Brand Presentations for Designers: Selling Your Thinking Through Storytelling | Ilya Lobanov | Skillshare
Search

Playback Speed


  • 0.5x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 2x

Brand Presentations for Designers: Selling Your Thinking Through Storytelling

teacher avatar Ilya Lobanov, Creating brands that make impact

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome to the class

      3:13

    • 2.

      Why Sell Your Thinking

      3:37

    • 3.

      Presentation Preparations

      5:44

    • 4.

      Start with a Story

      4:15

    • 5.

      Anatomy of a Presentation

      11:34

    • 6.

      Big Day of the Presentation

      5:24

    • 7.

      Presentation Example One

      9:52

    • 8.

      Presentation Example Two

      8:54

    • 9.

      Thank you and Class Project

      2:30

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

517

Students

3

Projects

About This Class

When I was a junior designer I assumed that my logo and branding work presentations should be filled with 90% pretty pictures. Can you relate?

What I've ultimately learned through trial and error over the last 18+ years is that about 90% of the presentation should in fact be demonstrating how you arrived at those decisions and selling in your thinking.

The 'beef' of the presentation needs to be about telling a compelling story, that's tied to specific agreed-upon objectives. And the deliverable (whether that's a simple logo, a full brand identity, or any type of design) should be the cherry on top.

While every client presentation should be unique, there are a few fundamental principles and components you should think about when presenting any type of branding work, and I will show you why using a structure like this is important. 

In this class aimed at Brand Designers and Brand Strategists you will learn:

  • How to create a client presentation that sells your thinking and ultimately your work.
  • How to structure the key sections intelligently
  • Review some example presentations for more context

The skills you will learn in this class are transferable – meaning that you will be able to apply this type of thinking for any presentation in the future, enabling you to present confidently and successfully.

Who is the class for:

  • Brand and Logo Designers
  • Brand Strategists
  • Marketing Professionals
  • Freelancers

If presenting your work has been challenging for you in the past, this class will give you the confidence and tools that you need – enrol now.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Ilya Lobanov

Creating brands that make impact

Teacher

Join a community of 1,000 Studeo Insiders and get exclusive access to the most powerful branding and creativity resources in my toolbox. Resources which will help you build a successful brand customers simply can't ignore.

