Creating a Google Slides theme lets you easily reuse the same font, layout and colour styling on every new slide deck. Here’s how you do it!
Summary: Creating a custom Google Slides theme lets you set consistent colours, fonts, and layouts. This saves time and ensures your presentations have a professional, unified look.
Google Slides is Google’s answer to PowerPoint, and a great presentation building tool if you’re already using Google Drive. The styling of your presentation is based on theme, background, and layout.
- Theme: A defined group of colours, fonts, and layouts
- Background: The picture/colour behind your content
- Layout: The way text and images are arranged
It comes with some pre-built themes (with varying degrees of ugliness), but if you have any sort of brand guidelines to follow or just want to level up, then a custom theme is for you.
Customising a Google Slides theme
In this video (5min), I show you how to setup a theme in Google Slides, including font and background colours, and how to apply the theme to any new slide deck:
Here’s what’s covered:
0:30 Create new Google Slide doc
0:56 Edit Google Slide theme
1:16 Apply a background colour
1:34 Change text colour
2:07 ‘Highlight section’ background colour
2:40 Select a layout
3:02 Rename the new theme (eg ‘Producing Paradise branding’)
3:23 Import theme into another document
3:50 Producing Paradise style guide
4:13 Producing Paradise Instagram styling
Google Slides Theme Creation Steps
To create a new theme:
- Open a new slide deck
- Go to the ‘Slide’ menu then ‘Edit theme’
- Update the styling on each of the layouts
- Rename the theme to something descriptive
Then when creating any other slide deck in future:
- Go to the ‘Slide’ menu then select ‘Change theme’
- Click ‘Import theme’
- Apply the theme you created
- Use the layout selector to pick a layout for each slide
Producing Paradise custom theme
You can see our theme in action on some of our recent slide decks:
Massive thanks to Aaron Puls for creating the Producing Paradise brand 🎨✨ Read more about the process we followed for that in our post: Producing our branding
Bring that same consistency to your whole business
Love how a custom Google Slides theme makes your presentations look polished and saves you time? That same approach can bring clarity and calm to the rest of your business systems.
The Organised Creative Notion Template
A thoughtfully designed workspace that helps freelancers plan content, track projects, and manage client work—all in one place.
EXPLORE THE TEMPLATE →
The Operations Review
A 1:1 session to simplify your systems and build smoother, more consistent workflows—tailored to your style.
BOOK A FREE 15-MIN DISCOVERY CALL →
When your tools match how you work, everything feels more manageable.
Great tips on creating a custom Google Slides theme! I especially appreciated the section about making use of master slides to maintain consistency. Excited to try out these ideas for my next presentation!
Great tutorial! I loved the step-by-step guidance on creating a custom Google Slides theme. The tips on color palettes and font choices were especially helpful. Can’t wait to try this out for my next presentation!
Yay! Thanks for taking the time to let me know, happy to help!