---
title: How to Make a Gartner Hype Cycle Slide in PowerPoint
description: How to build a Gartner Hype Cycle slide in PowerPoint — curve proportions, vertex editing, and keeping technology labels from overlapping.
image: https://www.advis-io.com/hubfs/blog-key-visuals/111-gartner-hype-cycle-slide-powerpoint.en.kv.png
---

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Consulting Slides

# How to Make a Gartner Hype Cycle Slide in PowerPoint

How to build a Gartner Hype Cycle slide in PowerPoint — curve proportions, vertex editing, and keeping technology labels from overlapping.

[Advisio Editorial](https://www.advis-io.com/en/blog/author/advisio-editorial)

 Oct 4, 2026

---

A Gartner Hype Cycle slide is not a generic S-curve you can eyeball from a stock chart and label afterward. Treat it that way and two things break almost immediately: the five phases get equal-width zones that don't match the shape anyone actually recognizes as a hype cycle, and the moment a market scan turns up eight technologies clustered in the Peak of Inflated Expectations against one sitting alone in the Trough of Disillusionment, half the labels start overlapping. The fix: draw the curve as a single Freeform shape with five to seven edited vertices set to Smooth Point — not a line chart, not SmartArt's basic curve — size each phase's zone to its own conventional proportion instead of splitting the x-axis into five equal fifths, and switch a crowded zone from direct labels to numbered markers with a legend row before the labels start colliding. The rest of this walks through each step, including the two places it usually breaks.

## What the Finished Slide Actually Looks Like

Before the steps, it's worth being precise about what you're building, because "hype cycle slide" covers a few different things depending on who's asking. The one a strategy or BizDev team actually needs for a market-scan workshop is a single continuous curve running left to right, with "Time" labeled along the x-axis and "Visibility" (Gartner's own term — some teams substitute "Expectations," which reads just as clearly) along the y-axis. Five phase zones sit beneath the curve, separated by thin dashed vertical dividers, with the phase names set in small type below the axis line rather than on the curve itself: Innovation Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment, Plateau of Productivity. A set of named technologies — however many the current scan turned up, which is rarely a round number — sit as small markers on the curve at the height matching their assessed phase, each with a label identifying it.

That last part is where almost every downloadable template quietly stops helping. A template ships with four or five placeholder markers spaced evenly across the curve, because a template can't know in advance that this year's scan will put six technologies in the Peak and only one in the Trough. Real market scans are lumpy — interest in a category clusters, which is exactly what the Peak of Inflated Expectations is supposed to represent — and a slide built to hold an even, generic spread breaks the first time real content goes in.

## Step 1 — Size Each Phase's Zone Before You Draw Anything

Start with the x-axis layout, not the curve. The common failure here is splitting the axis into five equal fifths — 20% of the width per phase — because that's the fastest way to lay out five labeled sections and it's what most of the downloadable templates default to. It also produces a curve that doesn't read as a hype cycle at a glance: equal fifths make the Trough look as wide as the Peak and squeeze the Slope of Enlightenment, which is conventionally the longest phase, into the same width as the shortest one.

The convention worth following instead: Innovation Trigger stays narrow, because the rise from nothing to initial buzz is fast. Peak of Inflated Expectations stays narrow too — hype peaks are brief by definition, which is part of why they're called peaks rather than plateaus. Trough of Disillusionment gets noticeably more width than either of those, since it covers both the fall from Peak and the extended bottom where disillusionment actually sets in. Slope of Enlightenment is the widest segment on the whole curve, because that's the phase where a technology typically spends years, not quarters, as practical use cases get worked out one at a time. Plateau of Productivity trails off at whatever width is left, usually comparable to the Trough.

In practice, that means roughly a 10-12-18-40-20 split of the total curve width rather than 20-20-20-20-20. You don't need to measure this to the pixel — draw four vertical guide lines at those approximate x-positions first, using PowerPoint's Smart Guides or a quick set of placeholder rectangles you'll delete later, and build the curve and phase labels against those guides rather than against a mental five-even-slices assumption.

