The Walmart team came to the table with a mountain of raw material for their premiere speakers' presentations. Dense, heavily-worded documents, scattered scratch notes, and screenshots that held all the right information but none of the visual clarity needed for a live conference setting. The core challenge wasn't a lack of content; it was wayyy too much of it, buried in formats that would never hold an audience's attention on a big screen.
They needed someone who could sit inside that jungle, pull out the actual narrative and key takeaways, and rebuild it into something a room full of Marketplace leaders could follow in real time…without losing any of the substance the speakers needed to convey. I also needed to have these built out to pass along as "governing decks" to four other designers who were going to work on this project with me.
On top of the content challenge, the decks needed to represent the Walmart Marketplace brand at a high-visibility event, meaning every slide had to feel polished, professional, and cohesive across multiple speakers and topics.
My approach started with editorial thinking before any design work began. I read through each speaker's source material to identify the core message, then restructured that information into a clear hierarchy: one idea per slide, supported by concise text, purposeful imagery, and custom infographics built to simplify otherwise complicated data or processes. Rather than cramming paragraphs onto slides, I broke information into digestible visuals, using layouts, spacing, and typography to guide the audience's eye and keep pacing tight during live delivery.
Custom infographics played a key role in translating abstract or numbers-heavy concepts into something instantly readable at a glance, which was critical given the pace of a conference presentation. Throughout the process, I worked through several rounds of stakeholder feedback, refining messaging emphasis, visual consistency, and brand alignment with each pass. That iterative collaboration was central to the project's success and it ensured the final decks weren't just visually strong, but accurately represented in each speaker's voice and priorities.
The result was a polished, cohesive set of presentation decks that let the content, not the clutter, take center stage, earning strong praise from the Walmart team for both the final product and the collaborative process that got us there.
