As creative professionals, the biggest and most anticipated moment during a project or a pitch is the presentation of the creative work. On Mad Men, the masterful Don Draper sets up the client with a prospective question and as they ponder, he unveils the mocked up art boards that reveal the answer (and usually win the account.) This is not a purely fictional scenario, in reality it's the ideal way that well crafted creative work should be presented, even if we can't always do it as smoothly as Mr. Draper.
We may live in a digital age but it is important to value your work and to present it in person whenever possible, validate it, explain it and "sell" it. While it is much easier to send a "Hi – here are some logo ideas we came up with…" Email than schedule a meeting, print comps, board up samples, and travel to your client, – it devalues your work immensely.
There are always exceptions, the smaller projects, long distance clients; we have a client based in India so we haven't taken the 2 day flight to go over our work, however we make sure to be on a call with them as they open the work we send so we can talk them through it.
It's not solely the pageantry of the process that makes the difference, the big benefit is being able to say why you did certain things, what you were trying to achieve and answer questions. You can quickly diffuse someone's personal preferences and irrelevant observations by validating your design and explaining why you made certain choices.
So get out those X-actos and mat board, hone up on your talking points and hit the pavement. It could make the difference.
