Strategic Design is My Passion

I live at the intersection of visual design and communication.

In the last ten years I have focused on the convergence of design and communication in the form of business presentation. I have worked with 70+ startups on their business materials, focusing on investor and marketing presentations. Decks that I’ve designed have raised over $35M in seed-stage investment. Additionally, I’ve worked with some of the top brands in the US to create internal and external decks to present ideas and seek funding, resulting in corporate sponsorships totaling over $100M.

Marcie Braden

My Work By the Numbers

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Presentations Delivered

In my career I’ve created thousands of presentations, from investor decks to sales pitches.

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Startup Investment Decks

I specialize in startup investment decks and have worked with over 70 companies to create or refine their pitch decks.

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Seed Funding

Investment decks that I’ve worked on have received aggregate seed-stage funding over $35M.

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Sponsor Funding

Corporate decks that I’ve created have received support from sponsors totaling over $100M.



We Help You Create:

A great presentation is a purposeful story that elicits a specific behavior from your audience. Whether it’s a powerpoint deck, website, company brand or advertising, your presentation should include all the essential elements.


Defined Purpose

Articulate a clear, actionable purpose for your presentation. What action do you want your audience to take after hearing you present?

Authentic Story

Engaging presentations are more than slides, they’re stories. Craft an authentic, relevant story to use as the scaffolding for your presentation.

Supporting Evidence

Every piece of information in your deck should pass the “Does this directly support my defined purpose?” test. If the answer is “no,” it doesn’t belong.

Visual Clarity

Clarity is the intersection of design and communication. Your visuals should support your arguments, making them clear. Remove the distractions.


What I Bring to the Table

  • 15 years of experience in information design
  • 10 years of experience in startups
  • A background in research & analysis
  • A strong network of resources at your disposal
  • Crazy commitment to your success
  • An attitude focused on getting things done

My Skills

99% / Strategic Thinking

95% / Visual Design

95% / Writing

99% / Communication

My Values


Honesty

I don’t say what you want to hear…I say what you need to hear. I’ll be honest with you about where you are and where you need to be, even if it isn’t easy for either of us.

Flexibility

I pride myself on being flexible – adjusting to a constantly changing dynamic. Especially in the startup world, I’ve learned that you put effort where it’s needed!

Dedication

When we work together I go above and beyond to understand who you are, what you do and the market in which you do it to ensure I’m the right addition to your team.

My Background

Is a Designer Born, or Made?

From an early age I realized communication and presentation were an important part of standing out from a crowd.

As a fifth grader, I was tasked with writing a poem for a youth literary contest. I quickly scrawled the first thing that came into my head and tossed the poem on my teacher’s desk. It was a simple poem about the changing of the seasons, maybe thirty words, on a sheet of looseleaf paper. She gave it a quick read and as the bell rang for the next period she held me back to have me make two seemingly irrelevant changes. Each time I mentioned the leaves falling she had me write the letters of “down” vertically. It seemed a silly task, but I did it quickly so that I could rush off to the next class.

A month later the county winners were announced – I had received first place in the poetry section. Not because my poem was particularly good (it wasn’t) but because the presentation made it stand out…it was a presentation that translated well into the literary magazine’s printed edition and made it distinct from the other poems.

Lesson learned. Presentation changes the way people interact with your message. I have learned this lesson countless times, from hurriedly writing last minute term papers in college to designing startup business canvases. If you take the time to consider your design and really make your work standout, you open a door to opportunity that didn’t exist before. (That’s not to say that design makes up for poor content, but it will give you a leg up on content that’s equally as solid.)

Even before I knew what to call myself, I was a designer, focused on the clear communication of everything I touched – from artwork to essays. It wasn’t until college, when I was spending as much time as Editor-in-Chief of my newspaper and Design Production Editor of my yearbook, that I realized the extent of my passion and decided to devote more time to understanding design.

The Winding Path to Presentation Design

In retrospect, I’ve always had an appreciation for strategic communication design, like presentations. In college, I kept finding things in the fridge that should have been in the cupboards and visa versa. It irritated me to no end. Instead of picking a fight or bringing it up at our house meetings, I stayed up until 3am one night and made a PowerPoint deck called “The Rules of Refrigeration.” It was a silly, light-hearted presentation that was really well received by my roommates (sort of a “Marcie is crazy, but this is kind of fun” reaction). But, do you know what? The mayo found a permanent home in the fridge.

As I bounced through my twenties, experimenting along different paths from medical chart creation to starting my own catering company, I focused my spare time on design. I read blogs, books and articles and eventually started taking small web projects as I trial-and-error’ed my way through HTML and CSS.

I began, like many non-professionally trained designers, by taking jobs mostly to build my portfolio (which meant a very low hourly income). Little by little I worked with more and more talented people, learning as I went. On various projects I frequently found myself leading design teams that were comprised of designers whose design skills were far above my own. But who often failed to understand the purpose of their design. I realized that I had a knack for putting content in the driver’s seat and artfully assigning design a “navigator’s” role in the process.

Good design is critical to conveying the message but most designers are bad at understanding the message! This realization propelled me towards presentation design. I love “weeding” your message out, organizing it and presenting it beautifully to get real results.

I love to work with companies – startups and established businesses alike – who understand the importance of design and value an honest take on their content.

In the last decade I have been regularly “employed” by over a dozen startups, have consulted with more than 70 and have had two of my own (PokerNearMe and ListSanity) with one successful exit. I’ve also participated in the respected 500 Startups accelerator program in Silicon Valley. I’ve been a finalist in pitch competitions and have been a core part of startup teams that were funded for an aggregate exceeding $10M.

As a front-end developer and designer who’s married to a Bitcoin expert (who is obsessed with self-driving cars), my startup interests lie largely in tech. But the startups I’ve worked with run the gamut in specializations and include: the Internet of Things, live and online poker, social networking sites, Bitcoin, on-demand warehousing, high school sports technology, sleep mask technology, on campus beacon technology, handmade soaps/lotions, public speaking instruction, scavenger hunts, real estate, security technology and many more.

Since founding Braden Strategic Design I’ve focused on presentation design but will work with clients on any content that requires strategic information design.

So that’s me in a nutshell! If you have great content that’s not delivering for you, that’s not driving customers or revenue and if you understand the value of presentation design – creating clarity of message and supporting it visually – and are open to honest feedback and willful revisions – I’d love to speak with you!

 

Let me help you improve your communication.

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