What it actually takes to ship presentations before the tools caught up. A first-hand account, written on launch day.
Presentations built entirely in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No PowerPoint. No Figma. No design tool. Just code, a custom template, and a nine-step checklist. Across these topics:
These presentations aren't filed away after a client meeting. They're live, deployed, searchable, and tracked. Every one of the 50 decks is proof of work: a public record of how I think, what I'm paying attention to, and how fast I can move from idea to published argument. In a career built on cultural intelligence, the intelligence has to be visible.
Something interesting lands -- an article, a product launch, a pattern I keep noticing. I save it to my #presentations-claude-code Slack channel. Then I open Claude Code and ask one question: is there enough here for a standalone presentation and a blog post? If yes, we start building. If not, it goes back in the pile.
The raw material comes from living in the work. Following the right voices. Reading deeply in specific areas. Noticing when different threads start converging. My information diet is deliberately narrow: AI and its cultural implications, brand strategy, the economics of creative work, human behaviour at scale. When something arrives at the intersection of two or more of those, it's usually worth saving.
The conversation with Claude Code isn't just "is there enough here?" It's: what's the actual argument? Who is this for? What would make someone change their mind? The first instinct is rarely the sharpest one. The topic might be Claude Design -- but the angle is "what 50 decks taught me before it existed." That reframe is where the deck gets interesting.
This deck is being written on Claude Design's launch day, before I have access to it. That's a deliberate call. The best time to publish a take isn't when you've fully digested something -- it's when the topic is live and the field is still open. A day-one perspective from someone with receipts is worth more than a retrospective from someone who waited.
Not everything that lands in the Slack channel becomes a deck. Sometimes there isn't enough for a standalone argument. Sometimes the angle isn't distinct enough. Sometimes it's too close to something already in the portfolio. That rejection is part of the quality control. It's why 50 presentations don't feel like noise -- because a lot more than 50 ideas were considered and declined.
The curation is the hardest part.
The build is proof that the idea was worth it.
Every deck that ships passed a test most ideas don't survive. When it does make it through: nine steps, no shortcuts.
Not a checklist: a production pipeline. What a team of three would have managed in 2020 now runs in a single session.
All 50 decks run on a single shared HTML template. It ships pre-wired with Plausible analytics, a grid and mosaic view, full mobile support, share buttons, keyboard navigation, print styles, and a resume-from-last-position feature. That's not set up per deck -- it's inherited. The infrastructure decision was made once. Every deck that follows pays nothing for it.
The nine steps aren't just a build process -- they're a content strategy. One conversation, one set of slides, and you get: a deployed presentation, a companion blog post, a LinkedIn carousel (12 slides, PDF), and a 1,200-word X Article written by Claude Opus. All from the same source material. The idea does the work once. The system distributes it everywhere.
For most of my career, a proper presentation meant research, narrative architecture, visual production, and at least one round of client revisions. One to two weeks minimum, if you were doing it properly. Now the same output -- researched, structured, designed, deployed, with a blog post and LinkedIn carousel -- takes days. Sometimes a weekend. The thinking hasn't got faster. Everything around the thinking has. This presentation is the proof: conceived, built, and published on the day Claude Design launched.
The hardest part isn't the thinking.
It's everything that comes after the thinking is done.
By the time a presentation is live, you've spent as much time on logistics as on ideas. That's the gap the tools haven't closed. Until now, possibly.
"Gives designers room to explore widely and everyone else a way to produce visual work." Powered by Claude Opus 4.7. Available on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise.
"I used to write up my page ideas in a doc and hope they survived the handoff. Now I can show my design team."
Every script I've written to generate thumbnails, OG images, and carousel exports exists because there was no tool that could do it conversationally. Claude Design isn't just faster -- it's a different model entirely. Instead of automating a checklist, you describe what you need and iterate. That's not an efficiency gain. It's a category change.
The interesting question isn't whether Claude can generate a slide. It's whether it can know which slide to cut, which idea isn't ready yet, and when the whole thing is trying too hard. That's not a tool problem. That's experience built across 50 presentations.
Better tools lower the cost of a bad idea.
Only better thinking raises the floor.
I don't have access to Claude Design yet. This talk was written on its launch day, before I'd used it once. That's the point: 50 decks in, I already know what I need to think better. The tools are catching up. The question is whether I am too.
Until then: 50 decks, nine steps each, all live at mikelitman.me/decks
mikelitman.me · hello@mikelitman.me