Phase 3: Pitch
Produce a short presentation that explains the project concept. Use presentation slide software to design the presentation and record a video presenting the slides in a professional manner. You can include voice narration or on screen text to explain what we're looking at. Please include:
- Slideshow Video: Clearly legible text or voice narration
- If doing voice narration, you can choose one team member to narrative, or have different members contribute narration of different slides.
- PDF export of slides used for the video.
The video should be fun and engaging! Imagine you are pitching this potential stakeholders or investors. Use bold imagery and visual design. Don't put long passages of text on a slide an then read it to us. Keep it simple and conversational.
Here's a gallery of real pitch decks from startups that you can look at for inspiration. Note that these are for businesses, and therefore focus on markets and profit more than is appropriate here. This is not a business class! You don't need a strategy to make money, and for some projects you might imagine you have an unlimited budget and develop a speculative design that never leaves the imagination stage. For other projects, you might create a real website, ad campaign, or comic book. Focus on applying design thinking to your problem and demonstrating creative problem-solving, attention to craft and detail, and sophisticated visual design.
Required Slides
Include slides dedicated to the following topics, though you don't have to use these exact titles and you can put them in any order:
- Problem: How things are now; establish the context for why your idea is needed or interesting.
- Solution: Introduce your core idea, using additional slides to flesh it out. Include images or sketches depicting how the final project might appear.
- Inspiration/Competitors: Show images of related work guiding your aesthetic style, or similar products you can study for reference.
- User/Audience report: Describe the intended audience for your project, such as:
- Demographic data
- Digital fluency
- Qualitative, interviews, or anecdotal info
- Challenges or obstacles
- Cultural background or context
- Empathy Map: A concise picture of the audience above. This diagram comes from UX research, but can be applied to other types of design too.
Requirements
- Must include topics above, including images as described.
- Video should be 3-5 minutes long.
Resources
- How to record slideshow and narration with Powerpoint
- How to record your screen with Quicktime (Mac). Other screen-recording software is available online. Do this if you want to record a Google Slide presentation.
- Audio recording programs:
- Audacity: free open-source audio recording; tutorial for how to record with computer mic.
- Adobe Audition: available with PSU Adobe account; professional grade audio editor. Here's a tutorial for recording a simple audio file.
- How to reduce video filesize (if your video is larger than 500MB or taking forever to upload):
- Use Adobe Media Encoder to resize or compress a video file (without editing it, if you want to trim a video or do complex editing, use Adove Premiere).
- This video shows how to reduce the bitrate (i.e. quality) of the video to lower the file size. You can also choose to resize the video; e.g. from 1080p (1920px x 1080px) to 720p (1280px x 720px).
Submission details:
- Post the pitch to the project blog.
- Upload a .zip file to the canvas assignment that includes:
- Pitch video (Please export/compress this video. It should be less the 500MB in filesize)
- PDF export of the slides
Note: only one person in the group needs to submit the file to the group assignment.