Design school taught me how to ideate like a badass, but it never taught me how to sell my ideas. Starting my graphic design career at Bluewolf, I had to learn this first-hand when trying to articulate my design decisions to my team and colleagues beyond our creative group — marketing, sales, recruiting, you name it. Like every other tech startup, we were a scrappy team that had to move fast. Our approach to presenting our design work was simple: a short verbal description of the project, then ta-da! The design! It sufficed since we only had a few stakeholders on any single project. At that time, my impression of presentations was that, plus PowerPoints we’d make for the sales team. For a designer, those sales PowerPoints weren’t sexy work, that’s for sure.
After Bluewolf, I spent a brief stint designing presentations for Facebook’s F8 conference. That experience opened my mind to a world of possibilities with presentation design. It was capable of dynamic animation! It can be editorial with visual storytelling! It’s a magazine that moves!
It all came together when I attended First Round, a one-day conference where agencies and studios shared their original presentations of initial design explorations made for clients. It sparked a fire in me to deliver compelling creative presentations. Since then, I’ve been…
