Slides that Rock: Create an Awesome Presentation about Your Company, Product or Service
Slides That Rock · Presentation Design
A charismatic pep talk with a real story structure buried inside, but you already know most of the actual advice.
A simple structure, delivered with a lot of filler
"Slides that Rock" promises six design principles and delivers something narrower: a story template borrowed heavily from Steve Jobs keynotes, plus a short checklist for cleaning up visual clutter. The course opens by asking students to identify their audience among three groups, customers, investors, or partners, since each wants a different pitch. That framing is useful and specific: a customer wants the product, an investor wants returns, a partner wants long-term involvement. It is also the most rigorous few minutes in the whole 93.
The story lecture is the backbone of the course, running nearly 24 minutes on its own. It teaches a three-part arc (beginning, middle, end) modeled on Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone launch: open with a short, "Twitter-friendly" headline, name the audience's problem as a villain, then resolve it with the product as hero. The rule of three shows up here and everywhere else, capping lists, sections, and talking points at three items on the reasoning that anything longer is forgettable. It is a serviceable mnemonic device, not a discovery, but it is taught with enough repetition that it will stick.
Where the design advice thins out
Once the course moves into actual slide design, the substance drops off fast. Simple Slides argues for blank canvases over templates, logos confined to the first and last slide only, and a hard ban on bullet points, pushing detailed information into handouts instead. Awesome Colors recommends pulling a palette from your product photography, your existing brand, or a site like Color Hunt, illustrated with a black-and-white-plus-one-accent-color example built around a leather goods brand. Cool Fonts is thinner still, mostly a reminder that system fonts embed reliably across computers while custom fonts require exporting to PDF, with free and paid font sites mentioned only in passing. Stunning Images covers real ground on photo sourcing, naming specific sites and warning against pixelated images, visible watermarks, and clip-art style graphics, but stops short of any actual composition or layout technique beyond the one-message-per-slide rule already established.
None of this is wrong, but very little of it is taught with the specificity that would make it stick beyond a single viewing. Compare the story lecture's clear structure to the color lecture's vague "pick colors that match your brand," and the unevenness becomes obvious.
The verdict
The course is heavy on motivational framing (repeated references to a "baby" audiences don't care about, a "villain" they need slain) and comparatively light on execution detail once you get past the story structure. A student who has never thought about presentation structure before will leave with a usable checklist: define your audience, write a hero-villain story with a punchy headline, strip your slides down to one message each, and source clean images. A student who has already absorbed a book like "Presentation Zen" or watched a few keynote teardowns will find almost nothing new, since the course leans on the same handful of Jobs examples rather than expanding into fresh technique.
The final project, a 25 to 30 slide deck about your own company or product, is a reasonable capstone and forces students to apply the structure rather than just absorb it. The suggested step of showing the finished deck to three honest reviewers before calling it done is good practical advice, if easy to skip. Overall this is a fast, encouraging primer rather than a deep design education, best suited to someone building their first real pitch deck from scratch.
The standout
The hero-villain story structure borrowed from Steve Jobs keynotes, where the audience's problem becomes a named villain your product defeats.
What you will learn
- Defining your audience across customer, investor, and partner segments before writing a single slide
- Structuring a talk in three parts using a Twitter-friendly headline, a stated villain, and a hero-product resolution
- Applying the rule of three to limit lists, sections, and on-slide points
- Stripping slides of templates, logos (except first and last), and bullet points in favor of one message per slide
- Choosing colors from your product, brand, or a color-palette site instead of a generic template
- Sourcing high-resolution, non-watermarked images from free and stock photo sites
Best for: A first-time founder or small-business owner who has never structured a pitch deck and needs a simple checklist to stop making bullet-point slides.
Skip it if: Anyone who has already read a presentation-design book or watched a few Steve Jobs keynote breakdowns, since the material covers the same ground without much new depth.