Join the Studeo Insiders

See full profile

Level: Intermediate

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Welcome to the class: Hey, there. If you are watching this introduction video, it probably means that you are a designer or a creative was looking for you to improve or strengthen your process for presenting your work to clients and gain more confidence when presenting work to clients. And I can tell you that whether you're working with a simple logo design or a full-on brand identity, please, based on a strategic brand workshop. I do believe that every client presentations should be unique and tailored to that client or that brief. But more so, it should not be just a collection of pretty pictures and application examples and greets. You should actually just be a way for you to demonstrate your strategic thinking behind the work and take the client on a journey and show how and why you feel the work in the end, the deliverable that you are showing to them is going to achieve their objective set by that creative brief. Hi, my name is Ilya Robin off and I'm the founder and creative director of studio, a brand agency focused on growing brands and businesses. The other thing that I'm really passionate about is empowering the Zionists to learn the skills necessary to take them from order takers to creative partners and to really maximize their potential. So on my own design journey, of course, I have also faced this obstacles such as the difficult clients and the impossible deadlines. And they're really fuzzy design briefs. So this is what this class is really about. It's a way for me to share the things that I have learned over the years where I was able to apply those tools and techniques to either minimize those challenges or completely avoid them. And hopefully you can avoid those on your design journey to. So while I said that every client presentation should be unique, there are still certain fundamental components that I myself integrate into creating a winning and successful presentation. So this is what I use today after 15 years of tweaking and perfecting this pilus. And I'm going to share them with you and explain to you why they're important. Other than displaying your deliverable or end design that you've created. The beef of the presentation should be about showing the strategic work and the end deliverable should be the cherry on top. The guts of the presentation should religious be taking the client on a story and on a journey? And so in this class aimed at brand strategist and Brenda Zionists, I will show you how to create the client presentation that sells your thinking and ultimately your work. Learn about the key sections and how to structure them intelligently, as well as show you some example presentations that I've created to provide you some more context. So the techniques that I will show you in this class are transferable, meaning that you'll be able to apply the same type of thinking to presenting of any kind of in the future. So if you had been struggling in the past to present confidently to your clients and communicating your message these classes for you and I can't wait for you to enroll as BY with the class project, you will be creating some kind of a deck or some kind of a way to communicate the message using the pillars that I will talk to you about in this video. So I hope to see you inside the class. 2. Why Sell Your Thinking: So as I mentioned in the intro video, the presentation of your final designs and application examples, should religious be the cherry on top. However, with designers, what I've noticed is they pretty much assume that 90% of their presentation in the slides should be filled with pretty pictures. In reality though, the 90 percent should be filled with demonstrating how you've arrived at those design decisions, showing your thinking and selling in your thinking. And if you do that part, the design will sell itself. Not only that, but you will also build the client for live by building relationship with them in showing how you think and gain trust through that process. You see when you go for this kind of big reveal of your design work, you're really making it all about you. You're essentially saying, marvel at my brilliance, check out this awesome designs and be wild by them. However, what we should really be focusing on is helping the client solve their business problems even now, if they haven't articulated that to you, they are all most likely looking for increased sales or increased brand awareness, increased visits to the website, and things of that nature, things that are related to that end customer interacting with them. And that's what, that's what your work should be aiming to achieve. In, after all, design is going to remain subjective until you tied to some kind of objective. Now, I've worked with different kinds of agencies and with different types of clients and different mindsets within those teams. And I can tell you that whenever we haven't gone for just this big reveal of the design work, copying that the client will understand it or be wowed by this amazing quality of work with have created probably about 50 percent of the time. The client even didn't know how to respond. They maybe had some objections in some cases, and other times they actually didn't like it. They didn't understand the design at all. And I can tell it even for the most persuasive design present this are people who are presenting the work. It can be very difficult to defend your design decisions. Once you are in that perspective, you have to control the presentation all the way through and control the context. And that's the way how you can actually control the outcomes of the presentation as well as you progress in your design career and you start communicating with your clients, you'll, you'll understand that the ideal clients, those who you really want to work with, they're actually buying your work in your thinking rather than just the design deliverable. In the further you progress, you'll understand how to package that in a way that you really take your client through on a journey. It's not about selling the work to them or selling your thinking, but it's actually about taking them on a journey and making sure that they are involved in oldest micro decisions along the way. And the way that you structure your presentation and you slide or how will you present this thinking and work to them? It's all about involving them at those micro decisions and getting buy-in from them and getting them to be a partner in that process. So the structure of the presentation can help, But also there's a bit of groundwork that you can do beforehand before the per-station takes place, before the big reveal and before the big day in order for you to improve your chances of a successful presentation. So that's what I'm going to talk to you about next in the next video. 