Before I started my company, I was working for a research institute as a graphic designer. I had a wide array of jobs that I worked on, but out of all the jobs, the ones I found hardest were presentations. So often, people would give me slides with paragraphs on them and tell me to "make them pretty." This was a struggle because pretty was not the issue.

As a designer, we're taught to think about the end-user. Slide after slide of text (pretty or not) is not effective for the audience, but once the presenter created the deck, they were often attached to the words, so it was too late. I went to my manager. I asked if I could do some research on how people learn and use that to proactively teach our clients how to go about designing their presentations from the beginning. My supervisor was very supportive of the idea and gave me funding to dig into the research. That led to a year of reading peer-reviewed research from various disciplines, pulling out what was relevant, and compiling it together into a massive document of hundreds of pages of notes. I used my background in teaching, psychology, and graphic design to eventually turn this research into a workshop.

I haven't looked back.

The original workshop I created isn't the same as the one I give now because over time as I gathered more information and tested it to see what works and what doesn't it has evolved, grown, and shifted. That's how presentations that you give more than once should be. The more you give them, the more feedback you have, and you should allow them to morph.