Learning objectives
You can:
- Place a formatting decision at the right level among master, layout and slide, and state for any given element which level owns it and what breaks if it is stored one level too low.
- Read a theme as roles rather than swatches, naming the twelve colour slots and two font roles, and explain why an element pointed at a slot survives a rebrand while a hard-typed hex does not.
- Build an eight-layout set covering title, section, one-column content, two-column content, chart, table, quote and closing, and defend each layout against the three-uses test.
- Audit a deck for local overrides, classify every override into one of eight classes, and produce the repair ledger that says which pass fixes which class.
- Sequence a repair so that each pass fixes the largest remaining class, and compute the time the sequence costs against the time the naive order would have cost.
- Compute the break-even for building a master, given a per-change saving and a build cost, and say honestly when a deck is too small or too short-lived to deserve one.
- Resolve a master collision when two decks are merged, choosing between the paste options, a layout remap, a hand repair and leaving an element alone, with the inheritance rule that decides each case.
- Ship a template file from a brand specification, checking its colour pairs against WCAG 2.1 AA contrast and rejecting or repairing any pair that fails.
- Version a template for a team, predicting the drift rate when a template changes after decks have been created from it, and running the re-apply pass that closes it.
- State what a master cannot do, naming the five Linter rules it leaves untouched and the judgement each one still requires from you.
Prerequisites & connections
Builds on. PR0.02, which is the entry to this branch and gives you the window, the four views, sections, the outline as a storyline check and the file hygiene that keeps a deck openable. It stops deliberately at using a template someone else built. Beyond that you need arithmetic and patience. No finance, no design background, and no prior deck that you are proud of.
Feeds forward. PR1.02 takes the placeholders you build here and teaches the geometry inside them: the grid, the twelve columns, distribution, optical alignment and the four-size type scale. PR1.03 takes the same objects and teaches shapes, tables, images, restraint in animation and the export checks that decide whether a deck survives leaving your machine. PR2.02 owns colour as a data-visualisation decision, which is a different question from the theme slot a colour lives in. PR3.02 uses the ghost-deck template as a thinking scaffold. PR5.01 to PR5.03 are the archetype templates, and every one of them is a layout set plus a storyline convention, which is why they are easy once this node is done. PR7.01 assumes all of it and gives you fourteen hours and a dataset you have not seen.
Seven neighbours own material that touches this one, and the boundaries are drawn on purpose so that nothing is taught twice. PR0.02 owns the interface, sections, file craft and applying an existing template; what is owned here is authoring one. PR1.02 owns alignment, grids, guides and the type scale as visual craft; here a placeholder's position is a storage decision, and where to put it on the grid is that module's question. PR1.03 owns object mechanics, animation, accessibility passes and export. PR2.02 owns the accent-and-neutral colour formula for charts, palette types and colour-blind safety; here the theme slot is the plumbing that formula runs through. PR2.03 owns the action title on a chart, which appears below only because a worked example builds a chart and a chart needs a title. PR5.01 to PR5.03 own the eight shipped deck templates as archetypes with storyline conventions attached. PR0.01 owns the audience and medium decision that precedes any of this. Where a section below names one of those ideas, it names it and moves on.