



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





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.