Investors in Miami do not read pitch decks the way founders hope they will. A partner at a Brickell fund flips through a deck in about three minutes, usually on a phone between meetings, and decides whether the founder deserves a call. A family office in Palm Beach asks for a deck so it can forward it to a colleague without you in the room. In both cases the deck has to work alone, which is a harder job than most founders realize.
Design is not decoration here. It is the way a deck controls what the reader notices first, how fast they understand the business, and whether the numbers feel credible. We design pitch decks as part of our brand design work, and we pair them with video when a deck needs a founder presence behind it. Every Live Global Studios engagement includes a director, DP, audio engineer, and producer on the production side, so the deck and the pitch film can be built as one package.
What a deck is actually for
There are really three decks, and confusing them is the most common mistake. The first is the send-ahead deck, built to be read alone. It carries more text, more context, and clear headlines that tell the whole story without narration. The second is the presenting deck, built to be spoken over. It carries fewer words, bigger visuals, and one idea per slide. The third is the leave-behind, a tighter version with the data room links and the ask. Founders usually build one hybrid file and use it for all three jobs, and it fails at each of them.
We start every deck by asking which room it is meant to win. A seed round pitch at a Wynwood accelerator demo day is a different object from a Series A deck sent to a Coral Gables family office. The audience, the length, and the proof they need are all different.
The structure that holds attention
Most strong decks follow a similar arc, and the arc matters more than the slide count. It opens with a single sentence that states what the company does in plain language. It follows with the problem, framed through a specific customer rather than a market statistic. Then comes the solution, shown with a real product image or a clear diagram, then the traction that proves anyone wants it. Market size, business model, team, and the ask come after. Competition belongs in the deck but rarely as a crowded quadrant chart that flatters the founder.
The headline on each slide should be a claim, not a label. A slide titled Traction tells the reader nothing. A slide titled Revenue grew 4x in nine months tells the reader the point, and the chart below it only has to confirm it. When we review decks, rewriting the headlines is often the fastest improvement we can make.
Design choices that signal credibility
Investors read design as a proxy for discipline. A deck with five typefaces, clashing colors, and stretched logos suggests a team that does not sweat details. We keep decks to two typefaces and a restrained palette, build every chart in the same style, and use real photography or product renders in place of stock imagery. Numbers get room to breathe. A single large figure beats a table of twelve small ones.
We also design for the phone. Text that looks fine on a laptop becomes unreadable when the deck is opened from an email on a handset. We test every deck at phone size before it ships, and we export a compact PDF that loads quickly, because a heavy file that stalls on a bad connection is a bad first impression.
Adding a founder video
A deck is cold on its own. A short founder video, ninety seconds to three minutes, gives an investor a sense of the person behind the numbers, and it often gets watched more reliably than the deck gets read. We can film it at The Chat Room, our Miami Beach studio on Lincoln Road, with a clean set, good light, and audio that sounds like a real conversation. The video and the deck share the same visual identity, so they read as one coherent company. For companies that need a product demo or a customer proof piece, we can shoot those on location and cut them into the deck as embedded clips or links.
What it costs
Honest ranges look like this. A clean presenting deck of 12 to 20 slides, built from your content and a refined template, typically runs 2,500 to 5,000 dollars. A fully custom deck with original charts, illustrations, and a narrative rewrite usually lands between 6,000 and 12,000 dollars. A founder video produced alongside the deck is quoted separately and commonly runs 2,500 to 6,000 dollars depending on whether you need one set or several scenes. Rush turnaround is possible but adds a premium, and we will tell you plainly what that premium is before work begins.
Frequently asked questions
How many slides should a pitch deck have?
Twelve to fifteen is the common range for an early-stage send-ahead deck. A presenting version can run shorter, since each slide gets a full minute of attention.
Do you write the content or only design it?
Both. We can work from your outline or help restructure the story, then design around the final messaging.
Can you build the deck in PowerPoint or Keynote so we can edit it?
Yes. We deliver editable source files along with a PDF, so your team can update numbers without calling us.
Can you shoot a pitch video to go with the deck?
Yes. We shoot founder pitches and product demos at our Miami Beach studio or on location, and match the look to the deck.
If you are heading into a raise and want the deck and the pitch to carry the same standard, start on our Connect page.
