Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Lori Chollar

      Lori Chollar is co-founder and CEO of TLC Creative Services, Inc., a design studio that thrives in the presentation world, and the live and virtual event industry. Her diverse design background spans traditional graphic and print design, apparel and product design, and a whole lot of presentation, template, and multimedia design. Building from a formal degree in graphic design to a thriving freelance business, her company with husband Troy has grown into a successful corporate design studio. Lori is passionate about good design and good business.

In this conversation, Lori talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Lori, your session this year is Put Your Deck on a Diet, about shrinking bloated files into fast, manageable presentations. Is file bloat mostly a design discipline problem, or does PowerPoint itself need to do more to prevent it?

Lori: I think the answer is a little bit of both, but if I had to choose one, I’d say it’s usually a workflow and design discipline problem.

PowerPoint is actually very forgiving, sometimes a little too forgiving. It will happily accept a 25MB image that’s only being displayed as a small thumbnail on a slide. It’ll let you import videos, create duplicate slide masters, embed fonts, keep dozens of hidden slides, and generally continue adding content without warning you that performance may start to suffer.

That being said, PowerPoint gives us a lot of tools to help manage file size and performance. And while we use those tools, to effectively optimize a file we also use a variety of add-ins and other software applications.

At TLC Creative, we work with presentations that are often used in high-stakes environments such as sales meetings, product launches, investor events, and large general sessions. In those situations, file size isn’t really a storage problem, it’s a performance problem. A sluggish deck can affect editing, collaboration, rehearsal, and even presenter confidence.

One of the main points of my session is that the easiest presentation to optimize is the one that’s built correctly from the beginning. A few good habits can prevent many of the issues people encounter later. The challenge is that many people don’t think about optimization until a file becomes painful to use. By then, they’re reacting to a problem instead of preventing one.

Geetesh: You’ve been a regular voice at the Presentation Summit for several years now. With so many more tools now competing for attention in the presentation space, has the audience’s relationship with PowerPoint itself changed, or does it still hold its ground?

Lori: There are certainly more tools available today than there were when I first started attending and speaking at the Summit. New design platforms, AI-powered tools, collaborative workspaces, video-based communication tools, and countless other presentation-related technologies have all entered the conversation.

What’s interesting, though, is that PowerPoint continues to hold an incredibly important place in the business world.

One reason for this is flexibility. PowerPoint isn’t just a presentation tool. It’s become a communication platform. Organizations use it for presentations, sales materials, internal communications, event graphics, training materials, executive briefings, and much more. It’s difficult to find another tool that can comfortably serve all of those purposes while remaining intuitive and easy to learn.

I think what’s changed most is not PowerPoint’s relevance, but our expectations. Audiences expect more. Presenters expect more. And of course, our presentation clients certainly expect more. The quality of visual communication continues to rise, and tools like AI are helping people work faster and explore ideas more quickly.

At the same time, some things haven’t changed. Strong content and storytelling, thoughtful design, and clear communication are still what make presentations effective. The software is important, but it’s not what ultimately makes a presentation memorable.

PowerPoint remains one of the most versatile canvases available, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Geetesh: If a presenter wants the biggest improvement in their work for the least amount of effort, what’s the one thing you’d tell them to focus on?

Lori: I would tell them to focus on clarity.

Not animations. Not fancy transitions. Not the latest design trend.

Clarity.

Whenever we’re designing presentations, we’re constantly asking ourselves a simple question: “What is the audience supposed to understand from this slide?”

If that answer isn’t immediately clear, the slide usually needs more work.

Some of the biggest improvements we make is simply simplifying content, reducing visual clutter, creating better hierarchy, and giving important information room to breathe. These aren’t necessarily complicated design skills. They’re often small decisions that make a very big difference.

Interestingly, clarity also connects back to the subject of my session. Just as cluttered slides can make information harder to understand, cluttered PowerPoint files can make presentations harder to build, edit, and deliver. In both cases, removing what’s unnecessary allows the important things to simply work better.

Good presentations aren’t about adding more. Very often, they’re about knowing what to take away.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.