3. Presentation Preparations: So some of my biggest screw ups when presenting my thinking and my work to clients occurred when I failed to understand the environment in which I will be presenting and also failing to prepare for, for the presentation itself. You probably have heard the phrase. By failing to prepare. You are preparing to fail. In one of the creative directors I worked with, this once told me that the success of the presentation lies not only in its contents, but in your ability to control your environment and influence your environment in which you're presenting. In one of the prerequisites for that is to present the face to face if you can. And I know in this current situation perhaps it might be difficult, but you can also present your work through real-time video conferencing by preparing properly, incorrectly and presenting in real time, because that will largely improve your success of your presentation. Now, here are a few different things they can think about before you prepare for your presentation. The first one is established who will be present, making sure that the key decisions make us will always be there. Because without them, you might as well be presenting to your mom. That might be a person who's working in marketing. Maybe there's someone in sales that's going to be involved. So you have to think about who those people are going to be, what kind of priorities and what kind of questions and queries there might be bringing to the table or what kind of contributions that might be bringing to the conversation. And you ultimately have to think about those people and how you can essentially pre answer the questions for them before they even arise. Number to think about the and understand the environment in which you will be presenting. So will it be held in their office, or maybe it's a coffee shop or somewhere else, then you have to think and prepare instruction or presentation accordingly. So for example, if you know that they have all the gear set up in their office with a big screen, then you might just need to bring your presentation file on a USB stick. I often travel with my MacBook and my PDF file in presentations or whatever I need on my MacBook. So then I can essentially just connect with my court to their big screen on the day and then present through that way. In some cases, you might be presenting on a projector, which means that the contrast will be quite low. So you need to think about that as well before ahead of time. Because you will know that the colors will be really kind of faded and you'll need to take that into consideration when presenting your, your thinking and also your work as well. So these are the kind of things that you need to think beforehand before you even start to create a presentation or even creating the work because your environment matters in the context, always matters. So once you know the environment that you'll be presenting in, you can start to loosely think about what your format of the presentation will be. So for example, will you be scrolling through a PDF file where you might be able to reveal different ideas gradually and introduce them one by one because the page number in the month of pages isn't really an issue. Or will you need to print out massive copies of massive presentation powers of a 100 pages, then that would be an issue if you've you have lots of pages that you have to print out for multiple parties involved, the multiple stakeholders at the presentation. So you need to think about that and in that context, you will have to think about how you might condense those pages down to the bare minimum on the most critical components. So this kind of thinking will help you structure the presentation before you start wasting time putting something together that will actually be cumbersome on the day. So here's a quick reminder for all of those points is that before you even start to think about them, you do really need to start developing some trust and understanding of the client and start to educate them about the process and also talking to them about the process. And conversation at the initial briefing meeting might go something along the lines of Mr. Client. Our process includes this initial discovery phase, then there is a research phase, then as a design phase, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And which point part of our process we come in to present our ideas and concepts to you in person. In this process only works if all of the key decision makers are present at the time. So of course, this is only a very rough guideline for how you should approach in approach the subject. It should organically bring it up when that happens to be appropriate within their first, initial conversations. But by doing this, you starting to influence and control the outcome of the presentation because he starting to control the actual process properly. And the only way that it will work is if you do that at the very beginning. Now of course, there will be times when some unforeseen things will happen that you can't control. But the best that they can do is prepare for, for at least the things that he can. There was a story where there was free partners that I was supposed to be presenting, but only one of them showed up and are still forced to give the presentation and things like that they can't control. You can. Of course. I tried to reschedule, but if you're forced to proceed with your presentation, just keep in mind that these things will happen. But do your best to present and controlled environment and the things that you can control. Now the next video, I'm going to talk about some storytelling frameworks that you can use to structure and strategize the contents of your presentation. 4. Start with a Story: So as humans, we all make our decision space now emulsions and our experiences. And often up to that, we rationalize it with some kind of data. But in order for us to remember any statistics or data information, they have to be charged with some kind of emotion or some kind of a reason for why we should care. Is Tony Robin says, information without emulsion is not retained. But when we are presenting design work, we're actually sitting on the opposite side of the spectrum. We are kind of showing up often emotionally charged work, which is extremely subjective. And we're hoping that our client will experience the same emotions and recognize the brilliance of our work. The trouble is of course, that all of us have different experiences and therefore the reactions that we have, certain subjective things will vary and will be quite different. And what we have to do as people who are presenting the work and presenting the giving the presentations. We have to ultimately minimize that subjectivity. So we have to strike a balance between the objective information and data in the emotional angle and subjectivity of design and art in we can start to do that through the power of storytelling. So as humans, we love stories. We had been retelling them and connecting with them deeply for thousands of years in stories help us to remember the facts and figures of those stories. But even more importantly, they help us to remember the reasons why those facts and figures were important. For example, the Europe called the basic premise of why Romeo and Juliet love was doomed. Or perhaps do you remember the reason for that clown fish, the reason why the clownfish had to travel in Finding Nemo. Do you remember why the Titanic sunk? So all of these things, stories in the help us to remember the facts and figures because they are charged with that emotion. And stories essentially help us to, to connect and show those facts and figures in a way that appeals to the emotional decision-making bits of our brains. So a lot of this story is to use a specific framework or listed in a loose way, they referred to the hero's journey, which is a framework originally coined by Joseph Campbell in the hero's journey. In the basic premise of it is that there is a character who has a dream I want, or a problem. So you can show how things were introducing the previous logo or other work that needs to change for our design