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"Gentrified" Pitch Deck Cover Page
"Gentrified" Pitch Deck Cover Page

Creative Pitch Deck Design For A Harlem Story

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“Gentrified” Pitch Deck Cover Page
"Gentrified" Pitch Deck Content Template #1
“Gentrified” Pitch Deck Content Template #1
"Gentrified" Pitch Deck Content Template #2
“Gentrified” Pitch Deck Content Template #2
"Gentrified" Pitch Deck Content Template #3
“Gentrified” Pitch Deck Content Template #3

Creative Pitch deck design process

Here in Studio City, CA, I sit, at Coffee Fix, my local watering hole. ‘People’ complain that it’s hard to meet strangers in Los Angeles, and they’re correct. However, even here in the dry, dusty land of lip injections, I’ve made some friends out of complete strangers at Coffee Fix.

Enter Levy Lee Simon. I saw him at Coffee Fix for many months before I introduced myself. It probably started out as something as innocuous as begging his pardon to see if the seat next to him was open.

Levy Lee (pronounced “Leevy Lee”, and sometimes just “Lee”) is an accomplished writer, an actor, and an extremely genuine man. He hails from Harlem, and grew up in a world I couldn’t have known a thing about without the entertainment industry. As it turned out, he’d just written a theatrical play set in Harlem called “Gentrified” that was looking for funding.

The timing was right, and Lee said I was the man for the job, so together we embarked on creating the artistic skeleton of a pitch deck to raise funds for the play. We started with a few AI-generated clip-art mock-ups Lee had created. With that in hand, I jumped into creating the real thing in Photoshop.

Photoshop Generative AI Workflow

Of late, Adobe has made it abundantly clear that its Creative Cloud applications now sport generative AI features. Generative AI of the mid-early 2020s frequently falls short of its hype. However, there was a generative AI feature in Photoshop that held its own, and actually enhanced my workflow.

To ensure I achieved authenticity in depicting Harlem, I sourced the elements of the city skyline, drummers, drums, and street signs from royalty-free photo repositories. However, the play had not been cast, so with cynicism and trepidation I entered a prompt akin to this into Photoshop’s Generative AI tool, “tall handsome black man standing in profile looking down”. The results blew me away. I then prompted Photoshop to generate a short blonde woman. Again excellent results.

In the images you see below, the featured characters (who each specifically appear in the script) are 100% generated. And everything around them is 100% traditional photo manipulation.

Iterating on Design: The Cover Page

The original mock-up that Levy Lee present to me, created with a widely available generative AI service.
The original mock-up that Levy Lee present to me, created with a widely available generative AI service.
My first-pass design, created using the Generative AI mock-up from Levy Lee and notes taken during our first sit-down.
My first-pass design, created using the Generative AI mock-up from Levy Lee and notes taken during our first sit-down.
My second mock-up, utilizing notes and additional clip art references from Levy Lee.
My second mock-up, utilizing notes and additional clip art references from Levy Lee.
Annotations to the image, made during our review of my 2nd mock-up.
Annotations to the image, made during our review of my 2nd mock-up.
After several additional small tweaks, regressions, and subtle pokes and prods, here is the final pitch deck cover.
After several additional small tweaks, regressions, and subtle pokes and prods, here is the final pitch deck cover.

If you’re interested in seeing more of Tim Collins’s graphic design work, click here to see all entries in the “Graphic Design” category.