Branded PowerPoint Factory

The Scenario

You're a marketing coordinator at a professional services firm. Every week, partners and consultants ask you to "put something into slides" — thought leadership pieces, client proposals, internal updates, training decks. The firm has a strict brand template: specific fonts, exact hex colours, logo placement rules, approved layouts. Every deck you produce must look like it came from the same designer.

The problem: nobody follows the rules consistently. Partners create their own "quick" decks that look nothing like the brand. Consultants copy old presentations with outdated logos. You spend more time fixing other people's slides than creating your own.

Today, you're going to teach Cowork to be the brand police. You'll build a workflow where anyone can hand Cowork a content brief and receive a presentation that matches the template every time.

What You'll Learn

By completing this tutorial, you'll be able to:

• Codify brand rules into a machine-readable specification that Cowork can follow
• Design a folder structure that separates templates, inputs, and outputs for reusable workflows
• Craft prompts that reference brand constraints and request pre-creation validation
• Conduct systematic slide-by-slide brand compliance reviews
• Build a documented workflow that non-technical team members can follow independently

Prerequisites

• Claude Desktop with Cowork enabled (Pro or Max plan)
• A company PowerPoint template (.pptx) with master slides, or a brand guidelines document (PDF or text). If you don't have one, create a simple brand spec: choose two fonts, three brand colours (hex codes), logo placement rules, and preferred slide layouts.
• A sample content brief — a one-page document outlining what a presentation should cover (5-8 slide topics with bullet points)

Step 1: Audit Your Brand Template

Before teaching Cowork anything, you need to codify the brand rules. Open your PowerPoint template and document:

• Fonts: Primary heading font, body text font, sizes for each
• Colours: Primary brand colour (hex), secondary colour, accent colour, background colour
• Logo: Where it appears (every slide? title only?), size, position
• Layouts: How many master slide layouts exist? Title slide, content slide, section divider, two-column, image-heavy?
• Margins and spacing: How much white space surrounds content?
• Dos and don'ts: Any explicit rules like "never use clip art" or "maximum 6 bullet points per slide"

Write all of this into a file called brand-rules.md. Be specific — "the primary colour is blue" is useless; "the primary colour is #1B3A5C and is used for headings and slide title bars" is actionable.

Here's an example of what a thorough brand-rules.md looks like:

## Fonts
- Headings: Montserrat Bold, 28pt, colour #1B3A5C
- Body text: Open Sans Regular, 16pt, colour #333333
- Captions/footnotes: Open Sans Light, 12pt, colour #666666

## Colours
- Primary: #1B3A5C (navy — headings, title bars, key charts)
- Secondary: #E87A3C (terracotta — accent elements, highlights, CTAs)
- Background: #FFFFFF (white — all slide backgrounds)
- Light accent: #F5F0EB (warm grey — table alternating rows, callout boxes)

## Logo
- Appears bottom-right on every slide except the title slide
- Title slide: centred, 20% larger
- Minimum clear space: 1cm on all sides
- File: logo-dark.png for white backgrounds

## Layouts
- Title slide: logo centred, title below, subtitle below that
- Content slide: heading top-left, body below, logo bottom-right
- Section divider: full-width colour bar (#1B3A5C), white text centred
- Two-column: equal width columns, 2cm gutter
- Data slide: heading top, chart or table centred, source footnote bottom-left

## Rules
- Maximum 6 bullet points per slide
- Maximum 8 words per bullet point
- No clip art, stock photos, or decorative images
- Charts: bar charts for comparisons, line charts for trends, never pie charts
- Tables: alternating row shading using #F5F0EB

Your brand-rules.md doesn't need to be identical to this — but it should be this specific. Vague rules produce vague compliance.

Checkpoint: You've got a brand-rules.md file with fonts, colours (hex codes), logo rules, layout descriptions, and formatting constraints.

Step 2: Create the Working Folder Structure

Set up your workspace:

• Slide-Factory/ (root — point Cowork here)
  • templates/ — place your .pptx template and brand-rules.md here
  • briefs/ — place content briefs here
  • output/ — Cowork will save finished decks here

This structure separates the persistent assets (template, brand rules) from the per-project inputs (briefs) and outputs (finished decks). It's designed to be reusable: next week, you drop a new brief into briefs/ and run the same workflow.

Checkpoint: Folder structure created with template and brand rules in place.

Step 3: Write the First Content Brief

Create a content brief for a specific presentation. If you don't have a real one, use this example:

Brief: Q1 Client Success Stories

Audience: Partner meeting (internal) Slides: 8 Tone: Confident, data-backed, celebratory

1. Title slide: "Q1 2026 Client Wins"
2. Quarter overview: 12 new clients, £2.4M new revenue, 96% retention
3. Case study — FinCorp: Reduced reporting time by 40%
4. Case study — MedTech Ltd: Launched new product line 3 months early
5. Case study — GreenBuild: ESG compliance audit completed ahead of schedule
6. Key metrics comparison: Q1 vs Q4 (table format)
7. Lessons learned: What worked, what to improve
8. Next quarter priorities

Save this as briefs/q1-client-wins-brief.md.

The brief should be specific enough that two different people reading it would produce broadly similar presentations. If your brief says "include some data about Q1" without specifying which data, you're leaving too much to interpretation — and Cowork will fill the gaps with generic content or fabricated figures.

A good test: could you hand this brief to a human designer and get a usable first draft without any follow-up questions? If not, add more detail.

Checkpoint: A content brief with specific slide topics, audience, tone, and key data points is saved in the briefs folder.

Step 4: Craft the Presentation Prompt

Your prompt needs to reference both the brand rules and the content brief. This is where most people go wrong — they ask Cowork to "make a presentation" without pointing it at the brand constraints.

