Meeting Title: Interlude Deck Design Process Discussion Date: 2025-09-24 Meeting participants: Hannah Wang, Samuel Roberts


WEBVTT

1 00:00:09.230 00:00:10.730 Samuel Roberts: Hey, sorry.

2 00:00:11.920 00:00:13.000 Hannah Wang: I’m worried.

3 00:00:13.480 00:00:14.959 Samuel Roberts: Good, yeah, how are you?

4 00:00:15.900 00:00:19.200 Hannah Wang: Good, sorry if it’s loud, I’m…

5 00:00:19.400 00:00:22.840 Hannah Wang: I’m working at a coffee shop where I’m outside, but…

6 00:00:23.180 00:00:23.960 Samuel Roberts: Oh, okay.

7 00:00:23.960 00:00:27.620 Hannah Wang: No, I don’t hear… I don’t hear anything but you, I can definitely tell you’re, like…

8 00:00:27.810 00:00:32.399 Hannah Wang: outside by the sound, but I don’t hear anything else, so I can still hear you. Okay, okay.

9 00:00:35.560 00:00:38.090 Samuel Roberts: Sweet. Okay, so yeah, the basic idea here is, like.

10 00:00:38.230 00:00:43.910 Samuel Roberts: We’re definitely hoping to talk to their designer and understand her process, but Tom’s idea was to…

11 00:00:44.190 00:00:52.219 Samuel Roberts: start that process with someone who, like, would have a sense of what someone might need for this, or what would be helpful. Yeah.

12 00:00:52.710 00:01:06.779 Samuel Roberts: So, I think I explained it in the post, but basically the deck agent right now outputs a, kind of outline, with some copy, and it has positive and negative feedback on the copy and things like that, and they iterate on it. And we’re exploring the kind of

13 00:01:07.130 00:01:11.900 Samuel Roberts: what can we do to help the designer as well? Because, like, we don’t want to…

14 00:01:12.090 00:01:17.660 Samuel Roberts: completely remove the human from the loop, because that’s kind of Interlude’s value-add, is, like, their choices.

15 00:01:17.660 00:01:18.260 Hannah Wang: Right.

16 00:01:18.610 00:01:29.419 Samuel Roberts: But if we can speed that up, and up wireframes, or lo-fi stuff, was the thought. So I guess I’m wondering, like, when you have to go to put a deck together, like.

17 00:01:29.820 00:01:36.540 Samuel Roberts: what… do you start with, I guess? What do you, like…

18 00:01:38.470 00:01:42.089 Samuel Roberts: Just, I guess just, like, kind of talk through that process, and I’ll have more questions.

19 00:01:42.540 00:01:47.240 Hannah Wang: Okay, sure. Yeah, so I guess…

20 00:01:48.500 00:01:58.139 Hannah Wang: I start with the requirements, and that usually involves the copy, and what… yeah, like, what copy is gonna be on each slide.

21 00:01:58.290 00:01:59.360 Hannah Wang: Okay.

22 00:01:59.520 00:02:05.290 Hannah Wang: Let me… I think it’s easier to show you a visual, so let me try to pull up…

23 00:02:05.670 00:02:08.560 Hannah Wang: something,

24 00:02:12.390 00:02:17.949 Hannah Wang: Okay, so maybe something like this. Let me share my screen.

25 00:02:20.410 00:02:27.149 Hannah Wang: So this is… Okay, so we have a capabilities deck, and…

26 00:02:27.150 00:02:27.730 Samuel Roberts: Okay.