contexts. Secondly, we have to introduce some kind of a challenge or obstacle that the character must overcome. That's part of the storytelling framework in our design contexts, we can think about that as a way to describe the challenges that we're facing for our project so that you and the client above aligned on the objectives. Notice how even that word is objectives in objective and not subjective. Now the third component is that the character is met usually with a help out or a mentor. With our design contexts. We can think about that as a way for us to introduce some data, research and facts that has helped you to arrive at your design decisions. Now, the fourth component is usually some kind of a transformation has occurred for the character. And in our design context of presenting the work, we can think about that as a way to introduce the work by helping your client understand your design decisions. The key here is that your design shouldn't be about selling that work to the client. The client does work into 2D on Horner to show you how brilliant you are. They want to come along on the story in a compelling journey with you. So if you take them on that journey, any craft, a compelling story, the client will have no doubt in my mind that the final designs that you presented them is the answer to the solution to the challenge that they're facing. Because they had been involved in all of those story points across the board. So in the next video, I'm actually going to have a look at the anatomy of a presentation in more detail with some practical examples. So stay tuned for that. 5. Anatomy of a Presentation: There is this mindset that I see in the design community. There's borderline self-centered. And I see designers that talk about the clients needing to listen to them because they are the expert. It's as if the clients should feel lucky that that designer has chosen them to do the work for them. The designers are treating it as a way to show the clients that the work is amazing and initially be wild by them. But that's exactly why so many clients actually do not value design. And in a lot of cases, because AS designers they're treating it as a transaction. Because we are making the work all about us. What we should be doing as designers is guiding our client to the right solution. And actually together working out the optimal solution. In arriving at that solution, that's going to be the most optimal solution for their target audience. So, imagine for a second that you ask someone on a date and within a few weeks, you meet at the appropriate time or the established time. And when you arrive at this first date, you arrive with a 10 year plan of how you're going to live together. You, you also bring along the tickets to Paris and engagement ring and so on. And that's what essentially you're asking the client to do when you're doing this big designer Wilson and expecting them to be wild by your work without doing any lead up. So why am I telling you all this? Because this is the, exactly the mindset that keeps the designs just got diving in into showing the brilliant design work and expecting the client just to get it. And they start to show the pretty pictures and the all of the design logos and grids in things of that nature. But the beef of the presentation, as I already mentioned, needs to be the thinking and selling in the thinking in showing how you arrived at those decisions. Because the clients will have very different experiences to you. So there's a certain method, how you can structure your presentation, which I have briefly already covered. But I'm going to dive deep into now crafting your presentation in thinking about the components that have to go into it in order for it to be a successful presentation and to take the client on the journey. So number one is you have to start with painting a clear picture of the objective. Now, this is the kinda thing that will help you increase the chances of having a yes of the final designs as well. So by defining the objective clearly you're defining and reminding everyone who's involved about what you're trying to achieve and what the actual challenges so that you have off, agreed on and then that you can work towards a great way to tackle this can also be used by creating a reverse brief, which is essentially a piece of document that you create after you received the initial brief from the client in which you rephrase or rethink what is being asked of you in the way that you understand it. And you start by showing them that you actually understand the actual problem rather than the surface level thing that there might have come to you for. So in this course I won't be covering the reverse brief. Detail about am I covered that in a future video at some point. But just to think about that in a way that you can communicate back to the client what the challenge is and how you've understood the charges can be a great way to define that objective and making sure that everyone is in agreement with that. And we can actually work towards this common objective and thus making the design more objective. The second component you can do is identify the past, present, and future. So this can involve showing samples of the old presently used materials, whether that's identity design, logos, or any materials that are being used, or any other generalities that you're trying to change. Hint, after showing that work, you can start to introduce the story of how you're planning to change something or other reasons why you're planning to change something or what's not working, what's working and what are the key things and reasons why you want to change this things? For step number three, you can start to detail the research. In that means presenting any research findings or customer interviews, desktop analysis, competitor trains, anything else that you've used to form your opinions and recommendations. So even if you're not involved and engaged in any kind of brand strategy work per se. You can still go ahead and do some desktop research. You can still find out about the different competitors, the key competitors of your client. And have a look at the colors in predominant colors that they're using in the cars that are being used in the industry. Have a look at the messaging stars that they have. Have a look at the services that they provide and maybe how they're calling the services and how they position them, the clients, and how to communicate the services to them. Is there a particular pricing structure? You can also have a look at the customer reviews for those competitors to get an understanding of what customers pain points are and whether or not there is a perception that there's competitors hitting on helping alleviate those pain points for the customers. So all of these things you can do even though you're not doing any strategy or brand strategy work, you can still involve yourself in that type of work and that any of that research will help you essentially backup your reasoning and the key decisions for your designs. And to be able to communicate to the client in a way that they will understand and see. The reason for. Number four is that you can start introducing those positioning pillars. And you can use brand pillars that you've used in forming the brand idea, which might be, for example, customer needs or brand value. So brand persona, followed by the big brand idea itself. And this is what you really need to sell in. Again, if you haven't done any kind of brand strategy work to be able to