Building design presentation templates with Pitch (Video)

May 3, 2021

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Note: Pitch sponsored this video, but did not sponsor this post or presentation.design.

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Video Transcript:

Hey friend, as a designer, I find myself creating a lot of presentations, whether it's to get stakeholder feedback or sort of present a status update to leadership. Often I'm creating these presentations collaboratively with other people on my team. In the past I've used tools likeGoogle Slides to create these presentations and tools.

[00:00:18] Like these are kind of clunky as a designer. I'm really looking for more robust. Design features and functionality. So I can make the presentation look exactly how I want it to and focus on the storytelling. There's a tool that I've been using recently that does all of this and more. And it's called Pitch. Pitch is an online collaborative presentation tool that gets the whole team together to focus on creating great presentations that tell a good story. In this video, I want to walk through building a presentation template.

[00:00:48] Let's do it. Before we jump into building the template. There's three things about pitch. I really like that. I want to share with you the first is the design look and feel of this tool. As a designer, I felt right at home, jumping into Pitch where I had access to all of the sort of design features and functionality I wanted, like.

[00:01:07] Distributing elements, aligning things well, cropping, masking, it just felt like a design tool in a presentation frame. It has a super low learning curve and I felt as soon as I dropped into the tool, I could just get up and running, creating my presentations. Really quickly because it was familiar to tools like Figma or sketch.

[00:01:27] The next thing I really like is it's collaboration, features. You can invite different members of your team to collaborate on a presentation, but the collaboration doesn't stop there. You can actually assign different slides to different people and also set statuses of your slides. And I'm going to show you all of that in a minute.

[00:01:42] And lastly Pitch also allows you to have templates. This is great, but when you're working with a larger team and you want some control over the look, feel and tone of your presentations within your company or team. Enough talking, let's start building in Pitch. Here I am in Pitch and I'm in my Femke.Design workspace.

[00:02:00] I also have another workspace here at the top left, and I have a few folders here. One is for an Açaí project and then the others, is, for a different team that I'm working on. Let's get started creating a presentation and I'm going to pick a really light template. Pitch has, a lot of templates that you can use to get started with.

[00:02:19] I'm just going to use this really light one, because I actually want to create my own template. If I wanted to, I could import and add all of these slides from this template, but I'm not going to do that for now. And just kind of start with this blank canvas. Let's start by adding a title. Okay. And I'm actually going to.

[00:02:37] Upload and add a custom font for this. Pitch does have a range of fonts, but let's say you have a brand font, you know something internal that you want to use.

[00:02:50] Okay! And pitch has brought our font in. I'm just going to check that this is correct and it looks good. This is the name of the font. Let's add this to our workspace.

[00:03:02] Okay, I'm going to go ahead and add a bit more content to our title slide here. Yeah.

[00:03:11] Okay. So I've added three pieces of text content here, and I've actually assigned a text style to each of these text boxes. So this one, as you can see, is a title. This one is a headline and this last one here is a sub-headline and currently it's kind of using default fonts except for this first one, which we added the custom font to.

[00:03:29] But I want to go ahead and actually edit the text styles for this other content so that we have all of the text with the custom font that we uploaded. So to do that, I'm actually going to come down here where I can see. I see the name of the style. That's been applied to this template, and I'm going to go ahead and edit this, which is going to bring the up into the Style builder.

[00:03:49] Now, from here, you can go in and edit all of the styles for your presentation template. The first thing I want to do is I want to update the font that's been used throughout my presentation. I'm going to choose over here the Palanquin, which is the font that we just uploaded. And you can see as soon as I selected that it changed the font.

[00:04:07] For all of the styles within my style, that's being used for this presentation. Let's change a few other things too. So for example, for the sub headline, let's say instead of this light gray, I want to use this more darker shade of gray and. Maybe I also want to increase the size just a little bit. There we go.

[00:04:30] There's a lot of other things you can also customize too. Let's say we wanted to customize the color of our bullet points.I can go ahead and do that as well. Let's say we wanted this rosy red color, maybe for a link we want to have that also be the rosy red color so that you can easily identify when something is a link.

[00:04:50] Let's add an underline to it as well. And you can see this live previewing on the left-hand side, as you go through. Let's see for these charts, let's make that a bit more interesting. Let's use our rosy red and let's see if there's anything else we want to change. Maybe our axes.Cool and some about shapes as well.

[00:05:10] Let's choose. Rosy red. So now we kind of have this like red gray thing going on. I'm going to rename this style to light mode and click save. Now you'll see that our text styles here, that we're using updated to reflect the settings that we just configured. Over in the Style builder. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and build out more of those templates.

[00:05:32] So we have a little bit more content to work with.

[00:05:39] Okay. I want to pause there and show you this. SoI just added this image here from Unsplash, which you can search for any image in here. And what I love about Pitch is I can resize this image as I wish, and it doesn't affect the proportions of the image, which. Saves me so much time having to crop the images.

[00:06:00] So I love that the images work this way.

[00:06:18] So, this is one thing I really like from my design tools is I can easily tidy up these. So for example, let's say I had, for some reason, put that one really far away. I can select all of these and click on Tidy and it easily distributes and aligns these, which is

[00:06:34] Awesome. You can, of course, very easily input your own images just by dragging and dropping. I'm going to bring in this phone here as sort of like a placeholder or maybe a design mock up, for example.

[00:07:11] I also really like, as I move content aroundPitch starts to kind of almost snap. The content to nice places of alignment.So like if I'm putting up the top here, it'll show me kind of like my margins for the top in the sides of this slide. It'll also show me where the center is, both horizontally and vertically.