## Step 2 — Draw the Curve as One Freeform Shape, Not a Chart

Two wrong tools get reached for here. The first is a native PowerPoint line or scatter chart, plotting a handful of made-up data points for "visibility over time." Charts connect points with straight segments by default, and even with smoothing turned on, a chart object comes with axis gridlines, data markers, and a legend system you'll spend more time stripping out than you would have spent just drawing the shape. The second is SmartArt's basic curved-arrow process graphic, which produces a single uniform arc — it has no mechanism for an asymmetric rise-peak-fall-climb-plateau shape, because that's not what it was built for.

The right tool is the Curve or Freeform shape from Insert \> Shapes, followed immediately by right-click \> Edit Points. Place vertices at the key moments in the shape — roughly: start point near the baseline, a point partway up the rise, the peak itself, the bottom of the trough (which should sit lower than your starting point, not level with it — that's part of what makes the shape read correctly), a midpoint on the long climb, the start of the plateau, and the end point. Six or seven vertices is usually enough; more than that and the curve starts picking up unwanted wobbles.

With the vertices placed, right-click each one and confirm it's set to **Smooth Point**, not Corner Point or Straight Point. A Smooth Point gives you two symmetric handles you can drag to control how steep the curve is on either side of that vertex — drag the handles at the peak vertex short and tight for an abrupt-feeling peak, or longer and flatter for a more rounded one. The common failure here is leaving a vertex on its default setting after you've repositioned it, which PowerPoint sometimes reverts to Corner Point: the curve then shows a visible kink at exactly the point — usually the peak or the trough bottom — where a hype cycle most needs to look continuous. If your curve has a sharp angle anywhere other than intentionally, right-click that vertex and switch it before touching anything else. [The same vertex-editing technique](https://www.advis-io.com/en/blog/change-curve-powerpoint?hsLang=en) is what makes a change curve slide's S-shape look hand-drawn rather than chart-generated, and the failure mode — a stray Corner Point breaking an otherwise smooth line — is identical.

Keep the whole curve as one shape. Resist the urge to draw it in segments (a rising piece, a falling piece, a climbing piece) and stitch them together — a single Freeform object is one thing to recolor, one thing to reposition if the slide layout changes, and one set of vertices to touch next year rather than three.

## Step 3 — Mark Phase Boundaries and Keep Labels Off the Curve

Add a thin dashed vertical line at each of the four boundaries between your five zones from Step 1 — light gray, low-contrast, since these are reference lines, not data. Set the five phase names in small type below the x-axis, each centered under its own zone. Two of the names — "Peak of Inflated Expectations" and "Trough of Disillusionment" — are long enough that they'll want to run past their zone's width if that zone is narrow (which Peak usually is); let the text wrap to two lines rather than shrinking the font size differently from the other four, since mismatched phase-label sizes read as sloppier than a two-line label does.

The common failure at this step is putting the phase names directly on the curve, near the top of each zone, because that's where there's open space before any technology markers go in. It looks fine until Step 4, when technology labels need exactly that same vertical space — now the phase name and the technology labels are fighting for the same band above the curve, and whichever was placed first gets covered. Keep phase names anchored to the axis at the bottom; keep the space above the curve free for the content that actually varies scan to scan.

## Step 4 — Plot Technologies on the Curve, Then Handle Density Per Zone

This is the step every template skips, and it's the one that actually eats time on a real deliverable. Place a small filled marker where each technology sits on the curve, at the x-position matching its assessed phase and sub-phase position, and at the y-height the curve itself defines at that x — don't place the marker off the curve and draw a line to it; the marker sits on the curve, the label sits off to the side.

Now count how many markers land in each zone, because the right labeling technique depends on that count, not on a single rule applied everywhere:

- **One or two items in a zone:** a direct label with a short leader line works fine. Point the leader line straight up (or down, for items near the top of a falling section) to a label sitting just outside the curve.
- **Three to five items in a zone:** stagger the leader-line length — short, medium, long, repeating — so each label sits at a different height and the labels stack vertically instead of competing for the same horizontal band. This is the technique most "how to" guides gesture at without naming.
- **Six or more items packed into one zone** (which is exactly what happens in a crowded Peak of Inflated Expectations during an AI-heavy market scan, for instance): staggered leader lines stop working — there isn't enough vertical room above a narrow zone to stack that many labels without them touching. Switch to small numbered markers directly on the curve, and move the full technology names into a legend row below the chart, ordered by number. This is a real technique, not a workaround — Gartner's own published hype cycle charts use numbered markers with a legend list rather than inline labels for exactly this reason, once a phase gets crowded enough that direct labels would collide.

