Take
Control
How Can I Control My Nerves When Presenting?
Get Inspired
What Have Successful Designers and Pros Experienced When They Were Presenting?
01
My Very First Presentation
02
Being Prepared Is Crucial
I remember the very first presentation I did. We were at a kick off meeting. I knew the project was, like, some millions of dollars to do so it brought in a ton of business to the agency I worked at. I was given one tiny portion of this four-hour kickoff; I think it’s was just like 15 minutes to talk about brand and why it’s important. Of course, I’m like a kid in this. I don’t think I was out of college yet; I think this was part of my internship. It’s me and the CMO of this other company that we were doing the work for and all of these stakeholders and all of my managers and bosses and colleagues. I remember getting up there and I was talking so quickly and I noticed it and I’m like, “Oh my, I’m making the one rookie mistake.” It was a good learning experience. Putting yourself out there and then once you do it you’re like,“I could probably do this again.” Once you do it a hundred times, you’re like, “It’s just part of daily life now.”
I learned to follow notes for sure. I think when I got up in front of those people, because it was at a conference room at a hotel, they have a square shaped desk that everyone was sitting around. So, literally all eyes were on me. I just got so overwhelmed I was going off-script and, not that it sounded bad, I’m sure I didn’t hit all the points that I wanted to. Feeling OK if you have to have notes; it’s a totally normal thing to do. No one is going to look down on you if you have them.
—Courtney Sabo, Co-Founder of PadPiper
03
Presenting to a Client Alone
When I was working for Red Rooster Group, which is a small branding and marketing firm for non-profits. Like I said, we were super small when we started out so I took on a lot of responsibility for lots of different things. One of those things was doing a little bit of project management and presentation to clients on the phone. I very quickly learned that I had to be prepared and eloquent on the phone.
I was a very nervous public speaker for a long time. In school I dreaded making presentations. I still hate talking on the phone; I avoid it at all costs. So, that was hard for me, but I practiced a lot over the years and I think that’s the thing people probably don’t want to hear, but it’s the most true. You just have to practice getting up in front of people and speaking.
For me, I’m still a nervous public speaker sometimes. I did a round table recently with a couple of my friends and it was a really busy month and I didn’t prepare as much as I had and I was nervous. I knew I was nervous because I didn’t feel like I knew my content well enough. So, I was afraid of messing up, or looking bad, or having awkward pauses in the conversation. So, I think being, at least for me, really prepared has also helped. It helps me be less nervous.
—Susannah Hainley, Art Director, Designer, Educator
04
It’s Important to Do the First Presentation in Person
There was one time where I was thrown in at the deep end. I was working at a design studio in London and I probably had been a designer for about four years, so I wasn’t a junior. I was sort of middle way; I had some experience. There was a presentation we were supposed to be giving to present a book design for a photography prize, a photography exhibition. I thought my boss was going to be coming to the meeting with me and he would present it. On the morning of the presentation he told me, “I’m not coming.” I don’t remember if he did it on purpose to throw me in the deep end or maybe he couldn’t come. I remember him saying, “I can’t come to the meeting. I’m too busy; I’ve got something else going on. You go alone and you present.”
I went with my client. It was me and the client were presenting to the CitiBank, Citigroup. They were the sponsor of the exhibition. I was really nervous; I had never presented. I went into this room and the table was bigger than this. There was, like, 10 seats around and there were six or seven people all looking at me. I just had to wing it. I was like, “OK. This is what we’ve done and...”
I don’t know if I did a good job, but, after that, I felt I had been put in a situation and it made me uncomfortable; it was a corporate company with one designer. It made me much better after that. I had more confidence because I was like, “OK. I’ve been put in this situation where I had to do that and I got over it and it was fine. It didn’t go terribly. No one got hurt.” I then became less nervous and got more confident.
—Tom Crabtree, Founder & Creative Director of Manual
One of the things... Starting with Keynote. You get your nice Mac laptop. A good processor makes it much easier to present. The way we started out was doing models. So, all those models over there were from presentations to clients. That's where we would explore different design concepts and walk into the conference room and put it on the table. There are advantages to that. A client can pick up the model and look around, see what it looks like. That’s much more difficult to do now that everything is done online. I will say this, we are adamant about this: whatever that first presentation is of our designs, it's always done in person, because if you do it online it's really easy for a client who doesn't understand
the concept to just tear it apart. There's so much non-verbal communication that happens with clients, with people in general; this is the way we communicate. When you put the filter of the internet, Facetime, whatever, it makes it very hard to understand which direction to go. So, we always do the first one in person. Subsequent ones can be done online, that's OK, but it's that first one that is really critical.
There have been a couple. Mostly because we got bogus information. You give people the wrong information, they are going to come back with the wrong design. They would say, "X, y, z." You would come back and say, "This is how we communicate well for x,y,z." And they would be like, "I didn't say x,y,z. No, absolutely not! We wanted a, b, c." So, you've been led down an incorrect path by the client.