[00:07:29] So that's a really, really nice touch as well.Because, you know, we like to keep our slides tidy.

[00:07:48] Okay. So here I have my presentation that I've made and I've made all of this using the text styles for the light mode that we defined earlier. You can see, I have texts. I also have some bulleted lists and they're pulling in our rosy red as well as some lines in some places. Right now, our presentation is using the light mode style that we built.

[00:08:08] But what if we wanted to build another style?Down here, let's add a dark mode for this template because you know, we want to be cool. We want to give people some options. I'm going to create a new style here and let's call this. Dark mode. And for this mode, let's make our background color, a dark color, and let's make sure that all of our text is.

[00:08:38] White so that we can read it and it doesn't get hidden with the dark background color.

[00:08:48] Okay. You can see we're also losing some of our table, so let's switch it over so that we can make sure we see the content. You know what, maybe I'm going to be a little bit different for this one. Let's make this the red and let's change the text to white. There we go. It looks a little bit different.

[00:09:05] Let's also change our charts, axes to whites that we can see them a little bit clearer. Okay. Now I've created my dark mode style. Let's save this and then. Now let's say we want to apply the dark mode style to our template. I'm going to select the slides that I want to change the style to. In this case, I'm going to select all of them.

[00:09:25] Then down here, I'm going to switch to dark mode and it immediately applies that dark mode to all of the slides in my template.So this is great. Instead of me having to go in and update the design of each slide individually, I can actually create a style and then apply that to. All of the relevant slides in my presentation.

[00:09:45] Now I have these dark and light mode styles in this presentation, but what if I wanted to make these styles accessible to other presentations within my workspace, I can actually open up the dropdown here and publish the style to my workspace. And that way, if I was creating a totally new presentation, let's quickly create one here.

[00:10:07] You'll now see, in this brand new presentation, the workspace styles that I created from that presentation earlier. So this is awesome. Maybe as a team, you have a particular brand or style that you want to make sure it's being used consistently across all presentations in your workspace, you can easily create that style, publish it to the workspace.

[00:10:27] And then every new presentation created. Can easily pull in that style as necessary. Let's say we wanted to now turn this presentation into a template so that other members in our workspace can use it up here. I'm going to click save as template and you can rename it as you wish.Now, click save template, and now the template is ready to use.

[00:10:46] If we go on over to our template gallery here.You can see this brand new template that we just created. Now, this means anytime a team member goes to create a presentation, they will now see in the team template section, that template that you just created. This, I think will save me so much time.

[00:11:04] Personally, it's always so much work to go in and set up and create your own new presentations from scratch and really difficult to keep them consistent and on brand. So I think that this is. Really neat for design teams to go ahead and create their own templates as necessary. And that way you just maintain consistency across the team.

[00:11:25] Lastly, let's take a look at some of these collaboration features. Over here in my side project, I have this presentation and I've been collaborating on this presentation with someone. You can see already these little one chat bubbles here, which means I actually have a comment. On that slide and, Oh, you can see my team member right here is viewing the slide as we speak.

[00:11:46] So let's go ahead and jump to this slide. AlrightI can see what my team member is selected on and I can also see their cursor here. So if they started moving around, I will actually see them moving around as well. Now let's take a look at the comments. So we know we have two comments here on the slide. I'm going to open this up and it looks like I have two comments assigned to me that the final mock is ready to add over here.

[00:12:08] And. Oh, he's also going to make sure that he updates the competitors tomorrow. So this is great. I can actually have comments on the individual slides and also assign them to people as necessary.Oh. And now we can see Owen actually moving around here on the slide as we speak another really cool thing about Pitch is you can actually set statuses to individual slides.

[00:12:28] So let's say we're not quite done with a slide yet. This problem statement is still a work in progress over here on the righthand side, I can actually set a slide status. So maybe I want to set this to, a to do status in progress status, or you can also select done, but in this case, let's set this one to in progress because we're still working through this problem statement.

[00:12:48] And anyone coming into this presentation can seethe status of a slide via this indicator here. You can also assign slides to individual people in your workspace. And this is great if maybe you're collaborating and working on a presentation together and you want to take certain sections and sort of own those and work on those.

[00:13:04] So let's say for the product goals, I want to assign this slide to my product manager, who is responsible for setting the product goals. I can just come into here and select her and assign the slide straight to her. And you can see it's assigned to her again. Over here on the left-hand side. And just to show you as well, you can also set a status to the slide too.

[00:13:25] So now we say, okay, this slides assigned to Stephanie and it is now set as a, to do. Okay, friend. So we've gone through creating your own presentation, using the style builder, uploading your own custom font. Setting different styles, also turning that presentation into a template for other workspace members to use.

[00:13:44] And also we've looked at the collaboration features such as assigning slides to different team members and setting statuses on slides as well as commenting. As you can see, Pitch has a lot of robust, easy to use features that, as a designer, I felt so comfortable in, and it's not only easy to use, but it's also fun to use.

[00:14:03] And so if you and your team are looking to up-level your presentations, then I highly recommend checking out Pitch. A special thank you to Pitch for sponsoring this video, which felt like such a good natural fit. And I hope that you have been inspired to try this tool. And up-level your presentations within your team.

[00:14:21] See you in another video. Take care.

Video notes:

Try Pitch for free today: https://pitch.com/?utm_medium=social&...

If you and your team are looking to up-level your presentations, I highly recommend checking out Pitch, an online collaborative presentation tool. It's not only easy, but also fun to use.This is a sponsored video.