Presenting to clients is a core design skill, but one of the last and toughest skills that a designer picks up. Mike Monteiro explains how you're doing it wrong.
Have you booked your ticket for Generate San Francisco on 15 July yet? It's going to be an unmissable day for anyone working in web design or frontend development, with eight inspiring talks from some of the industry's leading lights. It's our first San Francisco Generate, so book now and you'll become a Generate founding member and get 50% off the ticket price for all future Generate events.
Mike Monteiro will be winding up a packed day at Generate with a talk entitled In Praise of Ordinary People. "We want to change the world," he explains, "yet the world is rarely changed by people who claim to want that. It's changed by people who are just trying to get home. We want to disrupt, yet we end up disrupting the lives of those who can least afford it."
We need to do better, says Monteiro, and in his keynote he'll be exploring just how we can do that. And for a taste of the kind of truth bombs Monteiro's going to be dropping at Generate San Francisco, make sure you set aside an hour today to watch his talk from Generate New York last year.
In 13 Ways Designers Screw Up Client Presentations, he skewers the myth that good design sells itself. You may be a great designer, but if you can't present your work to clients, explain every decision you've made along the way and answer the client's question, then you're less valuable than a merely good designer who can do all that.
You're a designer; you shouldn't have to sell, right? Wrong!
Selling, Monteiro points out, is one of the last and toughest skills that a designer picks up. You can't afford to leave it to an account manager or creative director; particularly not if you don't want to later have to implement stupid changes to your design that you could have fended off had you been in the room to explain your process and talk the client round.
Basically, great design that you can't sell isn't going to pay the bills, but it's all too easy to mess up the presentation and drop the ball. Here, then, Monteiro lays out 13 ways designers get their presentations wrong so that you can avoid making the same mistakes. It's an hour of tough love and essential advice, and you'll come out of it much better equipped for selling your work and furthering your career.
Jim McCauley is a writer, performer and cat-wrangler who started writing professionally way back in 1995 on PC Format magazine, and has been covering technology-related subjects ever since, whether it's hardware, software or videogames. A chance call in 2005 led to Jim taking charge of Computer Arts' website and developing an interest in the world of graphic design, and eventually led to a move over to the freshly-launched Creative Bloq in 2012. Jim now works as a freelance writer for sites including Creative Bloq, T3 and PetsRadar, specialising in design, technology, wellness and cats, while doing the occasional pantomime and street performance in Bath and designing posters for a local drama group on the side.
