Verdigris Design System

Experimental

Producing a slide deck

This guide walks producers (sales, GTM, SE, partner managers) through producing a Verdigris slide deck against the cell’s spec. Read this when you have an engagement that needs a deck and you’re not sure where to start.

If you’re not sure which cell or genre fits, start with the /pick-cell-and-genre skill (source on GitHub; .claude/skills/ paths are not rendered into the docs site) or the index.md decision tree.

Step 1 — Pick the genre

The slides cell defines five genres, each calibrated to a specific engagement context. Pick one before opening a template.

Genre Audience Engagement state
pilot-kickoff Customer team executing a signed pilot Contract signed; first artifact after signature
customer-101 Prospect’s initial evaluator First substantive meeting; pre-contract
customer-201 Prospect’s technical evaluator Post-101; pre-pilot diligence
partner-enablement Partner AE / channel manager Co-sell motion; partner needs Verdigris-fluency
internal-team Verdigris-only Weekly status, prep, post-mortems, board updates

If the situation doesn’t fit any of these, do NOT improvise a sixth genre on the spot. Pick the closest, document the deviation, and propose a new genre via the adversarial-review workflow.

Step 2 — Pick the density mode

Every deck declares a presentation density mode. The mode determines word budgets per slide, headline/body ratio, visual dominance, captions, and whether speaker notes are required.

Three modes:

Per-genre defaults (from each genre’s frontmatter):

Genre Default density
pilot-kickoff dual-use
customer-101 live-spoken
customer-201 leave-behind
partner-enablement leave-behind
internal-team dual-use

Override when the delivery context warrants. Two equivalent paths depending on artifact format:

HTML decks (the canonical produced artifact for the slides cell): set data-density on the body tag.

<body class="vd-slide-deck"
      data-genre="customer-201"
      data-confidentiality="CUSTOMER-CONFIDENTIAL"
      data-density="live-spoken">  <!-- override; this 201 is being delivered live -->

Markdown drafts (rendered to HTML by Jekyll): declare in YAML frontmatter; the layout emits the equivalent data-density attribute on body.

---
genre: customer_201
density: live-spoken   # override; emitted as data-density on body
---

Both paths converge at data-density on the body tag, which is what the linter and compliance audit read. The full density spec lives in pilot-kickoff.md § Presentation density.

Step 3 — Anonymization checklist (only if the deck will ship publicly)

Default: real customer / partner decks stay private. They are CUSTOMER-CONFIDENTIAL, PARTNER-CONFIDENTIAL, or INTERNAL ONLY (per genre default) and ship via secure channel.

If the deck will be shared as an example in examples/ — to teach the cell to other producers — it must be fully anonymized. See examples/README.md for the 7-point checklist (customer name, site nicknames, equipment IDs, vendor names, dollar amounts, Verdigris team names, channel identifiers).

The discipline is engagement-shape preservation with full identity substitution: keep the technical content fully (case study metrics, integration patterns, voice recipes), substitute every identifying string with a placeholder.

Confidentiality-tier overrides require a structural rationale. If the deck declares data-confidentiality on <body> that does not match the genre default (e.g., customer-101 defaults to PUBLIC but the deck contains content that warrants CUSTOMER-CONFIDENTIAL), <body> MUST also carry a data-confidentiality-rationale="..." attribute with a non-empty justification. HTML comments don’t count — the audit reads attributes, not comments. Enforced by composition.persuade-slide-deck.confidentiality-rationale (Z2O-1463).

Step 4 — Fill the canonical structure (and gather visuals first)

A common failure mode is to author 20+ text-only slides, then realize the genre canon requires diagrams and screenshots that nobody has produced. Gather visuals first; let the prose wrap around them.

Required visuals by genre — composition.persuade-slide-deck.visuals-required (Z2O-1461) enforces a per-genre floor on non-logomark <svg> / <img> / <figure> elements:

Genre Visual floor What the canonical structure expects
customer-101 1 Hero visual on the “what we do” slide
customer-201 3 Architecture diagram (position 3) + 2-3 real sample-output screenshots (operator dashboard, alert/anomaly view, API response)
pilot-kickoff 2 Architecture diagram + pilot-timeline visual
partner-enablement 2 Architecture diagram + objection-handling decision tree
internal-team 0 No contract — whatever the meeting needs

A deck shipping with zero qualifying visual elements (other than the logomark) is a structural failure caught at audit time.

