We’ve all been there. You’re working on a project, and suddenly you are told you will be presenting your progress in 5 minutes to your stakeholders, the CEO and your childhood crush who are all excited to see what you’ve been up to.
There is no time to put a deck together. There is barely enough time to find the latest versions of each screen and put them in a separate page in an attempt to make the project look a bit less messy and cluttered. But you do it anyway and walk to ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶d̶o̶o̶m̶ the meeting room.
You connect you screen to the monitor or start sharing your screen. This is your first impression! Make sure you are presenting what needs to be seen and ONLY what needs to be seen. You don’t want them commenting on your wallpaper or even worse, see how cluttered your desktop is!
Luckily there is a solution for that:
Just make Sketch go fullscreen!
There is a very handy shortcut that I haven’t seen many people use when presenting their work using Sketch. Under the View menu you can find a nifty tool called Hide Interface.
The keyboard shortcut for this is Command Period.
This trick has never failed to impress other designers in any meeting I was presenting at.
Everyone else in the meeting: Wait! How did you do that?
Me, an intellectual: Command Period. ?
Time to move forward with the presentation. Now that you have fully cleared your screen of all clutter, shame, and weird layer names you are ready to share your screen.
Now comes to important part! Actually presenting your work. Ask yourself this: How do you bring the viewer’s attention to the parts of the screen you’re presenting? Move your cursor furiously over the button you’re pointing at? Grab the whole art board and move it so that they know which one you’re talking about? There must be a better way!
Zoom to selection: Command 2
Zoom to all: Command 1
These are the only two shortcuts you need to remember now. And use them like a pro. Select an art board or a layer group on the screen and Command 2. Bam! Hyper focused feedbacks ensue. Need to jump to another screen? No problem, Command 1, select the next art board, Command 2. Boom. You just blew everyone’s mind. Your PM rushes out the door to buy you a trophy, your childhood crush confesses their love for you (which you turn down), and the CEO offers you a raise. All because you learnt these few shortcuts.
From now on, when someone asks you to jump in a presentation to show your work in progress, the only thing preventing you from blowing their mind is the actual work you’re presenting. Which is great! I’m sure! I mean… You’re doing a great job! We all appreciate you! Ah, you know what I mean.