Education presentation design is a commercial job, not a classroom one. We do two of them for universities and colleges: the presentations that attract new students, and the PowerPoint template systems that keep every department on brand once marketing has signed them off. Both accessible by default, because in education that is the law rather than a preference.
Most institutions come to us for one and stay for the other.
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Outwards, to people who have no obligation to listen: prospective students, their parents, funders and partners. Inwards, across an institution that behaves like 40 separate organisations with one logo between them. Both jobs are high-stakes, and both are usually done without help.
Student recruitment is the highest-stakes presenting most universities do, and it gets the least design support.
Think about who is actually in the room. They are 17, they are sitting next to a parent, and they have already been to three of these at other institutions this month. They are comparing you against all of them on the train home, from memory. A deck built by committee in the department’s own shade of blue does not survive that comparison.
What we build for recruitment teams
Most universities we work with have a central marketing team, a brand book, and a template sitting on the intranet that nobody uses. They also have every school, faculty, research centre and professional services directorate building slides their own way, with a logo someone downloaded from Google in 2019.
That is a distribution problem rather than a design problem, and it comes from how universities are structured rather than from anyone doing a bad job. A central team cannot design its way out of it one deck at a time.
So we build PowerPoint template systems for the people who never asked for one: real layouts rather than a blank master, locked brand elements, a charting library, an icon set, and enough options that a lecturer with 20 minutes does not go looking for a workaround. You can see what one looks like in the template system we built for Totalmobile. Different sector, same problem.
“Why not just fix the template we already have?”
Sometimes that is the right answer, and we will tell you so rather than sell you a rebuild. But most institutional templates fail for the same reason: they were built as a brand asset rather than as a tool, so they solve consistency and nothing else. A template will not decide what goes on slide one of your clearing talk. The argument still has to be made, and that is the part that wins or loses the room.
We worked with Elise and the team at Hype to create a set of PowerPoint templates and the whole process was a pleasure to be part of. Impressive communication, design, knowledge and patience! We wouldn't hesitate to work with Hype again in the future.
UK universities and colleges are public sector bodies under the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018, which makes WCAG 2.2 AA a legal standard rather than a preference. In the US, the Department of Justice’s ADA Title II rule sets a comparable bar for public institutions. Slides shared with students count, and so does the template every department builds on.
So we design for it from the start instead of retrofitting: real contrast ratios, text that is text rather than a picture of text, reading order that makes sense to a screen reader, alt text written properly, and captions on anything with audio.
Building it into the template matters more than fixing it deck by deck, because that is the only way the standard reaches the other 40 departments. It also makes the deck better for everyone in the back row.
The audience, the outcome, the date, and the thing most agencies skip: who actually signs it off. In education that list is long, and we would rather know on day one than at round three.
We write the argument before anyone opens a design file. For a recruitment deck, that means deciding what a 17-year-old remembers on the train home.
Concepts on your brand, not ours. Accessibility built in, not bolted on.
In PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote or Figma Slides. Most university brand work is PowerPoint, though Google Workspace for Education makes Google Slides the default across much of the sector.
Consolidated feedback, one voice per round. Committees are the norm here, so we plan for them.
Source files, a walkthrough, and launch support for the departments who have to use it. A template nobody knows about is a template nobody uses.
Education presentation design is the design of presentations and template systems for education institutions: universities and colleges. In practice it covers student recruitment presentations, institutional PowerPoint templates, and the funding and board decks that go to governing bodies and trustees. It is a commercial discipline rather than classroom resource design.
Yes, and it is the bulk of our education work. We work with university marketing, recruitment and brand teams across the UK and the US, from studios in Manchester and Brooklyn. Most of that work sits under NDA, which is why you will see logos and slides on this page rather than written case studies.
Yes, and it is one of the two things we do most in this sector. An institutional template has to serve every school, faculty and directorate at once, so it needs real layouts, locked brand elements, accessibility built in, and enough flexibility that departments do not go around it. The wider service sits on our PowerPoint template design page.
Yes. UK universities and colleges fall under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 and WCAG 2.2 AA, and US institutions are covered by the ADA Title II rule. We design to those standards from the start: contrast, real text, reading order, alt text and captions. Building it into the template is what makes it stick across the institution.
Yes. Most university brand and template work is PowerPoint, but Google Workspace for Education makes Google Slides the default across much of the sector, particularly in colleges. We build in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote or Figma Slides, and we will tell you if you are in the wrong one.
From £1,900 / $2,500 for around 10 slides, rising to £8,550 / $11,400 for our ultimate tier. Storytelling and content development is £975 per 20 slides. An institution-wide template system is quoted separately, because the cost depends on how many departments it has to serve rather than how many slides it contains. What moves the number: slide count, how settled your content is, turnaround, and how many people have sign-off. If the need is recurring across faculties, retained studio time from £1,900 / $2,500 a month usually works out cheaper than commissioning deck by deck. Full pricing is published, including what each tier includes.