The approach was simple. As James is someone who’s extremely busy and we had are the recording of his talk, we decided to go ahead and redesign the whole presentation to support his unique speaking style without involving him too much. You can say it was like a surprise thing. And it was.

The way the talk was structured followed many of the best practices from the world of storytelling. It's quite rare for us to not engage in this phase actively too but because of the specifics this project came with, we didn't change or ask James to change anything in terms of content. However, we optimized the text that was on the previous slide and figure out ways how to say the same with less words.

Our main goal here is to remove all those bullets he had, split them into many more slides but way more visual such and use bold typography. The reason for the latter, he is a very confident speaker and has a very strong point of view on the subject he presented. As we weren’t bound to Microsoft’s corporate style brand, we decided to even use the Microsoft Surface Pen and draw some of the words to simulate a hand-written style for some of the messages he wanted to convey.

The approach to animating the deck was again based on James’s style of presenting. We listened very carefully to what he was saying and how. Then, based on what we discovered, we decided to support some of his points with animation that reflected the way he was presenting.

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Once the deck was ready, we double checked it for overall consistency and made sure that every click responds to the way he presents the topic.