About this design
Where the Stanford Style style comes from, and what it signals.
Stanford Style is a Stanford presentation template for research talks, drawn from the university's published identity. Cardinal red #8C1515 fills the cover and runs as a 30px brand bar across each content slide. Type sits in Stanford black #2E2D29, set in Source Sans 3 and Source Serif 4, the Google Fonts versions of the typefaces the identity guide names. It is an unofficial homage with no affiliation, license or endorsement.
You walk the room from question to credit. On the problem framing slide, the signature, you split a point-of-view statement into user, need and insight rows, the format design thinking courses teach, and end on one how-might-we question in a dark band. Next come the study design, results with 95% confidence intervals, a ledger of pre-registered hypotheses with nulls beside wins, and a team slide grouped by role.
In charts, cardinal marks the winning condition, Palo Alto green #175E54 the comparison arm and gray #767674 the control. Fog #DAD7CB fills the monograms that stand in for headshots. Use these Stanford-style slides for lab meetings and design research readouts.
Use it for
- Lab meetings and research group updates with experiment results
- Design thinking project readouts that open with a point of view and a how-might-we question
- Field trial or pilot study results for funders and community partners
- Graduate student talks at department seminars and conferences
- Grant progress reports that credit a team and its partners
Skip it for
- Business school case discussions built around a protagonist; Harvard Style follows the case method
- Presenting someone else's paper at journal club; Research Paper marks up the reprint in red pen
- Dissertation defenses organized by chapter; Thesis Defense tracks chapters on a rail
The presentation design prompt
This is the exact text that gets sent to your AI.
Create a presentation in the 'Stanford Style' theme, an unofficial homage to a cardinal red university research-lab talk. Background: white (#ffffff) on content slides. Typography: 'Source Sans 3' (Google Fonts) for titles at 700 to 800 (26 to 28px on content slides, 50 to 56px on the cover) and body text at 13 to 16px; 'Source Serif 4' for problem statements, how-might-we questions and plain-language findings at 19 to 28px, italic for the question. Headings #2e2d29, body #43423e, muted notes #6d6c69, rules #d5d5d4. The signature brand bar: a 30px cardinal (#8c1515) strip across the top of every content slide with the lab name in white Source Sans 3 600 12px on the left and the talk's short title in #f3e3e3 on the right. Title slide: full-bleed #8c1515, the brand bar darkened to #820000, a serif italic line naming the study type, a heavy white left-aligned title, a one-sentence serif description, speaker and venue at the bottom. Content titles state the finding in one sentence, such as 'A cooled room plus a daily text cut hot hours by 60 percent'. Problem framing slide: a point-of-view statement split into three ruled rows labeled User, Need and Insight in 14px cardinal 600, each row a Source Serif 4 phrase at 24px, then a full-width #2e2d29 band at the bottom with 'How might we' in #dad7cb and the question in white serif italic 28px. Study design: numbered phases on a 2px cardinal timeline, then trial arms on a #f2f1ec panel, each with a 4px left border in its chart color and its n. Results: one exhibit per slide, bars with 95% confidence intervals and p-value brackets, white values inside the bars, the winning condition #8c1515, comparison Palo Alto green #175e54, control #767674, no gridlines or legends, the effect restated in one serif sentence beside the chart with n. Hypothesis ledger: pre-registered IDs such as H1 in cardinal, the hypothesis, a result marker (filled #175e54 circle for supported, half-filled for partly supported, empty cardinal ring for not supported) and a right-aligned estimate with its interval; report null results in the same table. Lab team: people grouped by role under 2px cardinal rules, 34px #dad7cb monogram circles with cardinal initials, partners and funders credited. Footer on content slides: a 1px #d5d5d4 rule with the source or protocol line bottom-left and the page number bottom-right, both 11px #6d6c69. Strictly avoid: university seals, the tree emblem, wordmarks or any logo, claiming affiliation with Stanford University or any of its schools, cardinal backgrounds on content slides, gradients, drop shadows, stock photos of campuses or labs, clipart lightbulbs and sticky notes, bar charts without error bars or n, hiding null results, centered body text, bullet walls, identical rounded cards, extra chart colors. Use this theme for my slides. Ask me what the presentation is about first, then apply the theme to every slide.View this prompt and its data on GitHub
How to use this prompt
From copied text to a finished Stanford Style deck in four moves.
- 01
Copy the prompt
Use the copy button, or open it pre-filled in Claude or ChatGPT with one click from the panel on this page.
- 02
Tell the AI your topic
The prompt instructs the AI to ask what your presentation is about first. A sentence or a pasted outline is enough.
- 03
Generate and iterate
Ask for more slides or swap a layout. The avoid list at the end of the prompt keeps Stanford Style on-style while the content changes.
- 04
Or skip straight to a deck
SlideSpeak turns your topic or document into a finished Stanford Style presentation, exportable as PowerPoint or PDF.
Common questions
Working with the Stanford Style presentation design prompt in practice.