Read the brand rules in templates/brand-rules.md and the content brief in briefs/q1-client-wins-brief.md. Create a PowerPoint presentation saved as output/Q1-Client-Wins.pptx that:

1. Follows every rule in brand-rules.md — correct fonts, colours (exact hex codes), logo placement, and layout choices
2. Contains one slide per topic listed in the brief
3. Uses the appropriate master slide layout for each slide type (title slide layout for slide 1, content layout for body slides, etc.)
4. Keeps text concise — no more than 6 bullet points per slide, no paragraphs
5. Includes speaker notes on every slide with the full talking points
6. Uses British English throughout

Before creating the file, list the brand rules you will follow and the layout you will use for each slide so I can verify alignment.

That last line is critical — it forces Cowork to show you its interpretation of the brand rules before it creates the deck, giving you a chance to correct misunderstandings.

Checkpoint: Your prompt references brand rules by file path, specifies the output location, and requests a pre-creation brand alignment check.

Step 5: Review the Brand Alignment Check

When Cowork responds with its interpretation of the brand rules, verify:

• Are the hex codes correct? (Not "a shade of blue" — the exact code.)
• Did it identify the correct font names and sizes?
• Does it propose appropriate layouts for each slide?
• Did it note any rules it can't fully implement? (Some complex template features like animations or custom shapes may be beyond what Cowork can reproduce programmatically.)

If anything's off, correct it now. "The heading font should be Montserrat Bold at 28pt, not 24pt. And the accent colour is #E87A3C, not #E87A3D."

Checkpoint: Cowork's brand interpretation matches your brand-rules.md. Any discrepancies have been corrected before file creation.

Step 6: Generate and Review the Presentation

Let Cowork create the file. Once Q1-Client-Wins.pptx appears in the output folder, open it in PowerPoint (or Keynote, or Google Slides) and conduct a systematic review:

Slide-by-slide check:

Fill in this table for every slide. Note any deviations.

Common issues to watch for:

• Colours that are close but not exact (off by one hex digit — verify with the colour picker in PowerPoint)
• Default fonts instead of brand fonts (if the brand font isn't installed on your system, Cowork may fall back to a system font like Calibri or Arial)
• Logo missing or positioned incorrectly
• Slide layouts that don't match the master slide designs
• Text overflow — bullet points too long for the text box, causing text to spill off the slide
• Inconsistent spacing between slides — one slide has generous margins, another's cramped
• Speaker notes missing from some slides despite being requested for all

Checkpoint: You've reviewed every slide against the brand rules and noted all deviations.

Step 7: Iterate and Refine

Take the deviations you noted and ask Cowork to fix them. Be specific:

In slide 3, the heading colour is #1B3A5C but should be #1A3B5D. In slide 6, the table has 8 rows but the brief only specified 4 metrics — reduce to 4. Slide 7 is missing speaker notes. Please revise the file.

After the revision, check again. The goal is a deck that passes brand review with zero corrections needed.

Once you're satisfied, note exactly which corrections you had to make. These will inform the next step.

Checkpoint: The presentation passes brand review. All corrections have been applied.

Step 8: Build the Reusable Workflow Document

The real deliverable isn't one presentation — it's a system that anyone on your team can use. Create a file called slide-factory-workflow.md in your root folder that documents:

The Workflow:

1. Place the content brief in briefs/ as a Markdown file
2. Open Cowork, point it at Slide-Factory/
3. Paste the standard prompt (include the exact prompt text)
4. Review the brand alignment check before approving
5. Open the output file and run the slide-by-slide review checklist
6. Request corrections if needed

Known Limitations:

• List the elements Cowork handles well (fonts, colours, text, basic layouts)
• List the elements that need manual finishing (complex graphics, animations, gradient backgrounds)

Common Corrections:

• List the specific corrections you had to make, so future users know what to watch for

Checkpoint: You've got a complete workflow document that someone else on your team could follow to produce a brand-compliant deck without your help.

Expected Output

Your deliverable is a repeatable presentation workflow:

• brand-rules.md — codified brand standards
• Q1-Client-Wins.pptx — a brand-compliant presentation
• slide-factory-workflow.md — the documented process for anyone to follow
• A folder structure designed for ongoing use

The next time a partner says "can you put this into slides," you hand them the workflow document and the folder structure. They drop in a brief, run the prompt, and get a brand-compliant deck in minutes.

Why This Matters at Scale

The immediate value is one deck produced faster. The strategic value is brand consistency across your organisation. When every presentation goes through the same workflow with the same brand-rules.md, the visual identity of your firm's output becomes uniform — regardless of who created it, which office they sit in, or how much they care about design.

For firms that produce hundreds of presentations per year across dozens of partners and consultants, this workflow eliminates the single biggest source of brand drift: people who are too busy (or too important) to read the style guide. They don't need to read it. The workflow enforces it automatically.

The cost of brand inconsistency is real but invisible until you measure it. Clients notice when one proposal looks polished and the next looks like it was assembled in haste. A repeatable slide factory turns "we should follow the brand guidelines" from a suggestion into an enforced standard.

Extension Challenges

1. Multi-template support — Add a second template (e.g., a client-facing template and an internal template) and modify the prompt to select the correct one based on the brief's audience field.

2. Batch deck production — Place three different briefs in the briefs/ folder and modify the prompt to produce three separate presentations in one run. Test whether Cowork handles this in parallel.

3. Add a quality gate — After Cowork creates the deck, add a second prompt that asks Cowork to review the output against brand-rules.md and produce a compliance report listing any deviations it finds. See if Cowork can catch its own mistakes.