If you are really paying attention, though, you should be able to pretty much hit the design on the head, the nail on the head, the first time.
I've learned not to do it over Facetime. I learned that models are really helpful. They are really helpful in communicating. Architects know this. A lot of architects don't use them anymore, but I find that I do a lot of my design in the model stage, just playing. Let's see what else? Confirming what you've been told before you launch on a thing is important. Saying, "Here's what we heard. Is this correct?" Because sometimes that's where you get the x, y, z problem.
—Mitchell Mauk, Principal at Mauk Design
05
Very Simple Tricks Work During the Presentation
There was a design conference I spoke at maybe four years ago, soon after I joined SYP. It was at a design conference in Raleigh, N.C. actually of all places. It was very well attended, this talk, and I was pretty nervous. We had taken the approach in the presentation of injecting humor and putting video in the Keynote. Just trying to do things that were a little different and surprising. I remember it started off with a kind of funny slide; that loosened up the whole room, and that loosened me up. It kind of went really well from there. We got to the video pieces and I could tell people were really like, "Wow." Sometimes those simple little tricks in a presentation... People often don't know that you can put video into Keynote. People also come to a session that's about some topic around design and they're probably expecting a pretty serious presentation, but if you inject some humor, especially in the beginning, it changes the mood altogether and people are much more receptive to what you are saying. You can draft off that energy and sense of humor through the rest of the presentation. So, those were a couple of things that, I think, worked really well there and I've tried to do ever since. Very simple, kind of dumb, tricks, but they work.
—Jarin Tabata, Principal at SYPartners
06
I Learned That It’s Important When I Kept Losing Work
When I kept losing work to people who were doing worse work than I was. It's true! You're pitching work against people who's work wasn't as good as mine, but they could talk about it, which meant that they were building a relationship with the client. They were building a rapport. I was just going up there like, huh, isn't this great? Isn't it beautiful? They were like, yeah, it's great. This guy knows how to put a sentence together.
If you lose work to people who can talk about work enough, you realize how important it is to be able to talk about your work.
Whether you work for yourself or you go work for someone else, you are either a business of one or you are joining a larger business. It's a business. You have to earn a living. Presentation skills are all about being able to earn that living. Presentations have been the difference between us being able to make payroll and having a really horrible conversation with our employees. You don't ever want to have that conversation. You don't want your boss telling you that either.
I learned that if I sold the work I wouldn't have to have an unhappy conversation with my employees. That happened, too. I told you one successful story but that wasn't the only time I was in that position, and I was also in that position and not able to sell the work, and I did have to come back here and have that unpleasant conversation with employees. You don't want to have that conversation. It's horrible. It's horrible for them because they can't pay their rent now. It's horrible for you because you feel responsible, but it's more horrible for them.
Wherever you work you're going to have, hopefully, a bunch of projects, not just the one. If you only have one project you're in trouble. So, right behind this project you are working on now you are going to have a project that's coming up, right, ready to go. I mean, fingers crossed, you are going to have a steady stream of projects all the way through. They're all lined up. Let's say this project, you told your client, "I'm going to get it done in three months." Then you told your next client, "I can start your project in October, which is when I'm finished with this one." Now, let's say during the project you are working on now you have an unsuccessful presentation. You have to go redo two weeks of work.
The client you are working on now gets screwed and the next client gets screwed. Because now that project can't start on time because you couldn't finish this one on time. You see where I'm going?
That's a cascading failure all down the line. When you are running a design business, it's like a conveyor belt of work. When you've got a conveyor belt of things coming at you, you've got to keep a steady rhythm and a steady pace because the next thing is coming right there. You never want to stop the conveyor belt because then you can't pay people.
—Mike Monteiro, Design Director and Co-owner of Mule Design Studio
07
It’s Important to Be Able to Talk Without the Tech
In my company we have something called a Design Jam. It’s company-wide so it’s worldwide. People from all over the world log in. We do a hack-a-thon, basically, which is what the design jam is; then, the next day we present on what we did. Each team has five minutes to share their screen, walk through their little presentation, and then answer questions. People from all over the world are logging-in and you have to be ready. It’s a really long series of a bunch of playbacks that are all five minutes long.
I was in a cafe when this was happening. I was speaking but it was over video-chat; at companies this happens a lot. You can’t actually connect with your audience with your eyes; it’s all through video-chat. That happens a lot here. So, I was presenting to a huge amount of people. I decided to do it in a coffee shop because I was working from home. The internet was horrible. I couldn’t pull up the video-chat or the presentation. Basically a lot of technical difficulties. That can definitely slow people down, with any talk. Relying on tech can be kind of dangerous sometimes. You never really can foresee what can happen. So, that was an issue. I think I ended getting someone else to continue presenting because my audio wasn’t working—it was like everything went wrong. We went overtime; there was a lot of confusion.
