Slide Design Principles

This is the shared foundation for every deck builder in this category. It defines two things:

1. The slide-spec — a tool-agnostic, per-slide intermediate the builders produce before generating any .tex or .pptx. The spec is where structure is decided and corrected; the artifact is a mechanical render of an approved spec.
2. The design rules that apply regardless of format.

Use this skill directly for tool-agnostic slide feedback. Otherwise it is loaded as a dependency by:

• beamer-academic-deck — seminar, conference, lecture (LaTeX Beamer)
• beamer-proposal-report-deck — proposal, progress/final report (LaTeX Beamer)
• business-report-deck — industrial / executive report (PowerPoint via python-pptx, or Canva)

Planning a talk's narrative and pacing (what the one takeaway is, what to cut) is a separate, upstream job owned by research-talk-planner. This skill and the builders assume that planning is done — or do a lightweight version of it inline when no plan exists.

The slide-spec