Slide Design

"Make it beautiful" is a request for visual craft, not new content. Keep the user's copy, facts, images, and slide order; change how they look. A beautiful deck reads as the work of a studio with a point of view, not a template.

Precedence

This skill supplies craft, not a direction. The direction comes from the user's prompt and the brief create-deck builds from it; never swap in a preset style. The design-systems Precedence list decides what wins:

• Design system linked: it owns tokens (colors, fonts and weights, type sizes, spacing, radius, accents, logos, image style, custom CSS) through the --ds-* wrapper. Add nothing it does not define and never detach it. Beauty comes from using fewer of its elements more deliberately: scale contrast within its sizes, composition, negative space, alignment, a scarce accent.
• Reference deck: owns layouts, chrome, and markup idiom, and tokens too when no system is linked. Tighten inside its patterns; when none fits, compose from its conventions. It is a pattern library, not an outline.
• Attached style reference: match its measured type scale, weights, colors, alignment, and margins.
• Existing deck with an established look (including a starter template): its slides are the reference. Refine it; change the style only when asked.
• Nothing linked: realize the direction the prompt implies with this whole skill.

Explicit constraints in the current request beat all of these. If a selected system or reference is unavailable, tell the user the deck was styled without it instead of silently using this skill's defaults.

Typography

Type does most of the work.

• Only fonts the renderer maps load. SlideRenderer loads the Google families it knows; anything else falls back silently. Quote the family in font-family. Static-weight families ship only 400 and 700.
• Extreme scale contrast. Let one element dominate. On 960x540: statement or big number 72-120px, headline 32-56px, body 16-20px, labels 12-14px. A 96px number over 13px labels is striking; 40px over 28px is flat. Body never drops below 16px.
• Tight display type: letter-spacing -0.02 to -0.05em, line-height 0.95-1.1. Body line-height 1.35-1.5, about 60 characters per line max.
• Labels as labels: small uppercase with +0.06 to +0.12em tracking, or mono, for eyebrows, running heads, axis labels, and page numbers.
• Weight is hierarchy. One heavy and one regular weight; mid-weights everywhere look mushy. Size and weight before color.
• Details: curly quotes, en dashes for ranges, tabular numerals for aligned figures, no orphaned last word on a headline (rebalance with max-width or a <br>).

Composition

• Grid: 12 columns inside the wrapper padding, 16-24px gutters. Snap every edge.
• Asymmetry over centering. Headline in 5-7 columns, evidence large in the rest. Center only title and statement slides.
• Negative space is a material. One line of type in the lower-left third of an empty slide can be the best slide in the deck.
• One spacing scale (the system's gaps, else 8/16/24/40/64): close for related, far for unrelated. Equal gaps everywhere read as amateur.
• Optical alignment: nudge large type to look flush with small text.
• One focal point. Squint; one thing should land first.
• One idea per slide; split, do not shrink. A slide over the create-deck Fit budget becomes two slides, not smaller type or clipped overflow.
• Keep layout in normal flex/grid flow; slide-editing owns flow and fit constraints.

Color

With a system or reference, use only its colors; these rules govern how.

• Restrained palette: background, ink, one or two tinted neutrals, one accent.
• No pure defaults: warm or tinted off-white (#F4F1EA) over #FFFFFF, near-black or deep navy over #000000, greys leaning with the palette.
• Accent is scarce: one number, bar, word, or rule per slide.
• Fixed canvas: rhythm comes from composition and accent, not alternating light and dark slides.
• Readable contrast is part of beauty; audit-contrast is the check.

Imagery and graphics

• One treatment: the same crop, color grade, and radius on every image; respect the system's imageStyle.
• Go big or leave it out: a full-height column or most of the canvas. Small floating thumbnails read as placeholders.
• Screenshots as hero shots: crop to what the headline is about, scale up, set on a fitting surface.
• One graphic vocabulary: 1-2px rules, large index numbers ("01"), one repeated shape motif. Every shape needs a semantic role.
• Charts in the deck's type and palette: thin strokes, direct labels, the key series in the accent, the rest neutral, no gridline or legend clutter.

Rhythm

• Reuse a small layout family: title, section, statement, big number, headline
  • image, split, grid of 3, quote, closing. Alternate dense and sparse; avoid three identical layouts in a row.
• Fixed chrome in the same place on every slide: a small running head, a page number like 04 / 12 from the create-deck slide-number tokens (never typed digits, which go stale on reorder), maybe a hairline.
• Title and section slides carry the strongest expression of the direction.

What reads as generic

Everything centered at similar sizes in one weight; purple-to-blue gradients, glass, glows, gradient text; rows of rounded icon + title + description cards; emoji or decorative icons; shadows and borders on every block; stock people-at-laptops; bullet walls or shrunk text; default blue and default chart colors; mixed radii, alignments, and gaps; decoration filling space that should stay empty.

Critique pass

After rendering, before get-layout-overflows and audit-contrast, check each changed slide:

1. Squint: one clear focal point, balanced masses.
2. Direction: delivers the requested look and matches the other slides; with a system linked, every color, font, radius, and logo comes from it.
3. Scale: real contrast between the largest and smallest type.
4. Grid: edges align within and across slides; chrome never moves.
5. Subtract: remove what does not serve the slide.
6. Portfolio: would a strong designer show it? If not, make the one change that would.
7. Craft: no orphans, straight quotes, awkward breaks, blurry images, or off-system colors and fonts.

Fix findings in one correction pass.