title

When to use

• First slide of every deck. Sets topic, audience, and visual tone in one glance. The dark canvas anchors the deck visually so subsequent slides feel like a continuous document.
• Brand or section bookends. Pair with divider (mid-deck section breaks) and closing (the final slide) for the full anchor trio. All three share the dark-bookend treatment.
• Pitch and proposal openings. When the audience needs the headline and the framing line before any data. The subtitle paragraph is where the framing line goes.

When not to use

• Mid-deck statements. Use big-number or content for emphatic statements inside a deck. Reaching for the title chrome mid-deck breaks the bookend signal.
• Multi-line h1. Keep the h1 to one editorial line. The layout is centered and large — two-line titles get cramped and lose impact.
• Header or footer overrides. Don't add back _header: or _footer: on a title slide. The dark canvas is meant to be uninterrupted; chrome belongs on body slides.

Common mistakes

• Eyebrow written as bold or plain text instead of inline code, e.g. **Category · Date**. Wrap the eyebrow paragraph in backticks. The eyebrow CSS matches h1 + p:has(> code:only-child); without the code span the paragraph falls through to the general subtitle rule instead — it still renders styled, just as a second subtitle line, not the uppercase mono eyebrow lifted above the h1.
• The subtitle paragraph is authored before the eyebrow paragraph instead of after it. The eyebrow match is an immediate-next-ELEMENT-sibling selector (h1 + p:has(> code:only-child)) — it only counts element siblings, so an HTML comment between the h1 and the eyebrow is harmless, but another paragraph is not. Keep the source order heading → eyebrow → subtitle.
• Inline emphasis (**bold**, _italic_) inside the h1 itself. Keep the h1 to plain text. The centered, oversized type already carries full weight — nested emphasis at that scale reads as noise, not emphasis.
• Trying to author the spectrum bar as a markdown ---/*** rule instead of the spectrum class. Every top-level hr token in a slide body is Marp's slide separator (it splits the deck into a new slide) — there is no way to hand-author a literal rule element here. Add the spectrum class instead; the bar is CSS-generated.

Authoring

<!-- _class: title -->
<!-- _paginate: false -->
<!-- _header: '' -->
<!-- _footer: '' -->

# Deck title goes here

`Category · Date or audience`

One-line subtitle that frames the deck.

Slots

Anatomy

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│            [dark background]            │
│                                         │
│              EYEBROW LABEL              │
│                                         │
│           Display Title Here            │
│           Subtitle or tagline           │
│                                         │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Variants

<!-- _class: title silent spectrum -->

# A deck built on a color-coded spectrum.

`Six stages, six colors`

The title echoes the same six-step story the deck's own components carry.

Related

• dividermid-deck section breaks — same dark-bookend chrome
• closingthe final slide — closes the bookend pair