identify them. No problem, you can still distill some of those research thinks from the previous step into some kind of recommendations in some kind of formed opinions. So in a nutshell, you can say something along the lines of. Well, we've identified that out eight out of 10 of your biggest competitors use the color blue in their branding. And it will be difficult for your brand to stand out with so many businesses with the same colors. And therefore, we took that consideration when picking the colors fall for this particular logo, for your brand in making the design decisions for, for going forward of your logo. So this is just an example argument, but you can see how you can form recommendation. It doesn't have to be a kind of a formal sign then delivered kind of contract. All you're doing is you're saying that you have gone through and done some research in based on your findings, this is your professional opinion and your professional recommendation. In the next phase, you can show workings of their ideas itself, whether that might be sketches or explorations of the logo. But you don't want to do that too much, you just want to give a glimpse. So the purpose of showing this, this type of exploration is essentially to alleviate any assumptions for the client and also any, any worries that they might have. And also, you might be able to answer the questions of, why didn't you try that monkey logo idea that I suggested from the client. So you can kind of show the workings and what you have tried. And you can go through and talk about what has worked, what hasn't worked, and why and why you've moved to certain directions. Because that can start to for the client to see that you have explored things that maybe they had requested or even maybe things that they haven't requested, but you know, that they had in their back of their mind based on those initial briefings that you've had with them. So he wanted to put them at ease and you want to reduce the uncertainty at every stage of that process. So the next part of the presentation, in the next pillar of the presentation is showing the work in its simplest form first, so that might be like a black and white logo without any taglines or something that's basic, the basic structures of the basic blocks of a brand identity, for example. So if you are showing, for example, a logo, then you can show that in black and white without any taglines. And I've had examples of where I've presented the initial idea for the logo and actually showed them the logo in color afterwards, in the headed the color. But at least that's an easy problem to solve because then you basically just know that that idea for the logo is valid and all you have to do is maybe show them a few different color options. However, if the opposite has happened and you have shown them the logo and color first and they're headed the color. It tends to be a lot more difficult for the client to accept that logo, which they kind of negated or objectified words because of that internal element of their fighting against something that they've already said no to. So it's always best to present the work in its simplest form so that he can get a micro commitments to do the design decision process. And then it's easier to fall back a few small steps backwards if you have to tweak a small color or tweak something with the presented work. The other component in the peel off the presentation is actually to show the design work itself. So I will say that if you manage to sell your thinking in those initial stages of the presentation and you've done a really good job painting the picture throughout the presentation, then the corresponding work should almost tell itself. So by the time you are showing them the design work itself, the client should already be essentially on board with your ideas and your design decisions and the story that you had been telling them along the way, they should already have micro commitments to those decisions. And by the time you showing them the work, even if they're not a 100 percent happy. So long as you presented them with those objective reasons and data and findings, then it's easy to revert back and understand where you need to take a detour or way you need to make small adjustments if necessary. So you can say something along the lines of I here, I missed the client that you don't feel that the red is the best color that helps us to achieve this objective X. So knowing what we know about your competitors and the colors that defining and using and other findings and research that we have. I'm created. Can you share your thoughts about what color you feel would help us achieve X and connect to your target audience. So this is an extremely basic example, but it should give you an idea of how you can frame feedback or ask for feedback in a way that the clients can understand in a context that is going to be useful for you and the outcome of the project. So speaking of feedback, Let's talk about some other components that go around, such as framing feedback, and what other things you can prepare for the presentation itself. 6. Big Day of the Presentation: So you've got all the research, you've got all of the findings, you've got your big idea. You've got the data to support your design decisions and you've got the winning design that you know, he's going to hit the mark. But what are some of the other things that you can do to make your presentation a winning one. Firstly, you can reframe your perspective from giving a presentation to communicating a message. So now that I've talked about creating a winning presentation, and that's because I'm using a familiar language. So if I talk about getting a client's approval or selling your idea or selling your work. You know, we all get it as designers, we use this kind of language all the time. But the mindset shift from giving the presentation to communicating a message actually shifts your mind and shifts your perspective in the way that you can structure your presentation in the best, most optimal way when you understand that you're there to communicate your idea rather than to Salvia your work that can help you to actually structure your presentation so it doesn't even have to be a PDF slide. It can literally be you talking in front of a whiteboard for the, the explaining your design thinking and you have can you design decisions? It could be just the bars showing a video of something. So essentially at the intersection of what most natural to you and what formative field will best convey that message best to your client is what should determine how you will present. So whatever format you choose to give your presentation and to communicate your idea, just know that there are a few more things that you should consider to integrate into that engagement. On the day. Number 1 is talk about the agenda, set the expectations early. So you want your client to be certain about what will happen. And that lack of certainty can actually force us to take take control. So and that's what clients tend to do when they feel uncertain. If you can eliminate that by talking about the structure of your presentation before you started and what can be expected and what you will talk about that we'll put them at ease. As the second talk about the how you would like the framework to be presented to. You can talk about the beef of the presentation. And before you show the cherry or the work, remind everyone that what the objectives are and what the different challenges that you're trying to solve. And