Planners are often surprised when I tell them I don’t use a bunch of intense software to create my design presentations.

Much like all creatives, I started with a laptop and a dream but not a lot of capital. As business owners we often have to balance giving a high end service and experience with accessible, affordable tools. And my design presentations are no different.

Here’s the top tech tools I use in my design process:

Collaboration

Aisle Planner

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I use Aisle Planner as my CRM (client relationship management). I’m a huge lover of their tools and products. So while the monthly fee can add up, I use it for sales as well as project management which makes it well worth the investment for me.

One of the ways I use Aisle Planner to collaborate with clients is through their questionnaire templates.

The very first step of my design process is sending my clients a questionnaire to gather important information. This ranges from basic contact info, to information about their story, their expectations for their wedding and our communication. Having this in template form makes it easy for me to quickly send over the questionnaire as soon as they’re booked.

(Psst… looking for a new questionnaire template? You can get mine in my Design Process Guide in the shop.)

Once we have a basic direction, I love to collaborate with clients (and vendors) in Aisle Planner’s Design Studio. This feature is like a private Pinterest where you, the client, and any added planning partners can upload images, add comments, and build palettes.

This is huge for me working with destination or busy clients as we can’t always meet up together at a rental showroom or get time to go over inspiration before a floral meeting. But using Design Studio, we can share feedback whenever we’re able to get online. This private curation process also helps to cut down on some of the noise of using a larger inspiration platform.

NOTE: This link is a referral link. If you use this link, I may receive a monetary reward.

Presentation

Keynote

For the actual presentations, I use Keynote. This is the Mac version of Powerpoint. If you do not have Keynote, you can use Powerpoint or Canva in a similar way.

I created a template design presentation in Keynote that I can use each time for my clients to create dynamic wedding design presentations.

The learning curve isn’t too steep with Keynote, but it is less intuitive. Some of my favorite shortcuts are:

• the eye-drop tool makes it easy to grab key colors out to create a custom palette
• double-click images to get the black outline which you can use to crop the image
• the “arrange” tab includes layering options to create digital mockups that require no sketching abilities

Sketching

Procreate

If you do have a talent for sketching (or want to learn!), I highly recommend the Procreate App for iPad & Apple Pencil.

Save some trees – and save yourself the headache of trying to upload high resolution versions of a paper sketch – by using this tech tool to create digital sketches you can quickly incorporate into your visual design presentations.

For learning how to sketch using these tools, I recommend Roadmap to iPad Sketching by The Sketchbook Series & Concept Wedding Designs.