I worked with Foundation Studio in 2024 to help several Techstars Atlanta startups improve their pitch decks. Sometimes this meant focusing on visual design to make their stories more engaging, other times it was a more strategic collaboration to help founders sharpen their narratives.
Before designing, I like to understand how founders think about their companies and what excites them most. While reading materials helps, informal chats often reveal opportunities missed in formal decks. A founder might emphasize technical specs when a more meaningful angle is how they're transforming industry relationships, or they might share an anecdote that better captures their passion for solving a problem. These candid moments help identify the most compelling elements to highlight in their pitch.
Making pain points more tangible
Wscripted needed help conveying how their AI-powered platform accelerates script review and discovery for entertainment companies. While their existing deck touched on key points, investors were saying the problem and solution weren't clear enough.
Through conversations with founder Ellie Jamen, we identified that emails and attachments were a visceral pain point everyone in the industry could relate to. So we leaned into this by visually connecting an overflowing stack of email notifications to a mountain of scattered script pages. This change (1) made the idea more visceral that email has been an insufficient modern tool for reviewing script submissions, and (2) gave that point more room to breathe with its own slide before elaborating with specific stats in the next.
I made changes like this throughout the deck to make key points feel more obvious, tangible, and elegantly expressed than in the original deck.
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Structuring scattered points
Ranked came to me with a prototype that had recently been redesigned and a pitch deck containing valuable but scattered information. The founder had already locked in his copy and narrative, so my work focused on creating better visual structure, polish, and informational flow.
I gave the deck a bolder visual style inspired by new media platforms like Spotify, which aligned it better with the modern influencer marketing landscape. Better visual anchoring and hierarchy made it easier to follow how Ranked's focus on "nano-influencers" addressed specific market opportunities.
They wanted to include a pre-made infographic about the success of their Black Panther: Wakanda Forever social media campaign, which contained valuable information but was too dense for a slide. Restyling it wasn't feasible within our timeline, so I reworked the slide and graphic to harmonize better while pulling out the key points.
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Distinguishing a new kind of platform
This case study will be updated with slide images once Callo completes their current fundraising round.
Working on Callo's pre-seed pitch deck particularly excited me because of the startup's focus on creative taste—how directors, producers, and other above-the-line entertainment professionals could be matched based on their artistic sensibilities and professional goals rather than just industry connections.
People often mistakenly think of Callo's projects-oriented platform as "LinkedIn for film professionals" or other generalized productivity and networking tools. Their language also needed careful attention to avoid confusing "independent creators" with influencers or below-the-line crew roles. Our challenge was to make these distinctions clearer while showing how Callo could transform an industry that still relies heavily on word-of-mouth connections.
The redesign transformed their deck from standard tech startup slides into something that better reflected Callo's identity: a more artistically-attuned platform supporting indie productions. The deck also needed to work as a standalone pre-read before meetings, so we rethought all of the information pacing to help convey the information density with more clarity. I used interface-suggestive containers, atmospheric photography, and moody gradients to give each idea more room to resonate.
While the deck is currently under NDA during Callo's fundraising round, the slides are available to review upon request.