Architecture Portfolio Deck

About this template

Fourteen slides for a 10-15 minute talk

This deck is built for walking through your own work in ten to fifteen minutes: a job application at an architecture firm, a small competition pitch, a thesis portfolio review. It is not meant for meetings where the drawings themselves are reviewed – use the original drawings there and keep this deck as the opening and closing summary.

The seven agenda lines all lead to a slide

Slide 2 lists seven lines: 01 design attitude / 02 site analysis / 03 plan and section / 04 material detail / 05 existing building and renovation plan / 06 key figures / 07 trend analysis, each with a progress marker such as 01 / 07, and every one of the seven has a slide behind it. The file runs cover, agenda, four divider-plus-body pairs, the existing-building comparison on slide 11, key figures on 12, the trend chart on 13 and the closing slide on 14. Only the first four lines carry a divider and a body slide; the last three stand alone, so the four body slides are the only place to describe work at length.

1. The agenda wording and the divider titles are identical, so change both together. Renaming “site analysis” means editing slide 2, the divider on slide 5 and the body title on slide 6.
2. For more projects, duplicate a divider-plus-body pair (slides 9-10) to reach 16 slides, hand-number the new divider 05, add the agenda line, and change the 01 / 07 denominators to 08.
3. The cover holds only the category label (PRESENTATION DECKS), the title and one description line – there is no presenter field. Add your name and contact under the description yourself.
4. Each body slide is one lead sentence plus three numbered items. Do not add a fourth; duplicate the slide and run two per section.

What to swap into the four body slides

The stock wording is already architectural. Keep the order – attitude, site, plan, detail – and change the values to your own.

• Design attitude: three short rules such as “do not erase the level difference of the land”. Write rules you actually kept, not adjectives; the next three slides are their evidence.
• Site analysis: “site area 842 sqm, 4 m slope” and “6 m street frontage sets the entry” are placeholders. Change only the area, slope and access figures.
• Plan and section: “U-shaped plan around a courtyard”, “floor area table plus two sections” – facts checkable against the drawings. Add one line on your scope so team work is distinguished from yours.
• Material detail: “200 mm exposed concrete wall”, “1:1 brick mock-up” – dimensions and whether a mock-up existed. Interviews linger longest on this slide.

Figure cards and the use-type bars

The key figures slide shows 842 sqm site area, four storeys, 18 months of design, nine completed works. The first three describe one project while the last is a career total, so mixing the bases is confusing – make all four one project, or all four cumulative. Do not invent a value for a cell you cannot fill; swap the metric for something countable such as total floor area. The trend slide has four bars – housing 34, neighbourhood facility 52, culture 21, renovation 43 – labelled “unit: index”. Change that footnote before converting to counts, and remember the bars are shapes, not a chart object, so editing a number means resizing the shape by hand.

Common portfolio mistakes

• Five photos per project. The layout reserves space for three items, so extra images push the text out. Keep one hero image and move the rest to an appendix.
• Leaving the sample figures on slide 11 – completed in 1987, 2,400 sqm floor area, 40% heating and cooling saved by an envelope upgrade. They belong to a fictional project and will be the first thing a reviewer checks against your drawings.
• Editing only one side of slide 11. The three lines on the left (existing building) and the three on the right (renovation plan) have to face each other in the same order or the improvement does not read.
• Keeping the closing line “the original drawings come with it” while not actually sending them. That line reads as a promise.