How To Succeed at Slides: An Interview with Designer Jenny Lam

One of our favorite An Event Apart speakers, Seattle-based design entrepreneur Jenny Lam, recently launched a new business called The Slide Bureau with her partners Hillel Cooperman and Jeff Ort. We love to see our speakers and attendees succeed through their own creative efforts, and we're always intrigued to learn how our fellow web professionals come up with bright, original ideas for businesses, communities, products, and services. So we took a few moments to ask Jenny about her inspiration and processes.

Congratulations on launching The Slide Bureau, Jenny! What gave you the idea?

My partner, Hillel Cooperman, and I have been working together for over a dozen years. Hillel is a wonderful speaker and does a lot of public speaking. Over the years, I've designed many of his slide decks. People would often come up to him and tell him that he had really nice looking slides, and he would graciously give me some of the credit. He would joke, “wouldn't it be nice if Jenny could design everyone's slides?”

It seemed kind of insane to us that you can buy a piece of software like PowerPoint but then have to get a professional designer to make your slides look great. I remember that there were entire teams and outsourced vendors (when I worked) at Microsoft who were tasked with designing slides for execs. So we thought long and hard about how we could scale up our design services in a way that would make real users of presentation tools look great. Not just making the slides look great, but making the creators of presentations feel great and confident in the way they would present their specific ideas, and how they would easily broadcast their presentations to anyone, on any device, anywhere in the world. That's how The Slide Bureau came about.

Suppose I'm an advanced-practice nurse preparing a talk for a health conference. Would The Slide Bureau be for me, either now or in the future?

The service is for anyone who wants to create a slide presentation. We're targeting very specific verticals at first—realtors, teachers, and restaurateurs—because we've learned that their needs aren't being met. However, if you're a nurse prepping a talk at a health conference, you should get in touch and request specific slide template designs from our professional art department. For us, this request line is like analytics for figuring out what people want. If there's one nurse out there looking for a slide with a hospital administration flow infographic, then there are probably lots more people like him/her out there in need of the same slide.

Any other plans for The Slide Bureau?

We'd love to serve larger organizations by doing custom designs for them. This is where we'd design the pitches that the entire sales force at, say, Coldwell Banker would use, or the presentations at a large law firm or insurance company. I love thinking about how we can make a bigger impact with teams of people who rely on presentations to get their jobs done.

You're launching with an iPad app. Are there any plans for a web-based way to use the service?

We're launching with the iPad app first and learning from our users. If there's a desire for a web-based creation tool, we'll most definitely consider it.

Jenny Lam was Creative Director of the Windows User Experience team at Microsoft from 2001–2007, and is the cofounder of Jackson Fish Market, a small startup that has shipped over 20 software products in the last five years. She is one of twelve amazing speakers appearing at An Event Apart Chicago this year, where she will present “Hit it With a Pretty Stick,” a session on aesthetic principals that can be applied to web experiences of all shapes and sizes. See Jenny and her session in the Windy City, or attend the AEA event nearest you.