Highlight Projects 2023 – a year of changes and growth

As we reflect on the year 2023, it was overall a better year than the previous one – while it started with a lot of uncertainty hanging around, things cleared up towards the end of the year and showed signs of positive momentum for 2024. We’ve undergone some important changes behind the scenes, taking advantage of a website redesign to also overhaul our service offerings and better articulate what value we can provide.

We asked Mihai, Visual Hackers founder, how was 2023 for the industry: 

The design industry started to see a lot of “AI-powered tools” rising like mushrooms after a rain, promising to do better presentations and graphics than people and taking creatives out of the loop (or “democratizing design” as they like to call it). More than half of those tools are rubbish, they don’t have any actual AI technology but just some fancy automation and the results are sub-par and mediocre at best if the user doesn’t have any design knowledge beforehand. So these tools will end up serving creatives more because we know what to ask from them.

Start-up industry – still faced a lot of uncertainty, there’s been major layoffs in the tech sector and overall tech investors have been much more cautious than before. That meant that they’ll analyze and over-analyze a startup before committing to an investment, meaning also that pitch decks and other materials used in the fundraising process need to be much better and properly highlight the startup’s value propositions.

Projects:

Client name: Harpoon Ventures

Service provided: Pitch Deck Design, Presentation Design, Graphic Design

We’ve been proud to help & support Harpoon ever since they were founded. This year, as they moved to close their new venture fund, we’ve supported them with ongoing support in designing their pitch decks as well as other materials used for their investor relations effort.

Results: A $125M investment fund was announced at the beginning of December

Client name: Seedblink

Service provided: Pitch Deck Design

Seedblink are a long-term client, this year they came back to us to make a new pitch deck for them as they were preparing to raise a series B round.

Results: ongoing fundraising 

Client name: Fairbrics

Service provided: Pitch Deck Development

An awesome client that promises to solve a huge part of the climate crisis through their innovative solution. They approached us to redo their pitch deck for their upcoming series A round.

Results: ongoing fundraising

Client name: Couples Institute

Service provided: Presentation Design for Webinars and Keynotes

One of our oldest clients, we continued to do great work for the Couple’s Institute this year as well. As they continued with their flagship training program for other couple therapists, The Developmental Model, we’ve been constantly supporting them with various presentations they used for webinars, courses and industry events they participated in.

Results: increase in # of program participants, more engagement from them during the course

Client name: Cognitag

Service provided: Pitch Deck Development

Through one of our longer-term clients, Brisbane Strategy Ventures (a corporate venture studio from Australia), we ended up working on quite a few decks for their biggest client, CSIRO, which is the Australian Government’s Science and Research Organization. One standout project was Cognitag which is on a mission to revolutionize the Ambient IoT market.

Results: fundraising is not complete yet, but very promising early traction

What was the highlight of the year?

It wasn’t a particular moment or specific project highlight, but in the 2nd half of the year, once we overhauled and better defined our services, we were able to provide a lot more value to our clients and thus started working on larger projects. For example, we had multiple pitch deck development projects, where we took care of the strategy, storytelling and content development, besides design work.

Mihai, founder Visual Hackers

Now let’s see what 2024 will be like.