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Tee
Tran
Visual
Designer
Tee
Tran
Visual
Designer

Pitch

Location

Berlin, DE

Deliverables

Template gallery
Brand assets
Motion design
Partnership content
User testing

Making the world a better place

Great software drives our modern lives. We use Slack, not email. We jump on a Zoom call, not on the phone. So why are we still using presentation software that was designed last century?

Introducing Pitch, a modern solution that helps teams build better presentations: collaboratively, effectively, and beautifully.

3D illustrations by Anna and Arek Kajda (video may take time to load).

Breaking the stigma

In 2018, I was asked to join Pitch to lead the vision for templates. Initially, I wasn’t sure if it’d be a role I’d be interested in: it meant going from working on interactive products to static slides. However the more I thought about it, the more potential I saw in its challenge. It was an opportunity to change the world’s view of beige suits pitching in a beige room, showing that creating and giving presentations can actually be modern and fun. It meant redefining what a presentation could be.

Free templates offered in Pitch (video may take time to load).

Observing the competitive landscape

In studying our competitors, we noticed that their presentation templates felt pretty generic. It was hard to find designs that felt modern, and they’re mostly filled with lorem ipsum. For Pitch, templates aren’t just about offering something polished, but also something that’s actually useful. This means we start with our in-house content team to replace lorem ipsum with helpful placeholder text that guide the user to tell their story, especially if they’ve never told it before.

We replaced useless lorem ipsum with guiding placeholder text.
The placeholder text was also an opportunity to showoff Pitch’s humour.

Learning new tricks

This role wasn’t just about being a master of type, imagery, and layout. Creating modern templates meant keeping up with today’s tools and trends. In wanting to incorporate 3D assets and animations, I quickly self-taught myself programs such as AfterEffects and Cinema 4D while on the job.

Creating Cinema 4D animations for Pitch templates (video may take time to load).

All hands on deck

Our internal team didn’t always have the extensive knowledge to guide our users on all presentation topics, so we collaborated with well-known industry leaders to co-produce free templates in their areas of expertise. Some include: Meg Lewis’ Personal Branding Pitch Deck, Bakken & Bæck’s Case Study, and Maze’s Usability Testing Report. We later launched the template gallery, which is growing into an online platform where users can publish and share their best presentation content.

With Creator Profiles, creators and brands can showcase their best templates and presentations.

Refining product features

As it’s closely related to templates, I also got to help build new features and refine currently existing ones, such as the style editor, fluid styles, template generator, and more. Some of this meant initiating research, having conversations with Pitch users, and analysing our existing data from Amplitude.

The Style Editor allows users to edit fonts and colours universally throughout their presentations.

Extra support

In addition to leading the vision for templates, running team meetings, and planning the roadmap, I also supported the brand and marketing teams with creating visual assets. Some of these assets include blog post, website, weekly release, and social media visuals along with internal-facing documents under the direction of Pitch’s Brand Lead, Lu Yu.

A bittersweet goodbye

Joining Pitch as one of the first 20 employees, it was an amazing experience to watch the company and product grow into what it is today. I said goodbye after 3 years and was genuinely heartfelt to hear from my colleagues that I played a huge role in the company culture. On my last day, they created a 3D sticker of me in a sloth onesie (a gift they had given me previously) which users can access and use as a sticker in the app.

My colleagues surprised me by creating a 3D sticker of me available to use in the app

Results

  • 76% of surveyed users said that templates and styles were among their top 3 favourite features of Pitch
  • Pitch Templates is a top 4 finalist for 2021 Productivity Tool of the Year at the Golden Kitty Awards, competing against products like Figma and Cron
  • Pitch Templates voted #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt (March 2, 2021)
  • Pitch Templates voted #3 Product of the Week on Product Hunt (March 2, 2021)
  • The Template Gallery became a source for conversion (~4k signups per month)
  • Check out the templates landing page here
  • Pitch made Apple‘s Top 23 best apps of 2023
Linktree (au)
Outerknown (us)
ASN Bank (nl)
Tech City UK (uk)
Sprinklr (nl)
Etc