GOOD DESIGN IS THE LAST THING I DO
Solving the System Before Designing the Surface
One of my favorite things to design are presentations. There’s something uniquely satisfying about transforming a cluttered slide deck into a cohesive visual experience — one that communicates clearly, reflects a brand with confidence, and actually excites the people using it.
For the past couple of years, I’ve had the privilege of supporting Compudopt, a non-profit dedicated to bridging the digital divide for under-resourced communities. Their trainers work across the country, running classes that teach kids and teens everything from coding and AI to robotics and engineering. The mission is important. The materials needed to match it.
The organization came to me with a clear directive: transform their educational assets to better reflect their brand, resonate with students, and impress stakeholders. They got that — and a lot more problem-solving along the way.
GOOD DESIGN STARTS WITH GOOD QUSTIONS
Before I opened a single design tool, I started asking questions. One of the first: What platform are you building your presentations in?
The answer was PowerPoint. Curriculum writers were creating decks and distributing them to trainers across the country. Simple enough — until I kept digging.
It turned out that not all trainers had access to PowerPoint. Some were opening files in Google Slides. Others were using OpenOffice. If you’ve ever tried to transfer a presentation between platforms, you know what happens next: fonts default if they’re not installed on the user’s machine. Images get cropped strangely or disappear entirely. Layouts shift. The carefully designed slide that left the curriculum writer’s laptop arrives looking nothing like what was intended.
And there was another problem layered underneath that one. When a curriculum writer updated a presentation, they’d re-upload it to the company’s shared files account and hope that every trainer across the country noticed the update and swapped out the old version. There was no reliable way to ensure everyone was teaching from the same materials. This had to be resolved before any design work could begin.
This is where design thinking earns its keep. The visual problem — inconsistent, off-brand materials — was real. But it was a symptom. The underlying problem was a distribution and access infrastructure that couldn’t support a geographically distributed team. My recommendation: move everything to Canva.
It came with trade-offs I was upfront about. Canva doesn’t have the raw power of Adobe tools or the computational muscle of PowerPoint. But for this situation, it was the right tool — and here’s why:
Version control, solved. Trainers access presentations via shared links, so they’re always viewing the most current version. No re-uploading. No stale decks. No instructions asking everyone to please replace the file.
Platform independence, solved. No software required on the trainer’s end. No font substitutions, no layout surprises. What the curriculum writer builds is what the trainer presents.
Brand guardrails, built in. Branded templates mean the design system travels with the content. Writers work within the structure; the brand stays intact.
Collaboration, simplified. Canva’s comment tools made the feedback loop between me and the curriculum team smooth and direct — no emailing files back and forth.
The constraint — that non-designers needed to edit these materials down the road — actually shaped the design system itself. This is a great example of the sweet spot between DIY and working with a professional: I built the foundation, established the system, and set the brand guardrails — then handed it back to their team in a form they could actually use. They don’t need me for every little update. But they needed me to build something worth updating.
THEN, FINALLY, THE DESIGN
With the infrastructure problem solved, the creative work could begin in earnest. The strategic redesign elevated Compudopt’s classroom assets from functional-but-inconsistent into sophisticated learning tools. The challenge was a specific one: strike the right balance between professional polish and youth-friendly energy. These materials needed to impress funders and program directors and engage a room full of kids at the same time.
The answer was a comprehensive visual system — cohesive across workbooks, presentations, and supporting materials — that authentically reflected Compudopt’s brand identity. Consistent formatting replaced the patchwork of styles that had accumulated over time. Visually, we brought the presentations to life using a combination of original vector graphics, stock vectors manipulated to match the brand’s color palette and style, stock photography, and real training photos from Compudopt’s programs. The result is imagery that feels current, relevant, and genuinely connected to the students these materials are built for.
More recently, the work has expanded beyond presentations into branded trainer guides for staff — extending the same professionalism and consistency to the internal-facing side of the organization.
WHAT THIS PROJECT REALLY IS
It would be easy to describe this job as “I redesigned some PowerPoints.” But that’s not what happened.
What happened is that a problem got identified, interrogated, and solved at the root — and then it got designed. The client didn’t just get prettier slides. They got a system that works: one that their team can maintain, their trainers can trust, and their students can actually benefit from.
That’s what design thinking makes possible — and it’s why clients come back. With the tools available now, anyone can make something look good. A professional brings the strategic thinking to figure out what to build and why before a single pixel gets placed. The visual outcome is what you show in a portfolio. The infrastructure thinking is what earns the next project.
This is the value of bringing in a pro: not just taste and craft, but the experience to ask the questions your team didn’t know needed asking, and the expertise to solve problems you didn't know you had.