Presenting Design Work to Clients | Professional Practice Lesson 6

Originally published 2014. Updated March 2026.

To convince your client of the barnstorming excellence of your proposed solution, you’ll almost always need to take them through things step-by-step in a presentation. Presentations are the ultimate test of your communication skills. Many a fine idea has been admonished or dismissed through poor presentation. Gulp down the words below to ensure this doesn’t happen to yours.

Part of the Professional Practice series: Lesson 5 — Invoicing | Lesson 7 — Contracts

First Things First

The presentation is the moment of truth. The moment when the designer must bring all their communication skills to the fore and convince their audience that what they’re showing them is the right response to the brief.

Many designers find presenting to clients nerve-wracking, which is understandable. Client decisions can at times mean the difference between shopping for food that week or going back to Mum’s for dinner.

Being nervous isn’t perceived by others as being half as bad as you’d think. Nobody expects designers to possess statesman-level oratory skills. The main thing when giving presentations is to be yourself.

If you’re a smooth sort of person that’s wonderful, but being rough-edged or a little awkward is equally fine, if that’s part of your personality. Don’t try to be smooth if you’re not — you’ll more likely than not tie yourself up in knots with the effort of it all. Be yourself, and be passionate and confident about what you’re presenting.

All in the Preparation

“There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe” — Robert Heinlein

Spend time on every little detail before the big day, and be sure to have each component or topic in place, and in the order you want to present them. Keep things simple and structured, and take your clients — from beginning to end — through your creative process.

Avoid making assumptions about what your clients know. You may have worked, lived and breathed the project for the past fortnight, but your audience won’t have. Begin by restating the brief, explain the developmental process, and end with a compact summary. Presentations really needn’t be any more complicated than that.

Adrian Shaughnessy, acclaimed designer and writer of How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, states:

The great immutable law of making a design presentation is this: tell your audience what you are going to show them and then show it to them. That’s all there is to it. Don’t tell them what to think about what they are going to see, just tell them what it is that they are going to see. Try it. You’ll be amazed.

This is sound advice. Your client may have just been presented with something, to their mind, daring or even downright shocking. They’ll need time to digest things. After explaining what you’re about to present and presenting it, help that digestion by keeping quiet.

A Visual Reference of What You Might Include

Taking a lead from Shaughnessy, follow this visual reference guide for simple, effective presentations. The images comprise brief, project development and final execution of the visual identity for the Folkestone Film Factory.

It’s not What You Say, it’s the Way that You Say It

Ideas can be rejected not on their inferior quality per se, but more on the way they are presented. The illustration below demonstrates how, by utilising creative thinking, we can often turn decisions favourably in our direction. Being aware of the micro-climate of each presentation you find yourself in, and employing the communication skills necessary to resonate with each client, will certainly do your cause no harm.

Consider this example. Writer and producer Albert S. Ruddy agreed to produce the forthcoming “The Godfather” movie — at that time a best-selling novel that had managed to accrue certain negative associations, having been touted to and rejected by various Hollywood studios.

The only hurdle was approval from Paramount’s Charles Blühdorn, a volatile Austrian industrialist who reserved final sign-off on all pictures. Ruddy flew to New York. “Whaddaya wanna do with this movie?” Blühdorn enquired in his inimitable and brusque style.

Ruddy knew that if he began to discuss the novel, Blühdorn would reject the project out of hand. Instead he said: “Charlie, I want to make an ice-blue, terrifying movie… about people you love.”

Ruddy flew back to Los Angeles with Blühdorn’s blessing. Your clients may not be volatile Austrian industrialists, but the principle holds.

Presenting Remotely

Remote presentations — via Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet — have become standard practice. The fundamentals are exactly the same, but the medium demands a few adjustments.

Screen sharing your work means clients see what you see, which is both a strength and a risk. Prepare a single, clean document to share rather than jumping between applications. Keep your camera on — eye contact through a lens still matters. Consider walking clients through a PDF rather than a live design file; it removes the distraction of tool interfaces and lets the work do the talking.

Silence on a call reads differently to silence in a room. When you pause to let the work land, say so: “I’ll give you a moment with that.” And if the connection is poor, a screen-recorded walkthrough sent in advance can do the heavy lifting before you meet.

Top Presentation Tips

• Prepare thoroughly
• Speak factually, coherently, distinctly and not too quickly
• Intersperse your speaking with appropriate pauses to allow your audience to absorb the information
• Be as articulate as possible
• Argue convincingly, objectively and fairly
• Maintain eye contact — in person and on camera
• Don’t speak for longer than your audience’s attention span allows
• Don’t use PowerPoint

In Sum…

Thorough preparation and solid planning are vital. The work you present also has to be up to scratch. But ultimately, a lot rests on your personality.

Throughout your presentations, strive to come across as reasonable and likeable. Maintain eye contact with your audience, speak articulately and passionately about your work, listen to comments, and attempt to answer any questions as best you can. Your clients need to be convinced that you are not only the right designer for the job, but are also going to be easy to get along with.

The more you satisfy clients of this important criteria, the more you’ll be trudging back from the supermarket laden with food from all the well-paid jobs you’ll have won.

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Ready to develop your client communication skills? Our Certificate IV in Graphic Design covers professional practice from quoting and contracts to client presentations — everything you need to work confidently as a designer.

Continue the series: Lesson 7 — Graphic Design Contracts