All-staff presentations, senior leadership cabinet calls, and monthly SVP calls. 200+ decks, and a template system that outlived my tenure.
FleishmanHillard · Associate Creative Director
Strategy decks · Presentation systems and template libraries · Brand consistency · Design mentorship
THE CHALLENGE
I inherited two recurring deck programs for a global audience and grew the work to three, adding the monthly SVP calls. Fixed dates, executive content arriving the day before, and every deck starting from a blank file.
The material was dense as well as urgent: strategy decks running thirty-plus slides that every employee, in every office, had to be able to follow.
WHAT I DID
Built a template system so the work could start before the content arrived.
Rather than designing each deck from scratch, I built the asset that existed in advance. That moved production out of the final hours and made quality repeatable instead of heroic.
Derived it from the brand, and shipped the specs inside the file.
Theme colors mapped to the brand’s RGB values, substitute typefaces for anyone without the brand fonts, and reference slides for color, type and graphics built into the template itself. The rules travelled with the file, so nobody had to go looking for a guidelines document to stay on brand.
Designed a layout set, and a component library to go with it.
Layouts for the situations that actually came up: data, quotes, agenda, single statement, comparison, photo-led. Plus prebuilt callouts, trackers, and line and arrow styles in brand colors, drawn from the identity’s true shapes, so nobody had to build anything from scratch.
Shipped it as two files, matched to how presenters really work.
One loaded with a curated, on-brand image library for people who wanted images chosen for them. One with identical layouts and correctly sized empty frames for people bringing their own. This eliminated the single most common cause of a broken template.
Turned dense strategy into decks people could actually follow.
Complex strategic initiatives were a standing part of the work, not an occasional one. The agency’s 31-slide talent and transformation strategy is one example: three acts, consistent wayfinding, and a diagram that returned at every section so a reader always knew where they were in the argument. Simplifying complex material is a navigation problem, not a subtraction problem.
Taught the system, not just the file.
I mentored three junior designers on the brand ethos behind the template and how to make new work from it, rather than on where the layouts lived. Teaching the reasoning is what lets other people carry a system, and it is why this one kept running after I left.
RESULTS
200+ decks designed across five years
Three recurring executive programs owned, up from the two I inherited
Presentation work across most of the agency’s sectors by the time I left
Strategic initiatives translated into digestible decks as part of the role
Three junior designers mentored on the ethos and system, not just the software
A template system that outlived my tenure
A system is only real if it keeps working once the person who built it is out of the room. This one did, because the reasoning shipped inside the file and the people using it understood why it was built that way.
The brand system this template was built from.
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