then talk to them about how you would like the feedback to be framed by them. So you might say something like based on what we know about our customers, do you think this will work for that audience? Or if one of the objectives was to position the brand as transformational and change a dream. And one of the questions might be, does this work communicate transformation, change? For step number 3, have a plan in mind for what the next step might be and then set that expectation for the client as well. So at the end or even before showing the work, you can talk about what the next steps might be. So for example, you could talk about any additional deliverables that might be dependent on either the client making a decision today or how you plan to move forward with the rest of the project. Again, this is all about providing clarity and certainty to the client and let them know what is expected of them and what they can expect from you and from the presentation. So the things that I've talked to you about within this format, within this video is just a guideline. It's a formula, a set of rules. So it's great to understand the formulas and the guidelines to understand what works and what pitfalls can be avoided. But at the end of the day, these frameworks are meant to be used to your advantage. So you have to find the way how they work best for you rather than following them letter by letter. What I would recommend is actually use this framework in a few of your presentations ability and then see what has worked for you specifically and what hasn't worked for you specifically so that you can adjust. So for example, maybe you need to change the order of some contents within that beef sections for yourself personally, maybe that's suits your style better. Or maybe you need to show more of your process or maybe less of it. Maybe you need to be clear on the objectives that you set it. Maybe more specific or maybe not more generalized. Maybe you need to show mood boards before you show your work. So all of these factors should be considered and you should take them and consideration as to what works best for you and the way that you work, in the way that you present and the process that you use and so on. Because essentially the presentation is a way for you to communicate the message in the best, most optimal way. Again, use this structure as a, as a base. However, feel free to adjust that as you go along and you provide and give great presentations and you learn from your experiences. So in the next video, I'm going to take a deep dive into a practical example, or a few practical example. So you can see what I have created in the past and how I've structured my presentation. So you can get a little bit more context. 7. Presentation Example One: So I wanted to give you a few examples of the presentations that I have built using the structure that I have taken you through so far. And today, in this first presentation, I want to take you through a presentation I've put together for presenting brand identity work for a client of mine in the past when I worked for a design agency, this was a women's organization and we were tasked with creating a brand identity based on an archetype, which was the positioning angle that we used at the agency at the time. So essentially you see the uptake in some of the key elements out or some identifying elements of the agency where I worked for. Because I'm not obviously inclined to display that for you. But you can see what I have created in actual guts of the presentation itself. So firstly, we have the cover, and then we start diving into the objectives of what we're trying to do. So we are focusing in this particular presentation on creating a brand identity work that's translated from the brand archetype and insights from our brain discovery workshop into this brand identity system. And so that in the objectives we said that we want to communicate a sense of community certainty and confidence to vulnerable women. And we want to talk about building partnerships and networks to the most relevant service providers. And we want to make sure that it speaks to the target audience of women who are looking to support for domestic violence, information on pregnancy and more. So in that first slide, I have talked about the objectives for, for what we're trying to do. And then I dive into defining the territory's. So in my eyes, I'm actually building a picture of what the current business east and how I understood them. In the sense this is almost like a reverse brief, but I'm also defining the present, the past, and the future for this technique because I'm talking about what they provide and who they are as a business, who they are, and what infrastructure they have. So what's top of resources that I have? Then I'm talking about the services that they have, and I'm talking about how they they provide the services and also the mission and cause, which is the y. So all of this builds up the picture of the past, present, and future where we want them to go and where they are now at the moment. And the spite of that, I'm also showing them this was the current brand and the logo and some of the existing marketing materials. And then I'm diving into a bit of the research. I'm showing what the competitors look like. I give them a very brief snapshot of the competitors. And although we didn't really go through an extensive brand strategy workshop of them, there was a small discovery session, but there wasn't like a Fulang brand strategy session or commitment for this particular client. So the findings in this particular deck pretty light on, but I'm still using them to backup my decisions. So I'm showing them, this is a snapshot of your existing competitors. And what I want to do is I'm also want to remind them of the brand. Work that we've done in terms of their brand archetype. I'm reminding them that these are the key aspects of the archetype that we have established for them. And we want to communicate that they are innovative and the crate and the form connections. And then that's satisfied with off the shelf solutions. Always tailoring the services to their customers. And we'll want to involve the customer in the creation process of the outcomes, in showing the process of playful collaboration together with customers and provide us. And so I'm kinda trying to then distill some of the things that we know about the customers than the kind of people that come to them to, to submit questions on their website and call them. And we've been able to collect the data from the client. And so we, we essentially in this part of the presentation, we're talking about that the data we're showing the research with detailed detailing the research. So we're saying that we have come to understand that at the heart of it, all, vulnerable women are really looking for reliable and trustworthy source of information. And the woman Craig connections to the services they need and ability to build networks of other women in similar situation. And that the key differentiator for, for our client was that they creatively approach each situation in with the intention of creating a palette service by using the building blocks of their service network. And so this is kind of the section here of this presentations where I talk about how would I want them to evaluate the work that I will be presenting. So this is kinda the sections where I'm asking them, how will the feedback be provided or how would I like them to provide the feedback and also what they shouldn't