[← BLOG]

[EDITORIAL DESIGN]

Decks That Keep People Listening

Pitch decks, proposals and a brand guide that make complex ideas easy to follow.

Slides from an Impact Suite deck called “Rethinking Stress,” fanned out at an angle: a cracked brain illustration on a navy grid, a stress timeline and slides on behavioral response.

Not every design project gets a launch party. A lot of my favorite work lives in a slide deck, where the whole job is making something complicated feel simple.

A good pitch or proposal can make or break a startup or an event. The trick is to balance complex ideas with clear layouts, and to use imagery on purpose so the audience stays with you.

At Impact Suite, “Rethinking Stress” (the deck up top) turned a heavy topic into something an audience could actually follow. Each slide makes one point, with a bold color block or illustration doing the heavy lifting: a cracked brain for stress, a simple timeline from calm to eustress, and buttons that read “Eat” and “Breathe” for the basics.

Slides from an Impact Suite sales proposal: a navy cover with the Impact Suite mark, service pages for human services and technology, a customer reviews slide and a pricing slide.
A sales proposal template for Impact Suite.

The sales proposal had a different job: look trustworthy and be easy to customize. It moves from the services to customer reviews to pricing, so a sales rep could drop in the details for each client without redesigning anything.

Pages from a brand guide for Design Utah’s “Daydream” conference by AIGA Salt Lake City: the logo in red-orange, the Sora typeface, color swatches, social avatars and T-shirt designs.
The brand guide for Design Utah’s “Daydream” conference, for AIGA Salt Lake City.

A brand guide is a presentation too, just one that has to keep working long after you leave the room.