Stop Building Slides by Hand, AI Is Here

Building presentations is the need that comes up most often among the clients we support with Tandem. We all produce presentations internally and externally. And what takes time isn't so much the content, it's mostly the formatting.

Good news: for a few months now, AI has finally been able to generate clean slides that respect your brand guidelines!

Back in February, I did a full edition on a method to simplify presentation generation:

1. Deep Research to gather the raw material
2. A reasoning model to structure the message
3. Gamma to generate the deck.

If you want to take a look at the research + structure workflow, here's the previous edition:

Building perfect presentations with AI

Today, I won't go back over that. We're focusing on one specific point: producing clean slides, in your own image, without spending all day on them.

Status check → where do we stand on slide generation?

You can ask for slides from Claude (Artifacts), from Dust (frames), from ChatGPT… The catch is that it all comes out as HTML. Not importable into PowerPoint, not really editable, and above all no image generation, just diagrams.

Then Claude Design arrived, and it's a game changer. You generate slides of far better quality, still in HTML, but this time exportable to PowerPoint, to Canva, or sendable back to Claude Code to rework them. The gap with the classic chat is clear, as you'll see below.

The big shift = putting your brand guidelines into text

You know about skills : a markdown file that shares the context of a task with the AI, like an SOP. The design MD, follows exactly the same logic, but for your visual identity. Colors, typography, spacing, logos: everything is laid out in a text file that Claude reuses with every generation.

With the design.md, Claude can easily recreate the homepage of our site, but without the images (more on that later):

The benefit is obvious. You create it once, and every slide, every document keeps your brand's DNA. No more re-explaining your guidelines with every prompt.

How to create your design MD in a few minutes

Claude asks you questions and asks what you can share: website, Figma file, brand guidelines as a PDF, screenshots, logos… Code and Figma give the best results, but a URL and a few screenshots are plenty to get started.

There's a section on Claude Design to generate your design.md:

Claude asks you a series of questions to define your brand guidelines:

From there, Claude generates your system: palette, typography, components. You approve or ask for adjustments, block by block.

Design.md or skill? same principle

The design.md can only be used on Claude Design, but you can also create a “brand guidelines” skill and call it in a regular conversation. At Tandem, we have a /tandem-brand skill: as soon as I ask for a deliverable in the brand's style, Claude reads the skill and applies the guidelines on its own.

And it's not limited to slides. That same skill can generate sales proposals in docx or PDF, always on brand. To create it, you share your site's URL, some screenshots, your guidelines, and Claude builds the skill for you (comparable to the design.md but usable in chat or Cowork mode)

Here's the result of the very basic prompt from the screenshot above, respecting our guidelines:

In Claude Design, you can also attach skills on top of your design MD to steer the generation. Some are turnkey: “Make a deck” for an HTML deck, “Export as PPTX” for an editable file, “Save as PDF”…

Example with a deck

Here, a support proposal, 20 slides on brand. Editing happens directly in Claude Design, in several ways: “Adjustments” to tell Claude in natural language what needs changing, “Edit” to take over yourself on the background, the font or the text size, “Comments” to add comments on the slides.

Here are the possible modes one after another, separated by a yellow line:

Once you're happy, you export: editable PowerPoint, PDF, or standalone HTML. You can also send it straight to Canva or to Claude Code to push further.

Claude Design, Artifacts or Gamma?

Each solution has its pros and cons for now. One of the big questions is whether you want to take over after the generation or not (editing). Here's a recap:

• Artifacts in the chat → fast, but in HTML so barely editable and no images. Perfect for a diagram or a quick mockup, not for a deck to share and refine.
• Claude Design → quality HTML, editable in the tool, then exported as editable PowerPoint (native text and shapes) or as screenshots (frozen image, cleaner but not editable). The right compromise when you want polish and control. But still no image generation. That said, you can integrate shared images.
• Gamma (and the specialized slide tools) → this is where image generation and image management make the difference. AI images, stock libraries, models like Nano Banana, fine-grained layout control, PPTX or Google Slides export. If illustrating your points matters, Gamma goes further. For example on this slide, there are many options to place the image I want, between AI images, royalty-free images, or ones available on the web…

The real deciding factor often comes down to one question: do you need generated images, or are diagrams enough? Watch out for the cost on the Gamma side though: for a presentation of around 10 images, it ranges from €0.13 with a cheap model to a few euros with a premium model.

The limits of slide generation

Depending on the standard you expect from your slides, there are limits to keep in mind:

1. Typography. After exporting from Claude Design to PowerPoint, the layout holds up well, but the font size tends to shrink. Plan for some adjustments.
2. The content. As always with AI, there can be errors in the figures, the charts, the claims. A polished deck gives a false impression of reliability.

Cowork, another option

If you want native PowerPoint, Cowork can be an interesting solution. It's a hybrid between Claude chat (html), which is fast but not editable, and Claude Design (pptx), which is slow but editable.

You skip the HTML step: Cowork creates the .pptx file directly on your computer. It reads your context, relies on the formatting skill, and builds the native presentation.

It's noticeably faster to generate, but the output is less refined than Claude Design or Gamma. Best kept for working decks, when speed matters more than aesthetics.