How to Prepare a Design Presentation?

How to Prepare a Design Presentation In the Fastest Way

Design is a creative process. When making a design based on the material provided by your client, you get to create your unique vision while still ensuring that your designs convey the message your client needs them to have. After finishing the first visual samples of your designs, revisions and mutual compromises shape your designs into their final forms. This double-sided nature of the designing process may often lead to conflicts and discrepancies that arise from the lack of clearness both in your ways of presenting your designs and your clients’ ways of delivering their feedback. Because of that, one of the most time-consuming tasks of a graphic designer is communication with the client.

With every other revision and every other detail that caught the attention of your client, you’ll need to design new versions of your project, transfer them to your client, wait for their feedback, and do this all over again, maybe for countless times. So, presenting design concepts can create an unnecessary amount of email or online meeting traffic. In this article, we will try to explain how you can prepare a design presentation that will minimize this time loss, and how you can utilize Artboard Studio to its full potential to have an unprecedentedly streamlined revisioning process.

Be clear

If you’re reading this article right now, we can presume that you are already a designer looking for answers on how to prepare a presentation for your clients. And if you’re a designer, we are not the ones to teach you that being as straightforward as possible in your messages is the single best way to create a design that will appeal to nearly anyone who sees it. So, why not also carry this approach over to your presentations?

You are a designer. When creating a presentation, bear this in mind and be as clear and precise as possible. Avoid becoming tedious while making an introduction and give brief explanations on what you’re trying to achieve. Also, when choosing the visual pieces that you’ll include in your presentation, try to be as precise as possible. If you are to use an excessive amount of visual examples in your presentations, there's a high chance that your clients will feel confused, overwhelmed and lose the message you are trying to convey with the designs. While preparing your presentation, keep it in your mind that the average attention span for an average person is roughly 8 seconds, and it’s continuously diminishing year by year. So, don’t waste your and your clients’ precious time and be precise about your messages.

Make your clients feel free to give feedback

As the natural process of creating a design for a client goes, your clients will probably be more than eager to share their feedback and revision requests after you send your first examples of the project. Since the first aim of your designs should be to reach the client’s expectations rather than fully showcasing your own vision, encouraging your clients to give feedback will lead you to create more satisfactory designs in the end. As you apply the client’s feedback on the project, the result will get progressively closer to what your clients envisioned in the first place. So, while preparing your presentation, don’t forget to mention that all positive and negative feedback is welcome, and it’s best to agree on a project that makes both ends happy.

With Artboard Studio’s Presentations feature, your clients can easily drop comments directly on the design that needs a revision along with exactly what they want you to change or keep in the design. Just like in Google Documents, you can instantly display the client’s feedback and edit your design accordingly. After the revision is done, you can mark the comments as ‘resolved’ or have a real-time conversation with your client under the comment. While giving the clients the freedom to share precise feedback for exact points on the design, Artboard’s Presentations feature also saves a ton of time for both of the parties by negating the need for endless email traffic of sharing revisions back and forth.

Leave notes to clarify the message

Even though we said that you should encourage your clients to comment on your designs freely, you still need to play your part to go for the best end result possible if you think what you’re doing is right. You’re the designer; you should know better, right? So, in order to avoid any misunderstandings regarding what you’re trying to convey with your design, add notes with the visuals to tell your clients why you created your design the way it is and why it should work for their business. And as you can guess, Artboard is the best platform to do this, again.

While presenting with Artboard, you can also add your own comments on your designs to explain the design to your clients, share your insights, and give some key takeaways of your work. Also, taking advantage of research data while sharing your insights on why your design is going to perform well is one of the best ways to convince your clients to trust you by showing that you know what you’re doing.

Check those typos!

You’re probably wondering, ‘How on earth could I make a grammar error or a typo while I’m preparing a presentation for a customer. Trust us; you’d be surprised to see how many designers are missing the opportunity to get a high-caliber gig just because of a tiny typo or a grammar error. Since you are trying to work with professionals, and since you want your clients to see you as a professional, your presentations have to feel professional in order to exist in competitive markets. So, one last grammar check after finalizing a great-looking design presentation never hurts anybody. Better safe than sorry, huh?

Present where you design

As you now know that Artboard gives you the perfect opportunity to have a presentation that lets you easily engage with your customers, you can also transfer your designing process to artboard. After creating your design in the browser-based designing software Artboard without having the need to download any additional software, you can quickly turn your designs into presentations.

When the design is done, you can click on the ‘Present’ button located in the upper right corner and access your design presentation. The presentation will include all the different versions of a design you created, and it can be easily shared by entering the email addresses of your clients or sharing the ‘Public link’ with them. When your clients display the presentation, they can drop comments on specific points of the design. After your clients share their feedback with you through the Artboard Presentations, you can either answer them on the comment’s thread or make the changes and mark the comment as ‘resolved’. After you make a change in the design itself, the changes will instantly affect the presentation, so your clients will be instantly updated on how your design is looking at the moment. With Artboard Studio, you can create the best possible end result by having a real-time revision process. Sign up to Artboard Studio to see what you can achieve without even installing software on your computer.