Having conference slides designed: what you can outsource

Almost everything except your expertise can be outsourced: a speaker agency develops the talk and its structure with you, and a designer turns the slides into finished graphics. The structure of a talk is its narrative: the order of the ideas and the point at which the audience learns something new. If you want conference slides designed for you, you usually need two providers with different jobs, and the order in which you hire them decides both cost and result. This article shows which tasks arise, who takes them on and why the designer should only be paid once a conference has accepted your talk.

Which tasks make up a conference talk?

A conference talk consists of four stages: the message, the narrative with its text, the slides as the visual layer and the appearance itself. It starts with the question of what your talk offers the audience and which message should stick. Then come the narrative and the text for each section, after that the slides, and finally the appearance. If you search for "presentation design service" or "have slides made for a talk", you usually mean only the third stage. A designer can take it on, as long as someone tells them what belongs on the slides.

Many commissions fail on this condition. A designer receives a deck with too much text and an unresolved order and delivers a beautiful layout that still looks overloaded, because the weakness lay in the structure and the layout cannot fix it. A speaker agency therefore starts one stage earlier, with the talk itself. The whole path from topic to first stage is described in the guide Becoming a speaker.

Talk and narrative: what a speaker agency takes on

A speaker agency for experts works on the expert's behalf and gets them onto specialist conference stages to win B2B clients there. That starts with the talk itself: from your knowledge and your projects comes a topic that a programme committee (the group that decides on submissions at a conference) wants for its audience.

Stage Starter takes this work off your hands: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit it. A call for papers is the public announcement through which a conference collects talk proposals, and an abstract is the short description of the planned talk that the committee reads. We develop the talk and abstracts in conversation with you, then follow up and support you all the way to the stage. How a topic becomes a talk is described in Having a talk developed.

Presentation design is a discipline of its own, and speaker agencies for submissions generally do not design slides. At Stage Starter graphic design is not part of the service, and in return your designer receives a finished structure from us and is spared the questions about open points. You approve the talk and abstracts once before the start, not every single submission.

What does a designer take on, and what does it cost?

A designer or a presentation agency turns the structure into a visual layer, and a conference talk costs roughly €500 to €2,000 with a freelance presentation designer. The designer sets the basic layout with colours and fonts and adds recurring elements that hold a deck together. They turn figures into charts and choose images and icons. Along the way they make sure the slides stay legible in a large hall, where a projector delivers different contrasts from your screen.

The price range follows from hourly rates of around €50 to €150 and the 15 to 25 slides a thirty-minute talk needs. Presentation agencies with their own team charge more than this range. A common model is a fixed price for a basic layout with several slide types and billing by effort for changes. Clarify in advance how many rounds of corrections are included and in which file format you receive the slides. How many slides suit which speaking time is shown in How many slides does a talk need?.

The timeline is just as clear: a designer usually needs one to three weeks for a deck of this size, including rounds of corrections. A finished structure shortens this, because the questions about content fall away.

What stays with you: your expertise and the appearance

No provider can supply the parts of a talk that come from your practice. These include the examples from real projects, the figures you can stand behind yourself and the stance with which you describe a problem. A programme committee and a specialist audience notice whether a talk comes from experience or from research. An agency therefore interviews you and shapes the material, but the material itself comes from you.

Nobody gives the talk for you. You also hold the conversations after the talk yourself, because that is where a listener becomes a potential client.

When do I commission the slides?

You commission the slides after a conference has accepted your talk, because for the vast majority of submissions the programme committee decides on the abstract and needs no deck. Individual calls ask for an outline, a video or slides, especially for workshops and conferences close to academia, and the call then says so. Between submission and answer there are often weeks, and sometimes months until the appearance, as the article on the timeline from call for papers to stage shows. A designer who works before the submission is designing slides for a talk nobody has decided on yet.

With our submissions for clients we reach up to 19 per cent acceptances per conference, while the market norm at this volume of submissions is 5 per cent at most. No agency can guarantee an acceptance, because the programme committee decides, and so you release the design budget only after the first acceptance. It then goes into a talk that is booked, and the deck can be adapted for further appearances, even when slot lengths and organisers' requirements change.

With paid speaking slots the calculation runs the other way. Pay to speak quickly costs €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot, and the slide design comes on top. At specialist conferences with an open call, by contrast, a programme committee decides, and the slot costs the speaker nothing. The collaboration with Stage Starter starts from €990 net per month and runs from the talk through research to support on the way to the stage.

What organisers specify and what to settle in writing

After acceptance, the organiser gets in touch with requirements on slot length, technology in the hall, submission deadline and file format. Most organisers ask for PowerPoint or PDF in a 16:9 aspect ratio, because the computers in the hall are set up for these. Keynote files usually only run if you may connect your own laptop, and you export Google Slides to one of the two formats beforehand. Whether the slides are later made available to attendees and whether the talk is recorded is usually set out in the speaker agreement, the contract between speaker and organiser. The article What to clarify with the organiser as a speaker goes through these points.

For the designer this means they need to know the requirements before setting the layout, and that a deck is often adapted for the next organiser. Get written confirmation from them that you may use, change and publish the slides at further conferences, because without it the rights to the design stay with the designer. This article provides an overview and does not constitute legal advice. As part of our support up to the stage, we coordinate technology and slot with the organiser, and the designer supplies the slides.