker notes) plus a generation step that writes the actual file.

When to use it

• You have a one-page outline and need a 10–14 slide investor deck by morning.
• You're adapting a master sales deck per prospect and want consistent layouts without redrawing every slide.
• You have raw numbers (ARR, retention cohorts, TAM) and want the skill to pick the right chart instead of defaulting to a pie chart.
• You want speaker notes written alongside each slide so the deck and the talk track stay in sync.

How it works

The skill runs in two passes. First it produces a deck spec — a JSON/YAML document with one entry per slide: title, layout (e.g. title, two-column, metric-hero, chart, quote), body copy, a chart block (type + series), an image prompt or stock-search query, and notes. You review or edit this spec. Second, it renders to PowerPoint using python-pptx: Presentation(), slides.add_slide(), placeholder population, and add_chart() with XL_CHART_TYPE for native, editable charts. Brand settings (fonts, hex palette, logo path) are read from a brand.yaml so colors and type carry through every slide.

Example

curl -fsSL --create-dirs -o ~/.claude/skills/ppt-deck-designer/SKILL.md https://claudeskil.com/skills/ppt-deck-designer/SKILL.md

# generate a spec from an outline, then render
claude "design a 12-slide seed pitch from outline.md using brand.yaml"

# brand.yaml
primary: "#1A1A2E"
accent:  "#E94560"
font_head: "Inter"
font_body: "Inter"
logo: assets/logo.png

Tips & gotchas

• Charts render as native PowerPoint chart objects, so reviewers can edit data in Keynote/PowerPoint — but Keynote occasionally restyles them on import; lock final visuals by exporting to PDF.
• Pixel-perfect custom layouts beyond the built-in set require editing the spec's layout to blank and positioning shapes by EMU yourself.
• Feed real numbers in the outline. Given vague metrics the skill writes placeholder ranges rather than inventing figures.
• Logo and fonts must exist on the rendering machine; missing fonts silently fall back to Calibri.

FAQ

Can I edit the deck after generation? Yes — output is a standard .pptx. Text, charts, and images are all editable objects, not flattened images.

Does it work for Keynote? It targets .pptx, which Keynote opens and exports. There is no native .key writer.

Can I reuse one spec across decks? Yes. Keep the spec in version control and swap brand.yaml to re-skin the same content per audience.