Deck Builder — Taking the friction out of presentations

The team gets a finished on-brand deck from its own notes and saves three to four hours a presentation. It runs on AI. I built the Keep Left design system it uses and taught it which layout each slide needs.

More than the brand colours

The design system contains more than 400 lines of brand information and layout guidance. It covers exact colour values, typefaces and type sizes, alongside the treatment of agendas, budgets, footers and bridging pages.

The creative work was in working out how those rules should be used. Supplying the right font doesn’t settle how a budget should be presented or whether a slide needs a different layout.

Making the content clear

I wanted someone who isn’t a designer to be able to concentrate on the substance of their presentation and still have that work presented properly.

The skill needs to interpret the content and choose an appropriate treatment from the design system. That is the part I developed beyond a standard slide template.

Art direction during onboarding

I reviewed every output as an art director would, looking at whether the presentation worked and whether the design system was being applied appropriately. I used those reviews to refine the skill.

The aim was to raise the standard of the team’s routine presentations. Major pitches still warrant a designer’s involvement, and a generated deck still needs someone to review the work.

My role

I built the design system and its interpretation guidance, and carried out the art-direction reviews used to refine the outputs.