I render slide layouts at 1920x1080 and run automated checks on every one of them: content outside the canvas, text clipped by its container, content running into the footer, overlapping elements, and elements hidden behind others.
After a while I noticed the failures weren't random. The same patterns kept coming back, and they matched what makes a generated deck feel off when you sit through it. None of them are about taste. They are decisions made in the wrong order.
1. Everything is centered
Cover centered, body centered, closing centered. Centered text never tells the reader where to start. A cover with one line can stay in the center. Once there are two blocks of information, left align and make one of them clearly bigger than the rest.
2. Three cards, whatever the content
Two items become three cards. Five items become three cards. The layout got picked before anyone counted the items, and three across is the arrangement most templates lead with, so that is what comes back by default.
Count first, then pick an arrangement built for that count. Quick test: cover the slide and say how many things it compares. If that number isn't the number of boxes on screen, the form is wrong.
3. The title is a sentence
"We improved customer satisfaction through a data-driven approach" is not a title. It's the script, and it competes with the person speaking. Cut it to a noun phrase and lead with the number: "Satisfaction up 32%". If a title needs more than about 40 characters, two messages are probably sharing one slide.
4. Numbers arrive without a source
A market size in 90pt type, no year, no idea who produced it. Models are good at filling in plausible figures and just as good at leaving out where they came from. Put the year and source on the same slide, even in small type. A blank space is cheaper than a wrong number.
5. Decoration that means nothing
A gradient behind the text, an icon on every bullet. Decoration exists to pull the eye somewhere, so when everything is decorated, nothing pulls. Use one accent color per slide and spend it once. Gradients also shift the value behind text, so contrast stops being predictable and small type suffers first.
6. Text that clips or overflows
A title wraps to two lines and pushes the cards below it off the edge. This is a verification problem, not a design one. Generated slides usually look fine as code and have never been rendered at real size.
This is also the easiest one to catch with a script. Render the slide in a headless browser at the size you'll present at, then compare each element's bounding box with its container. For hidden content, document.elementFromPoint at the element's center tells you whether something else is sitting on top of it.
7. Slides drift from each other
Slide three and slide seven have different margins, and the body text changes size somewhere in between. Building one slide at a time means every decision is made fresh and lands on a slightly different value. Nobody in the audience names this one. They just remember the deck as careless.
The fix is the same one you'd use in a web app: pull spacing and type sizes into CSS variables and let every slide read from them, so the whole deck keeps one rhythm.
The order behind all seven
The usual sequence is to write everything, look for a layout, then shrink the text or stretch the box when it doesn't fit. Reverse it. Decide the one thing the slide has to say, count the items, pick an arrangement for that count, then write to the space you have. Most of the list above never gets a chance to happen.
What else do you keep seeing in generated decks? I built this list from render failures, so it leans toward things a script can detect. I suspect the tells that matter most are ones no checker would catch.
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