The figure below shows the same nine technologies — eight clustered in the Peak, one alone in the Trough — laid out both ways.

![Comparison diagram: a hype cycle curve with equal-width phase zones and uniform leader lines causing eight technology labels to overlap in the Peak zone, versus the same curve with proportional zone widths where the crowded Peak zone uses numbered markers and a legend row instead of direct labels.](https://www.advis-io.com/hubfs/blog-figures/111-gartner-hype-cycle-slide-powerpoint-fig1.en.png)

Figure: the same nine technologies (eight in Peak, one in Trough) plotted with equal zones and uniform labels (top) versus proportional zones with density-matched labeling (bottom).

Two mistakes show up often enough to call out directly. The first is shrinking the font size only for the crowded zone's labels to make them fit — the slide ends up with one phase in 9-point type and the rest in 12-point, which reads as "this section was crammed in" even to someone who can't articulate why. Switch techniques (direct label → staggered → numbered) instead of shrinking type. The second is staggering leader lines without checking whether they cross each other — when markers sit close together on the x-axis, assign the stagger tiers in the same left-to-right order as the markers themselves, not randomly, or the leader lines end up crossing in a way that makes it genuinely hard to trace which label belongs to which dot.

**A note from experience:** none of this gets built once and left alone. A live engagement refreshes the market scan every quarter or every time a vendor briefing shifts the team's read on a technology, and the count per zone is different almost every time — seven items in the Peak this quarter, eleven next quarter once a new category heats up. Re-staggering labels and redrawing zone proportions by hand on that cadence is exactly the kind of mechanical, rules-based work — count items per zone, pick the matching technique, resize — that's tedious precisely because the logic is simple and repetitive, not because it's hard. It's the same rebuild tax that shows up on [a maturity model slide](https://www.advis-io.com/en/blog/maturity-model-slide-powerpoint?hsLang=en) whenever the score distribution shifts between assessment cycles. [Advisio](https://www.advis-io.com/?hsLang=en), listed on [Microsoft AppSource](https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/advisioinc1760912844242.advisio-202604?tab=Overview), takes the phase definitions and the current technology list, counts items per zone itself, and re-renders only the affected zone as native PowerPoint shapes when next quarter's scan changes the count — so moving one technology from Peak to Trough after a client pushes back on the assessment is a drag-and-drop edit, not a rebuild.

## Finishing Checklist

- Zone widths follow the roughly 10-12-18-40-20 convention, not five equal fifths.
- The curve is a single Freeform shape with vertices set to Smooth Point — no visible kinks at the peak or trough.
- Phase names sit below the x-axis, not on the curve, and don't compete with technology labels for the same space.
- Each zone's labeling technique (direct, staggered, or numbered + legend) matches its item count — not the same technique copied across every zone.
- No two labels overlap or touch at normal zoom, and no leader lines cross each other unnecessarily.
- Marker size and label font size are consistent across every zone, including the crowded one.

## Applying It to a Different Market Scan

The same four steps hold regardless of what's being scanned. A cybersecurity team mapping nine technologies for a board update might land three in the Innovation Trigger (still pre-product), two in the Peak, one lonely item already down in the Trough from a prior hype wave, two climbing the Slope, and one mature item on the Plateau — a 3-2-1-2-1 split that's nearly the inverse of the AI-scan example above, with no single zone crowded enough to need numbered markers at all. Every zone there gets a direct label with a short leader line, because three items is the largest count in any single zone. Nothing about the construction method changes; only the per-zone labeling decision does, because it's driven by the count in each zone, not by a rule fixed in advance. That's the actual skill this slide type tests — not drawing a curve once, but re-reading the same four steps correctly every time the scan comes back with a different shape.

[Consulting Slides](https://www.advis-io.com/en/blog/tag/consulting-slides) [Slide Design](https://www.advis-io.com/en/blog/tag/slide-design)

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