Spend more time perfecting the presentation

Most big pieces of creative work involve some kind of presentation—a meeting where you need to share the work and get feedback or sign-off. It could be to internal management or external clients. Often, the quality of this presentation is more important than the quality of the work itself, so you need to dedicate the appropriate amount of time to it. I’ve seen great work get killed because it was presented badly, and mediocre work get clapped because it was delivered brilliantly.

Start thinking about the presentation long before you’ve finished doing the work—even at the start of the process. It ensures you're considering your audience and what they need to see and hear right from the beginning. For example, you might know that a particularly vocal person from sales will be in the meeting—and that this person has an important trade show coming up. A good idea might be to mock up something that shows your creative solution in that context. It’s better to think of that two weeks out than the day before.

It also helps you edit and refine the work in real time. If you can imagine part of your solution being hard to explain to a room full of people, maybe it’s not a good solution to begin with. You can also think about potential criticisms and ways to mitigate them while creating the work. It will help you decide what other slides or examples need to be shown to tell the story of your solution.

I learned all of this from advertising agencies in London. The culture of pitching is bad in lots of ways, but it results in an industry that is really good at giving presentations. I think design agencies and in-house teams could learn a lot from advertising agencies in this regard.

Every discussion eventually ends up being about AI these days, so here we are. Another reason to give presentations the time they deserve is that this persuasive presenting part of creative work is going to be hard to recreate with AI in the short term. If you get good at it, your job is safe. For now.

Takeaway

• For important work with medium-high stakes, spend 30% of the time allocated to the job on the presentation. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it's a decent guide.

• Start the presentation early. Work on it at the same time as you are doing the work.

Need help refining a big presentation? I can help.