What to send your presentation designer (it changes the price)

The same 20-slide deck can cost $900 or $2,000 from the same studio, and the difference is usually not ambition. It is what arrived in the first email. Content readiness is the single biggest lever on presentation pricing, and it is the one lever entirely in the client's hands.

Final text, or an honest draft

Finished, approved content is the cheapest project you can buy: the designer structures, designs, ships. When the text is half-formed, someone senior has to do editorial work — deciding what the deck is trying to say — and editorial time is the expensive kind.

An honest draft beats a polished lie. A rough document saying “we don't know how to end this” is more useful than a confident wall of text three stakeholders have not agreed on. The most expensive projects we see are the ones where content gets renegotiated internally after design has started; every internal compromise arrives as a revision request. If the text genuinely is not ready, say so and buy the structural work explicitly — it exists as a service. It just should not arrive disguised as “small text edits” in round two.

Brand assets, in their original formats

Logo in vector — SVG, EPS or AI, not a screenshot from the website. Brand guidelines if they exist, even old ones. Fonts, with names, or at least a licence status. Approved photography if you have it. Guidelines covering only a logo and two colours are normal, and any competent studio extends them for presentation use. What slows a project is not thin guidelines; it is guidelines that exist and arrive in week two, after the concept was approved against nothing.

Two or three references, with one sentence each

Send examples you like — decks, sites, anything — with a sentence about what you like: the restraint, the density, the chart style. Three references with reasons beat thirty without. Also useful and rarely sent: one example you dislike. It fences the direction faster than ten positive ones. You are not designing the deck by sending references; you are shortening the distance between concept one and the concept that gets approved, and that distance is measured in days.

The three answers that shape everything

Who is in the room, what should they do after the last slide, and how will the deck be used — presented live, sent cold, or both? Those three change layout density, slide count, title style and chart depth. A deck read on a phone by an investor and a deck projected at a summit are different products that happen to share a file format. Deadlines belong here too, stated honestly: a real deadline is a constraint we plan around, a false-alarm deadline discovered in week three is how quality gets rationed.

What not to send

• A folder of every presentation the company has ever made, unlabelled.
• Fragmented feedback channels, agreed before the project even starts.
• A template you already dislike, with instructions to make it work. If it worked, you would not be writing to a studio.

The same preparation logic applies to any design engagement, not just decks — we set out the general version in how to write a design brief, and what the tiers themselves cost in presentation design pricing.