be judging the work on and kinda what our objectives for the design, Brendan and the work. So does the logo and brand identity communicate a sentence of building networks? Thus, the logo and brand communicate a sense of play and curiosity. Does it identify self-expression, creativity? And does it the project, the sense of providing tailored solutions by focusing on individual needs. And then I'm presenting the brand pillars, what I'm calling in the section of the structure that I've advised you earlier, focusing in on individual needs and providing unique support, which is my brand idea. So I've kind of created this positioning statement, if you like, is the brand idea, which is what I will be using to drive all of the future design decisions of the brand. So I've taken all of my, all of my customer findings and the objectives and the brand archetype work and the work and research about their competitors. And I have kind of capsulated in distill it into this one statement. In from there. Then I'm diving into showing them the workings of the sketches of the work as I've described to you before. Some. I'm showing them that I've explored different solutions for the logos based on these morphological matrix. I have explored the just simple word and letter combinations. I have explored different explorations for what a network or connection would look like in the unique solutions and creating and building and using building blocks and other components that were in part of the initial presentation. Then I'm bringing them the column. And then when introducing the color that I will be using. And then I'm building up the logo in the meaning of the logo and the shape of the logo that I've created, which is the, again, taking, going back to those initial decisions and objectives that I have set at the beginning of the presentation. We want to focus on the individual and we also want to project up Mother Nature and female energy and also unique support in and joining the network. And Q stands for Queensland, which want to integrate to make sure that we identify that as a Queensland organization, which is a state in Australia. And then I'm introducing the logo in its simplest form, just black and white. And you can see how that logo shape has been created and how I've explained it by firstly explaining the objectives and also communicating them as part of presenting the logo. Before I actually show the logo, I diving into how I've built that up. And I know it's not unusual for, for, for the Zionists do this. I've seen plenty of designers do this. But the key here is to connect the original objectives that you have talked about in the initial stages of the presentation and the key findings and to kind of connect the dots together. That's the key here. It's not about just coming up with a great idea. For a logo type. It's actually about connecting the objectives to the subjectivity of designs. So then once they've seen the logo in black and white, I can then show it with color in and I can show them some other variations. And then I can talk about the different components, the building blocks and components for the brand identity system. I'm talking about how the pattern and the graphics used to present the community that, that building by layering different elements on top of each other, we are communicating how every service is unique and tailored and colored images of women with different races and they all represent vulnerable and confident women. We want to show them at the heart of the services. And then the all of that is kind of built in a way that does talk about that unique creation of a service. Then I'm talking about the small components of the brand identity, which is some illustrations and patents. And then the imagery that we will be using to create that. And essentially then I'm diving in into the application examples. So as you can see here, I didn't just, if I just basically just started dabbing in from this section onwards for the presentation. They would, maybe they would like to design just as they are. But in a lot of times, in a lot of my experiences, clients don't really understand the subjective designs all the time. You have to take them on that journey. So this was presentation on one end. I will dive into a second example in the next video. 8. Presentation Example Two: Welcome back. This is the second presentation that I want to take you through it. This is a recent client of mine that I worked with where I didn't do some strategic work beforehand. And but also a dam that with one of the deliverables was also brand identity work. So I will take you through again, I've taken out some of the private components of the presentation, but I'll, I'll share the kind of the guts of it so that they can understand the context of building one. So again, we start with the color. Obviously it doesn't look like this. This is just me taking out the client's name and the design and the logo and everything for my brand. But then the initial parts of this particular presentation was actually me talking to them about the agenda of the presentation. So there's quite a few components of the presentation that I wanted to take them through. So you see that I have clearly defined the kind of things that I will be showing them, including the past, present and future goals and opportunities with essentially the objectives, then the competitive landscape and customer persona's, and the brand values and personality and positioning, tone of voice. And then finally the look and feel. So we start by defining where they are in the process. So I talked to them about having done that, the initial brand workshop. And we have done the analysis and research and where at the moment in the positioning stages and presenting the idea. So that's where we are past, present, and future. Then we are painting the goals and opportunities. So we want to understand the customer's needs to make sure we're delivering on those conscious and subconscious expectation. The, then another objective was to solidify their brand values into something unique and relevant for them. And establish their unique personality and tone of voice. And also define the brand positioning and which will be the positioning statement that will drive our brand identity work. So then I dive into the competitors. So I kind of do the research and present the findings based on that. Again, there are a few different components that were part of this research. I've taken some of that out because it was a private, confidential information. But the key aspect you can see here is that I'm reviewing the messaging for particular competitor and as well as the testimonials that customers share regarding the service for that competitor, as well as the some of the key findings on the key findings up on that this business has been operation fall with 20 years and they do have a multitude of services, but they have a heavy we are all for everyone angle and not really targeting anyone in particular. And there isn't any evidence positioning there I could see. And I kind of go through a few different examples like this in finding that maybe there's a lack of valuable customer reviews for, for this particular competitor. And there's no particular values that are, that's a dividend. And the messaging. For this particular customer, for this particular competitor rather, is that ticks them all, which is the strap line. And the kind of outline, the different messaging and texts that they use in the wording that they use. So then as