presentaid Design Checker: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

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    Laszlo Diewald has been working as a consultant for more than 10 years now. He started his career as an employee right after his study at the Technical University of Munich. Shortly after, he decided to become self-employed as a freelance consultant. In 2017, he founded his own consultancy, with a focus on large scale projects in the financial sector. In parallel, he started working on presentaid, which was finally launched in April 2022.

In this conversation, Laszlo talks about presentaid’s new Design Checker option.

Geetesh: Laszlo, let’s start with the “why.” Your documentation frames Design Checker around brand drift, where decks slowly lose their polish as they get copied, edited, and rushed under deadline pressure. Was there a specific moment or piece of customer feedback that convinced you that Design Checker was worth building as part of presentaid, or had it been on the roadmap for a while?

Laszlo: It had been on my mind for a while, but it wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was a pattern that kept repeating in customer conversations. I come from a PMO and project management background myself, so I’ve lived through the exact scenario Design Checker is built for: a deck gets built, then copied, then edited by three more people, then merged with slides from last quarter’s version, all under the usual deadline pressure before a steering committee or client meeting. Nobody sets out to ship an off-brand slide; it just accumulates, one small edit at a time, until suddenly there’s a stray font, or a color that’s close-but-not-quite.

What convinced me that this was worth building as a dedicated feature, rather than leaving it as something our Quick Styles and the Color Pane will mostly prevent, was realizing those tools only protect what happens going forward. They don’t catch what’s already in a 60-slide deck someone inherited eight revisions ago. Once I framed it that way – an automated pass that catches what slipped through, rather than another way to apply styles, the rest of the feature basically designed itself around that single job.

Geetesh: Design Checker works against either a deck’s own theme or a company-wide standard, lets users fix, jump to, or ignore each finding. Tell us more about how the feature works day to day, and where it’s headed next.

Laszlo: Day to day, it’s meant to feel like having a very meticulous colleague proofread your deck before you have to. You open the Design Checker pane, hit Check Presentation (or just the slides you’ve got selected), and it scans everything against rules: off-theme fonts and colors, inconsistent titles and footers, shapes hanging off the slide, orphaned footnotes, double spaces, that sort of thing. Findings show up grouped either by slide or by rule, with a severity slider so you can filter down to just errors if you’re in a hurry.

For each finding, you get three options:

1. Fix it with one click (works across every occurrence of that issue at once),
2. Jump straight to the slide to look at it yourself (we draw a highlight box right around the offending shape), or
3. Ignore it if it was intentional.

Everything’s undoable independently of PowerPoint’s own undo history, which matters more than people expect once they start using it.

For teams, there’s a company profile an admin can define: approved fonts, sizes, bullet formatting, so the checker enforces an actual organizational standard, not just internal consistency.

Where is it headed? More rule coverage based on what customer feedback surfaces, and tighter integration with the rest of our library and brand-control tooling, since brand drift and stale content are really two sides of the same problem.

Geetesh: Let us talk about practicalities. How would you frame presentaid’s cost to benefit ratio for someone weighing it against their current workflow, and is there a trial version available for readers who want to try it before committing?

Laszlo: I’d frame it less as a tool that costs X and more as what’s an hour of a senior person’s time worth the night before a board deck. A single user license of presentaid is €23/month or €248/year per user, so it’s well under €1 a day, and that’s for the full toolset, not just Design Checker.

If Design Checker alone saves you from manually eyeballing a deck once a month, it’s already paid for itself many times over, and that’s before counting our automated reports, libraries, agenda, or any of the other features. If you want hard facts, we also have a ROI calculator on our website.

And yes, there’s a 30-day free trial with full functionality, no credit card required. I’d genuinely encourage anyone reading this to just install it and run Design Checker against whatever deck is sitting open on their desktop right now. It tends to be a more convincing argument than anything I can say in an interview. The free trial can be requested on our website.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.