Recently I saw a talk where this guy’s clicker was fast-forwarding a bunch of slides and he kept being thrown because the tech wasn’t working. So, think trying to simplify technology. Try not to use a bunch of slides or videos, audio. That can be just tough. If you do use it, practice that, make sure you don’t need wi-fi. Things like that. People rely on a lot of slides with a bunch of tech and that can just be tough sometimes. In this last talk I gave I only had four slides and they had like nothing on them. It was basically one word and it was to prompt me to think about what the next thing was. It was more of a nice picture, because it was really a simple slide, there wasn’t bullet points. I think if you’re able to practice and be comfortable with what you’re saying you shouldn’t need slides, which can be hard if you are doing something technical and you are showing designs, but I still think it’s pretty important to be able to just talk without the tech.
—Alex Morris, UX Designer for Data & AI at IBM
08
The Structure of a Presentation Really Matters
I have had many unsuccessful experiences. I learned a lot. When I started working as a designer I wasn’t really good at communication. Sometimes I felt like people were confused after I presented. I feel like it’s because I didn’t organize the content well; I didn’t show how we start, what’s the process, what’s the end result. So people are confused. I had to organize everything and then show them again. I learned a lot from the process. How do you organize your thoughts and how do you present your idea clearly to people.
This one time I was presenting my ideas to the team. I started with my solution or my ideas. They couldn’t make the connection why the solution suited the problem we were solving. There was no clear relationship between the solution I chose and the end goal. I felt like I should have reversed the structure of the presentation. That would make it more clear.
—Shihwen Wang, UX Lead at Huge
09
A Presentation Is Also a User Experience
I was working with another client that makes doors and windows. There’s no way we could put the same presentation for that. These guys were hard-core corporate. “I just have ten minutes. Do your presentation.” We kept it very very neat. One of the directors told us at the beginning of the presentation, “This client has a problem with small text, so make sure everything is big in the presentation. Don’t use anything like small text.” We felt, “Ok that’s a good point; we’ll keep it in mind.” That way we made a presentation where everything was one type size; everything was big and very organized. This client was very by-the-clock and wanted to see everything like “ping”. Instead of a skit, we made handouts. We had a journey and we printed that journey; it was the only piece that had fine print because it was whole user journey and had a lot of micro-steps—this step for this guy and this step for this guy. So there’s no way he could make sense of it in the presentation so, while we were presenting, we also had a handout so he could look closely and react. He found that a brilliant step because it was very personal and he could see it in person.
You have to come up with these innovative solutions because, by the end of it, a presentation is also a user experience. He’s also experiencing you’re giving him a story, giving him a solution. By the end of it, what you actually close the presentation with is, “As a studio, this is what we suggest. If you want to take this forward, these are the things you need to do, things to consider for the next steps.” Just leave it on that so they have something to chew on, to think about. It’s not just we’ve done the presentation. End of story. It’s not like that. The story is moving. You have to keep that ongoing process.
—Krishnapriya Dutta Gupta, Senior Visual Designer at Google
10
Being Prepared Is One of the Key Things in Speaking
When I got into the product world. I used to be in agency life before I got into product in general and internal teams. I was applying for this job and they didn’t tell me what was going to happen in the interview process. I had to whiteboard within the interview process; I also had to whiteboard while talking about my design and why I was doing what I was doing. This was before I had a solid foundation on product in general. This was a brand new product, too, so understanding the product process and understanding what I was doing and how that ties in to the process. So, I was doing these desktop pretty much wire frames at the whiteboard and talking to it. This person I was talking to was ex-Apple; she was a higher-up at Apple. She was like, “What is this guy talking about right now?” I was just going all over the place; my mind was working at a different pace than what I was thinking, so I was talking really fast but then I would short out and forget what I was going to say. I was really nervous as well because I really wanted the job. That was an unsuccessful time because I clearly didn’t have the preparation going into it and I needed to understand product better and the process a little bit better.
Control your pacing; make sure you pause and slow down and figure out what you want to say. But also just being more prepared. Being prepared is one of the key things in speaking.
—Kyle McDowell, Design Director at Fantasy
11
Sometimes Adversity Makes the Presentation Great
The day prior to presenting to the CEO of Gap Inc and the President of Banana Republic, I was mugged and dragged behind car leaving my knees and hands scarred and bloody. The presentation was 10 hours later for a project that we had worked 10 months on. Not showing up was not an option. I put on a long-sleeved sweater that covered my hands, took a bunch of Advil and—as they say: the show must go on. We successfully presented the work… and then I went home to take a nap. Even in adversity, you can pull it off… in fact, sometimes, adversity /makes/ the presentation great.
—Hunter Wimmer, Associate Director of School of Graphic Design at
Academy of Art University