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!

A duotoned dark purple and beige version of the Apple 'artist palette' emoji, in front of a light blue triangle across the top right corner

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.

Google Slides Simple Light theme layouts
Simple Light theme layouts
Google Slides Momentum theme layouts
Momentum theme layouts
Google Slides Focus theme layouts
Focus theme layouts

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:

  1. Open a new slide deck
  2. Go to the ‘Slide’ menu then ‘Edit theme’
  3. Update the styling on each of the layouts
  4. Rename the theme to something descriptive
Screenshot of a theme editing screen in Google Slides
Google Slides theme editing screen

Then when creating any other slide deck in future:

  1. Go to the ‘Slide’ menu then select ‘Change theme’
  2. Click ‘Import theme’
  3. Apply the theme you created
  4. Use the layout selector to pick a layout for each slide
Screenshot of the layout selection dropdown in Google Slides
Google Slides layout selector dropdown

Producing Paradise custom theme

You can see our theme in action on some of our recent slide decks:

Slides for 'How to secure your online accounts'
Slides for ‘How to secure your online accounts’
Slides for 'How to stick with a new habit'
Slides for ‘How to stick with a new habit’
Slides for 'How to live by your values with help from your calendar'
Slides for ‘How to live by your values with help from your calendar’

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