27 00:02:27.990 00:02:31.050 Hannah Wang: Basically, we wanted, like, a revised one, so…

28 00:02:31.670 00:02:38.100 Hannah Wang: He took… well, this is not starting from scratch, obviously, but these are, like, kind of the notes that…

29 00:02:38.890 00:02:54.389 Hannah Wang: John put, so, like, maybe something like this, like, oh, a new slide, how our AI is different, and even, like, yeah, just having even the nitty-gritty of the copy would be helpful, but even if the copy isn’t there, like, I use AI to generate that, because we have a prompt that helps us

30 00:02:54.920 00:03:04.849 Hannah Wang: get the copy and generate copy. So… because that was, like, a huge bottleneck for us before. Basically, like, design was blocked on copy, but…

31 00:03:04.870 00:03:07.580 Samuel Roberts: Yep. Copy came from UTAM, and Utam…

32 00:03:07.580 00:03:10.429 Hannah Wang: It’s so busy, so he became the bottleneck.

33 00:03:10.430 00:03:12.359 Samuel Roberts: I don’t think the same thing they’re dealing with now is, like.

34 00:03:12.510 00:03:20.960 Samuel Roberts: like, the main guy is the one iterating on it. He obviously, like, gives a ton of feedback afterwards and stuff, too, but getting that initial copy is huge for them, so yeah.

35 00:03:20.960 00:03:33.139 Hannah Wang: Brutal, yeah. So, yeah, I use AI for that, but anyway, just having… I’m sure even this, like, Uten is the one who wrote it down, and I’m pretty sure he used AI for this, but… Probably, yeah.

36 00:03:33.300 00:03:38.140 Hannah Wang: Just having, like, a general gist, even if there’s no, like.

37 00:03:38.710 00:03:41.579 Hannah Wang: Requirements for what the designs will look like.

38 00:03:41.580 00:03:41.920 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

39 00:03:41.920 00:03:46.210 Hannah Wang: That’s, like, totally fine with me, and so, given…

40 00:03:46.680 00:03:55.770 Hannah Wang: this. Let me see. Let me try to find the equivalent slide for that. I think it’s the AI capabilities deck.

41 00:04:03.730 00:04:05.289 Hannah Wang: option I do both.

42 00:04:18.490 00:04:21.100 Hannah Wang: Okay, so I think it’s this slide, so…

43 00:04:21.100 00:04:22.000 Samuel Roberts: Yes, yeah.

44 00:04:22.000 00:04:37.760 Hannah Wang: Yeah, so, like, I didn’t… there was no, like, design requirement. Like, oh, make, like, a third of it green, and add a dashboard, like, that wasn’t there. So, that’s, I guess, where my creativity comes in, and how I kind of think about…

45 00:04:38.010 00:04:43.979 Hannah Wang: like, designing a deck. Obviously, you don’t want a ton of words, because no one’s gonna read it.

46 00:04:43.980 00:04:45.010 Samuel Roberts: Sure.

47 00:04:45.010 00:04:51.509 Hannah Wang: And I feel like a lot of data consultancy slide decks, it’s just, like, blocks of bullet.

48 00:04:51.510 00:04:52.030 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

49 00:04:52.280 00:05:03.589 Hannah Wang: no visual, so I try to make it hierarchically easy for people to skim through it. So, I guess, naturally, as humans, we look at the biggest thing first.

50 00:05:03.800 00:05:08.339 Hannah Wang: And we go top to bottom, left to right, so that’s kind of why I put…

51 00:05:08.510 00:05:13.120 Hannah Wang: Like, the header, the header’s the biggest, that’s kind of the biggest takeaway we want you to have, and

52 00:05:13.250 00:05:21.770 Hannah Wang: Kind of going down, like, if you want to read the bullets, you do read it, and I also added icons, so it’s more eye-catching, because if there’s no icons, like.

53 00:05:22.360 00:05:24.120 Hannah Wang: I don’t know, I just don’t want to.

54 00:05:24.120 00:05:24.720 Samuel Roberts: Fair.

55 00:05:25.300 00:05:26.140 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, yeah.

56 00:05:26.290 00:05:27.300 Hannah Wang: And then…

57 00:05:27.620 00:05:39.739 Hannah Wang: this was feedback that I got from Luton to add these logos. It’s relevant to evals and adoption and stuff, and then, yeah, I just, like, added a dashboard. On the right, I think I asked you for this, or some.