a part of a recommendation, I'm essentially saying, well, this is the repeating themes of those competitors. This is the things that I have seen time and time again have after looking at those multiple competitors. And so this are the things that we want to avoid or have a really strong reason for using if we want to use it. Because this is the things that everyone else is saying. So you want to stand out and differentiate that we want to stay away from these. Then I'm looking at the customer needs and I'm kinda come through and done a workshop as part of the workshop, then I'm outlining this is the kind of different customer needs that we have outlined and have the different persona's that we have identified. And they want the use of simplicity of the product that they use. And they want creativity and innovation from their provider and security and peace of mind. And then another customer persona. They want to, again intuitive UX and UI for the tool that they're using. And they want an excellent connection and security and doesn't like something that takes long time to setup. And basically, after all of those different customer persona reviews, we then identify that these are the key things that our customers are looking for is the security, simplicity, innovation, and growth. Then I'm talking about the brand values and I'm talking to them about why brand value psi important. And I'm just sharing the example of how Donald Trump basically had one message and this political campaign that he will build the wall. Whereas his, his competitor heads like a 100 different values that we really didn't know what she stood for. And so, so Mrs. Hillary Clinton was obviously on the losing end of that particular political campaign. And the reason for that is that we want to use 10-fold clear values. So that's, I'm basically explaining to my customer why having clear and relevant unique values is important. And again, from the brand workshop, sharing what we have found and what we have collaborated and what our values are, which is simplicity, security, innovation, honesty and connectivity. In. And then I'm kinda breaking down each value into further description of what that means specifically for my client. And then I'm basically saying, follow the brand positioning. This is our new brand, who we are, what we do and how we do it. This is again, setting up the brand pillars and it's also taking them into that in the past, present, and future kind of components. And the position statement is the main brand pillar is we're on a mission to create meaningful connections, delivering innovative technologies to help businesses be interconnected, solutions or tail it secure, user-friendly, and more importantly, bring people together. So I've actually tweaked this positioning statement. This is not the position statement I have created for this particular brand. I had to change it because again, I cannot really share their specific unique point of view because they haven't quite launched, this brand actually haven't launched. So I don't want to give away anything unique and specific to that brand, but it gives you an idea that a positioning statement like this can act as a North Star for your design work, for your messaging work and so on. So then there was some components for messaging styles which are taken up from here, just so that I can skip to this look and feel part. So in this presentation what I'm doing is I'm Cali num. Okay. When I present you the visual work, I want you to judge it and evaluated based on these components. So I'm asking them to frame the feedback, some controlling the presentation. And I'm setting the context of how I'd like to feed back, to be provided to me. Doesn't bring strategy to life that we have defined. Does it represent the brand personality and brand values? And does it move us the way we want to go? And then, based on this particular presentation, I haven't actually gone through and created the logo and brand identity. Well, I have created it, but in this particular presentation, I was only presenting them with mood boards. So I wanted them to present them with moodboards before I proceed with the logo design. So this was the first option number 1 of the moodboard, and this was option number two. And option number two is what they've actually ultimately selected for moving forward. So this is again, one more way how you construct your presentation to have micro commitments for, for, for those decisions. And from there onwards from this particular presentation and I've gone and taking their approved and selected moodboard number 2 and created the, the actual brand identity work. But you can see how using this in a structured way in getting the buy-in from every of those micro steps of the journey means that they kind of essentially tick, tick, tick, tick. And then even if you have some options, awesome needs to tweak at the latest stage, it's very easy just to go a few steps back rather than starting from scratch, which is normally what happens when you're working with fuzzy brief. Or you have no structure to your presentation. And you're just hoping to wow the client. So this hope, this gives you more context, is how you can apply this light. Top of thinking. Structuring your presentation. 9. Thank you and Class Project: Congratulations, you've just made a giant leap towards being able to present your work more confidently and also increasing your chances of that yes, at the end in the client approval, at the end of your presentation. Just remember the presentation in story telling techniques that I've talked about today. They're not there to help you trick your customer, intersect or selling the idea to them in selling your design work for them. It's about knowing how to best structure your presentations in the most optimal format to be able to communicate the design decisions and the thinking about your work and your findings and show the merits of the design work and design decisions that you have made to help the client understand and take them on a journey of the design decision process to help them see why the design and the final design deliverables are actually the solution that they need in. So the presentation techniques that I have talked about today, they're not only great for presenting logo and brand identity work that can be used for literally anything. Because this presentation techniques is essentially a force multiplier that will help you in any future endeavors, whether professional or personal. For the class project, I would love for you to take either an existing project of yours or a new project that you're working on, or even a fake make-believe brand or something where you can put together and create a presentation using the format and the structure that I have talked to you about Day and integrating that storytelling through that presentation. And then feel free to share whether a PDF or a slide deck or a link to Dropbox or Google Drive or anything of that nature. So that you can show us your presentation deck or at least components of it. The big, big pillars that we've talked about. So that we can have a look at your presentation and see what takeaways you have taken from this class. As always, if you have enjoyed my class, I highly encourage you to leave a positive review. It helps me to continue creating this type of courses. And I'd love you to follow me on this platform. And solidity can give, get notified whenever new classes become available. So I'll see you in my next class and have a great time.