A great presentation is the crucible of any project. It’s your pathway to get those precious few initial stakeholder to give shit. Here is the process we use to make ours — Happy Pitching
1) Start with Sketch:
I took the liberty of creating a template to help you get started. Included are:
- A vertical, letter sized page good for white papers or report style documents 612x792
- A horizontal, widescreen page good for presentations and pitch decks 1600x900
If you need a different size just manually adjust your desired artboard dimensions.
Bonus Tip: Command ⌘ + D will duplicate an artboard in Sketch
2) Design
This could use a whole post on it’s own and honestly depends a lot on your prior experience but I’ll take a whack at the high level concepts to get you going. You first have to determine what type of document you're trying to make. The two most common are slide presentations that are generally meant to be a visual aids to an oral presentation or a white paper or report type documented that is to be primarily read without a spoken component.
Always Include:
- Simple Title Page
- Page Numbers
- Consistent Header or Footer with branding
- Closing page with contact info
- If more than 10 pages, throw in a table of contents (can be left off slide deck in some cases, use your best judgement)
This gives you a good overarching framework to at least make the content easy to navigate.
High Level Design Ideas:
Keep it simple — make sure you use crazy colors, font, and images sparingly. You want the content to be the centerpiece. If you add something in, make sure it is in support of the content on the page. Superfluity sucks
Use white space — White space is pleasing to the eye, saves you work, and looks good on just about any screen or surface. When in doubt opt for more white space and unleash your inner minimalist.
Powerful Images — Remember the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” and strategically use images to help articulate your points. They don’t need to be on every page but when used astutely, they are a powerful tool. Don’t be afraid to give them the entire page with no or minimal annotation.
Real World Examples ↓
Helpful Resources:
I made a catalog of helpful design tools called Launchkit that will up your design game.
3) Export as PDF
You have your content beautifully designed and are ready to show it to the world, now what? Well, we have to export but this comes with a caveat — if the presentation is a large, multi-page document, the default sketch export dialogue is woefully inadequate.
To solve this problem we are going to use a handy sketch plugin from a kind Aussie named William. Click the link below to download the plugin from github.
You should just have to unzip the file and then click on the file labeled:
“PDF Export.sketchplugin”
It can now be found in back in Sketch in the plugin drop down menu
Select all the artboards you want to export and then in the plugin menu, click “Export selected artboards”
You will get the above pop-up with the default settings exporting documents from left to right. You shouldn’t have to change these.
Click “Export” and you’re done!
4) Compress your PDF
If you have a primarily text document, this step might not be necessary (but still probably a good idea). We are going to use a handy web app to compress our PDF into something more manageable that can easily be sent over email without maxing out attachment size limits. This is especially important if you have large images in your presentation.
For reference, the Southrail example above went from 202.8 MB → 5.3 MB
Just upload your PDF and go grab a cup of coffee(or a few depending on doc size) while you wait for your newly compressed presentation to finish!
5) Pitch With Purpose
You’re idea now looks like a million bucks, so why not go out and raise ten?