58 00:05:39.740 00:05:41.010 Samuel Roberts: That’s right, okay, yeah.

59 00:05:41.010 00:05:44.440 Hannah Wang: Yeah, and then I just add, like, a little… Stop.

60 00:05:44.720 00:05:46.370 Hannah Wang: Title, or, like, a…

61 00:05:46.590 00:05:55.139 Hannah Wang: what’s the word for this? Like, a subtitle, subheader, description, to kind of go after, to explain what this dashboard is.

62 00:05:55.330 00:06:00.330 Hannah Wang: And how I got to this design, I mean, I just do a lot of…

63 00:06:00.930 00:06:05.219 Hannah Wang: like, competitive analysis. Like, I just look at other slide decks, or I just kind of…

64 00:06:05.560 00:06:08.939 Hannah Wang: like, I think I have an inventory in my head of, like, things.

65 00:06:08.940 00:06:09.640 Samuel Roberts: Totally, yeah.

66 00:06:09.640 00:06:15.029 Hannah Wang: look good. And so I just try to, like, copy, copy that.

67 00:06:15.480 00:06:21.970 Hannah Wang: And… and then, obviously, like, having the branding Yeah.

68 00:06:21.970 00:06:22.559 Samuel Roberts: Of course.

69 00:06:22.560 00:06:31.129 Hannah Wang: It’s super helpful, so, like, the colors that we use, the fonts we use, our color palette, like, it’s basically the design system.

70 00:06:31.330 00:06:40.609 Hannah Wang: And then after that, I asked for feedback on the copy specifically, and any other, like, design

71 00:06:42.330 00:06:47.600 Hannah Wang: acts or changes to be made, and then I just iterate based off of that.

72 00:06:47.600 00:06:48.330 Samuel Roberts: Cool. Okay.

73 00:06:48.330 00:06:51.250 Hannah Wang: Let’s see another example.

74 00:06:52.040 00:07:06.109 Hannah Wang: A lot of the times, like, for these tools and stuff, like, obviously… obviously, I don’t really know much. I know generally what NAN is, and I know generally what clay is, so another thing I do is, like, to build

75 00:07:06.350 00:07:12.099 Hannah Wang: building this kind of chart thing, like, I just straight up went to Clay’s website, and I saw something.

76 00:07:12.100 00:07:12.450 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

77 00:07:12.450 00:07:21.310 Hannah Wang: like this, and then I just plugged it into AI, and I was like, how can I make it relevant to us? And how does Clay help us?

78 00:07:21.310 00:07:21.990 Samuel Roberts: True.

79 00:07:21.990 00:07:30.719 Hannah Wang: So I just kind of… yeah, it’s a lot of using AI, a lot of just looking at websites, if it’s a tool-specific slide.

80 00:07:30.940 00:07:36.320 Hannah Wang: A lot of these, like, we had already designed architecture diagrams, so I.

81 00:07:36.320 00:07:36.749 Samuel Roberts: I just caught.

82 00:07:36.750 00:07:41.949 Hannah Wang: kind of… Yeah, use the similar style that we already had.

83 00:07:42.110 00:07:48.250 Hannah Wang: like, this case study thing, like, Anne had made this long time ago, like, the structure, so I just kind of copied that.

84 00:07:49.790 00:07:59.889 Hannah Wang: But yeah, that’s kind of how I do it. And if I, like, get stuck on something, I just, like, come back to it in a couple hours with fresh pairs of eyes. I think that always helps.

85 00:08:00.210 00:08:06.750 Hannah Wang: Yeah, is that… I don’t know if that was helpful at all, but…

86 00:08:06.750 00:08:10.409 Samuel Roberts: Oh, no, it definitely was, definitely was. I mean, there’s a lot that, like, again, I…

87 00:08:10.490 00:08:29.719 Samuel Roberts: I want us to, like, help them, but not, like, assume their creativity instead. Like, I want them to be free to do stuff, so, like, if, for example, like, what we’re thinking right now, I guess, is, like, Utam had mentioned Gamma as, like, a slide deck generation thing, and they have a new API, that I’m… I’m gonna play with.