Don’t ship placeholder-only slides either. composition.persuade-slide-deck.placeholder-density (Z2O-1462) fails any body slide where more than 50% of body content is <span class="vd-template">[FIELD: ...]</span>. Placeholders are fine for slot-fill (anchored metrics, decision dates, named contacts), not as the entire body of a slide.

Open the genre spec for the canonical slide structure:

Each spec carries:

Step 5 — Validate

Three checks before delivery. All run from the repo root.

Validate the rule structure:

npm run validate:rules

Catches token / rule schema issues independent of any specific deck.

Lint the deck for density violations:

npm run lint:slide-density categories/slides/examples/{your-file}.html

Catches per-mode word-count violations (live-spoken slides over ~36 words, dual-use over ~96, leave-behind over ~180). Filed under Z2O-1418. Exit 0 = clean.

Run the per-artifact compliance audit:

npm run audit:compliance -- categories/slides/examples/{your-file}.html

Catches violations of the 17 composition rules under composition.persuade-slide-deck in rules/visual-rules.yml: arc count + single-turn + max-low-energy, coupling type-floor + dark-bookends + chart-colors, logomark consistency, confidentiality marking, confidentiality rationale (Z2O-1463), role-not-name templating, absolute dates, table formatting, density-mode-required, density-word-cap, density-speaker-notes, visuals-required (Z2O-1461), placeholder-density (Z2O-1462). Resolve all critical findings before delivery. Should-fix findings are judgment calls.

For a private deck not in the repo, run the audit against a copy in /tmp/:

npm run audit:compliance -- /tmp/your-deck-draft.html

Step 6 — GTM review gate

Some genres need GTM review; others don’t. Default by genre:

Genre GTM review required
pilot-kickoff Yes — this is the customer team’s first artifact after signature; quality is load-bearing on the engagement
customer-101 Yes — this is the brand’s first impression on a new prospect
customer-201 Yes — technical evaluators are reading slides three times; imprecision is costly
partner-enablement Yes — partner AEs cite this for months; their customer conversations depend on it
internal-team No (Verdigris-internal; no external-audience risk)

The GTM reviewer is typically the engagement lead (sales) or the partnerships lead (partner-enablement). Async approval logged in the relevant Linear ticket or a Slack thread is the canonical record.

For example artifacts in examples/ that are fully anonymized: GTM review is not required because the content is fictional or scrubbed of customer identifiers.

Step 7 — Render to PDF

Slides are authored as HTML; the deliverable is usually a PDF the customer team can drop into a meeting, attach to an email, or print. Plain chrome --print-to-pdf produces blank pages on the slides stylesheet (paged-media context drops most slide content; verified against the canonical examples too). Use the build script (Z2O-1464):

npm run render:slides -- categories/slides/examples/{your-file}.html /tmp/{your-file}.pdf

Full-page viewport screenshot at 1280×(720·N) → slice at 720px boundaries → assemble into a paged PDF at 13.333in × 7.5in (matches the slides.css @page declaration). Each slide ships as one rasterized page; text is not selectable, but the layout is faithful. If cmd-F-able text is required, distribute the HTML directly.

Sanity-check before circulating:

qlmanage -t -s 1280 -o /tmp/ /tmp/{your-file}.pdf  # macOS thumbnail of page 1
open /tmp/{your-file}.pdf                          # eyeball every slide

If the title slide thumbnail shows only the logomark, the render bug bit you — re-run; do not ship.

Step 8 — Ship

Once validated, rendered, and (where applicable) GTM-reviewed:

Filename: {type}-{audience}-{topic}-{YYYYMMDD}-v{N}.{ext} per the sales-collateral production guide. Versioning vs refresh rules live there too.

Confidentiality marking: every slide carries the marking in the footer band. Tier varies by genre (PUBLIC / CUSTOMER-CONFIDENTIAL / PARTNER-CONFIDENTIAL / INTERNAL ONLY); presence is mandatory.

Distribution channel by tier:

Never:

See also