88 00:08:30.650 00:08:32.840 Hannah Wang: Oh, right, yeah, he did mention this.

89 00:08:33.370 00:08:39.029 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, this seems like more like helping people create the whole deck, but, like, obviously we don’t want to do that for them, necessarily.

90 00:08:39.039 00:08:39.909 Hannah Wang: Totally.

91 00:08:40.240 00:08:42.390 Samuel Roberts: So, there’s another tool I saw that just, like.

92 00:08:43.330 00:08:49.739 Samuel Roberts: And this is kind of nice, because it just… it takes Markdown files, and as long as they’re structured a certain way, it generates, like.

93 00:08:49.950 00:08:52.200 Samuel Roberts: Fairly simple slides.

94 00:08:52.200 00:08:54.860 Hannah Wang: Okay. But, I’m thinking…

95 00:08:55.660 00:09:00.259 Samuel Roberts: Is there… like, if you got the copy, and, like, a first…

96 00:09:00.510 00:09:02.940 Samuel Roberts: Like, be one of, like, a lo-fi…

97 00:09:03.090 00:09:06.859 Samuel Roberts: version of the deck. Would that, like, help or hinder you, you know?

98 00:09:08.300 00:09:10.530 Hannah Wang: It would happen.

99 00:09:10.930 00:09:20.750 Hannah Wang: if… the client is, like, this is exactly how I want it. Like, it’s definitely helpful. For example, like.

100 00:09:21.470 00:09:27.970 Hannah Wang: Like, if the lo-fi was, like, oh, text here, and then, like, two boxes here.

101 00:09:27.970 00:09:29.829 Samuel Roberts: That’s kind of what I’m thinking, yeah.

102 00:09:29.830 00:09:39.959 Hannah Wang: Yeah, that would be helpful if the client is, like, very particular, and they’re like, this is exactly what I want. But if they’re more like, oh, this…

103 00:09:40.190 00:09:48.729 Hannah Wang: is… this could be a design that I want, but I’m also open to other stuff. Like, I feel like I would be boxed into this design if I got it.

104 00:09:48.730 00:09:49.769 Samuel Roberts: That’s what I’m worried about, yeah.

105 00:09:49.770 00:09:53.069 Hannah Wang: But that’s just personally me.

106 00:09:53.210 00:09:58.970 Hannah Wang: Let me think… What?

107 00:09:58.970 00:10:01.300 Samuel Roberts: That does make sense, that’s kind of what I’m worried about, because, like.

108 00:10:01.300 00:10:03.310 Hannah Wang: Yeah. One of the, like…

109 00:10:03.350 00:10:11.230 Samuel Roberts: I don’t want to say grunt work, but, like, the repetitive task of, like, moving things around, like, is part of the creative task. Yeah. And so I don’t want to, like…

110 00:10:11.850 00:10:15.690 Samuel Roberts: Spit something out that the designer’s gonna feel like… Boxed in by.

111 00:10:15.850 00:10:18.349 Hannah Wang: What we could do… sorry.

112 00:10:18.350 00:10:18.950 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, go ahead.

113 00:10:19.450 00:10:25.060 Hannah Wang: I mean, what could be helpful is giving me multiple options, like, multiple… Totally, totally, yeah.

114 00:10:25.060 00:10:25.650 Samuel Roberts: Thank you.

115 00:10:25.650 00:10:35.460 Hannah Wang: That way, like, I can see what’s possible, and I could, like, start merging ideas together. Like, if I just get one, I’m like, okay, my brain needs help thinking of

116 00:10:35.520 00:10:51.559 Hannah Wang: the other, like, lo-fi type of designs and layout and stuff. So if you give me multiple, that’s helpful, because it’s like, okay, this is possible, that other thing is possible, how about I, like, merge the two, and then you could, like, come up with a new…

117 00:10:51.970 00:10:54.490 Samuel Roberts: Okay, that’s… that’s good insight, I like that.

118 00:10:54.890 00:11:08.130 Samuel Roberts: The other element of this is that we’re gonna be getting final versions of decks that they have, and we’re gonna be using that to, like, try to help refine the initial deck agent that does the copy right now.

119 00:11:09.910 00:11:12.680 Samuel Roberts: And I don’t have a good way to necessarily start pulling

120 00:11:13.120 00:11:21.190 Samuel Roberts: visual elements and, like, understanding structure of slides yet, but, I may come back to you at some point.

121 00:11:21.700 00:11:30.119 Samuel Roberts: And to help us, like, once we have a system to do it, like, refine the prompt that can, like, look at all their decks and say, like, oh, they tend to do this, I tend to do that.

122 00:11:30.120 00:11:31.429 Hannah Wang: Oh, yeah, totally.

123 00:11:31.430 00:11:48.810 Samuel Roberts: I think there’s a lot to be opened up by having their final decks, and especially if we have the inputs that went into it, like, they have, like, transcripts and questionnaires that they get from the clients they work with. Their clients are usually, like, raising money and stuff, so they’re putting together pitch decks for various different levels.

124 00:11:49.240 00:12:03.449 Samuel Roberts: And so they have, like, a questionnaire, a transcript, and right… and previously, he had been feeding that into Claude, and going back and forth, and what we’ve basically done is, like, removed the going to Claude thing, it’s right in Slack, you feed it, it generates a V1, you can iterate on it. Okay.

125 00:12:03.560 00:12:13.570 Samuel Roberts: But I’d love to do that with… now that we have their slides, we can get, hopefully, closer to that, like, final version. Obviously, we’re not going to get there, because, again, I don’t want them to just take it and run. I want them to.

126 00:12:13.570 00:12:13.930 Hannah Wang: Yeah.

127 00:12:13.930 00:12:16.060 Samuel Roberts: work on it, but I’m wondering if there’s…

128 00:12:16.460 00:12:22.660 Samuel Roberts: a good way to take the actual… like, we’re gonna probably strip a lot of the copy out of the deck so we can feed it to the agents.

129 00:12:22.870 00:12:27.500 Samuel Roberts: And, like, eval on it, but I also want to try to make use of the, kind of.

130 00:12:28.200 00:12:31.230 Samuel Roberts: Visual language and elements that they have.

131 00:12:31.370 00:12:35.420 Samuel Roberts: I don’t have a good idea how to do that yet, but,

132 00:12:35.780 00:12:38.060 Samuel Roberts: it’s definitely something we’re trying to think about, because I think they’re…

133 00:12:38.170 00:12:46.210 Samuel Roberts: What will be patterns that we might be able to pull out that they’re, like, the designer does every time, or them as a firm do every time, that may or may not be…

134 00:12:46.680 00:12:49.309 Samuel Roberts: conscious or subconscious? I don’t know.

135 00:12:49.310 00:13:07.749 Hannah Wang: I mean, I’m pretty, like, I feel like humans are lazy, and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so definitely what I do is, like, with any variation of a deck that I need to create, like, you’ll be able to see similarities between all of them, because I’m like, okay, this is… this is what I’ve designed before, like, I don’t want to, like…

136 00:13:07.920 00:13:12.579 Hannah Wang: You know, come up with something totally new, because that takes a lot of brain power.

137 00:13:12.580 00:13:22.019 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, so I think, again, I don’t have a great sense of how we’re gonna ingest the visuals right now, because I know we can do some of that, but I don’t know if…

138 00:13:22.340 00:13:24.650 Samuel Roberts: Any of the LMs are gonna be, like, good at it?

139 00:13:25.170 00:13:25.850 Hannah Wang: Mmm.

140 00:13:25.990 00:13:31.030 Samuel Roberts: But if we get to that point, when we get to that point, I may…

141 00:13:31.680 00:13:33.979 Samuel Roberts: Ask you again for some input, because…

142 00:13:34.320 00:13:34.670 Hannah Wang: Yeah.

143 00:13:34.670 00:13:39.159 Samuel Roberts: I’m not a visual designer, I’m not a visual person, really, so I don’t want to, like…

144 00:13:39.530 00:13:41.400 Samuel Roberts: Bias it towards my, like.

145 00:13:41.580 00:14:00.569 Samuel Roberts: aesthetic, I guess, that I don’t like. So, okay, this was helpful. I appreciate you walking me through. Like I said, we’re hoping to meet with their designer, and I guess we’ll see how different or similar, their style is, which would be… but that’s… that’s… even that’s good, because I’ll have a good sense of, like, the scope of all this, because I don’.

146 00:14:00.570 00:14:03.909 Hannah Wang: Yeah, I… by no means am I, like, a…

147 00:14:04.310 00:14:09.730 Hannah Wang: traffic design… designer, I guess? Like, my… well, my background is software engineering, and then I just.

148 00:14:09.730 00:14:10.050 Samuel Roberts: Oh, no.

149 00:14:10.050 00:14:16.609 Hannah Wang: pivot into UX design, and I feel like UX is slightly different still. It’s like a different flavor of design than, like.

150 00:14:16.610 00:14:17.190 Samuel Roberts: Yep.

151 00:14:17.190 00:14:20.259 Hannah Wang: Sales, like, creating sales collateral on slide decks.

152 00:14:20.400 00:14:26.879 Hannah Wang: So, I don’t know if, like, the designer at Interlude has, like, I don’t know, like…

153 00:14:26.880 00:14:27.860 Samuel Roberts: No, you’re totally right.

154 00:14:27.860 00:14:35.670 Hannah Wang: This is a… it’s just me caveating, like, oh yeah, I’m… I just kind of fake it till I bake it type of thing.

155 00:14:35.670 00:14:37.060 Samuel Roberts: Oh, no, you’re good, you’re good.

156 00:14:37.450 00:14:40.350 Samuel Roberts: You’re closer to it than I am, so that’s a little lighter.

157 00:14:41.760 00:14:46.609 Samuel Roberts: Cool. Alright, well, I… I think I’m good. This was… this was, helpful. I’ll let you…

158 00:14:46.790 00:14:57.840 Samuel Roberts: get some of your time back here, but thank you so much for taking the time on short notice as well. I’ve been meaning to ask you this since we had a call on Friday, and I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

159 00:14:58.540 00:15:00.150 Samuel Roberts: So, I appreciate it.

160 00:15:00.270 00:15:04.989 Samuel Roberts: And yeah, like I said, I might… if we start to work on the decks more…

161 00:15:05.540 00:15:09.539 Samuel Roberts: visually, I might loop you in again as someone that

162 00:15:09.740 00:15:17.649 Samuel Roberts: can, like, maybe see the patterns and know what to put in the prompt, if we’re not, as engineers, thinking about it that way, because, yeah, great. Okay.

163 00:15:18.260 00:15:27.570 Hannah Wang: All right. Well, yeah, feel free to ping me at any time. I feel like I still have my engineer brain, too, so that might be help. I have the engineer and design brain, I guess.

164 00:15:27.570 00:15:28.870 Samuel Roberts: Probably bridge it a little bit, yeah.

165 00:15:28.870 00:15:33.900 Hannah Wang: Maybe, hopefully, that’s the goal, but, yeah, I hope you have a good rest of your day.

166 00:15:34.110 00:15:35.010 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, you as well.

167 00:15:35.370 00:15:36.609 Samuel Roberts: Thank you, bye.