On the worktable sits a foam-core board with a torn page from a tile catalog, three fabric swatches pinned at angles (rust bouclé, oatmeal linen, a blue ticking stripe), a paint chip in a warm white, and a pencil floor plan of a 14-by-16-foot living room with the sofa drawn twice because the first spot blocked the radiator. On the laptop, a folder called “Marsh_living_FINAL_v2” holds 41 images, about a third of which are the same walnut side table photographed from different angles.
That board works when you’re standing next to it and pointing. It works less well at ten the next morning, when the clients (call them Dana and Luis) are across a table, Luis has one eye on his phone, and Dana wants to know why the rug costs more than the coffee table. A mood board shows taste. Clients sign off on decisions, and a board doesn’t lay those out in any order.
So most designers end up building a pitch deck the night before, dragging images into PowerPoint until the cursor starts to blur. The first draft of that deck can come from a tool now, which leaves your evening for the parts that need a designer.
The room has a story, and the deck tells it in order
Before opening any software, decide what the deck has to carry. For a single-room project I use seven beats, and they don’t get equal space:
- The brief. The client’s own words, played back. “We host Thanksgiving for twelve and the room has to take it” beats “open, family-friendly living space.” One slide.
- The concept. A name and one sentence: “Warm modern, with a little 1970s Milan in the lighting.” If you can’t say it in a sentence, the board isn’t finished.
- The palette. Swatches and paint, each tagged with where it goes. The rust bouclé is the accent chair, not the sofa, and the slide should say so before the client assumes otherwise.
- The plan. Furniture positions, walkways, the TV wall, where the floor lamp plugs in.
- Budget bands. Ranges per category, never a line-item list at this stage.
- The timeline. Lead times drive this. A custom sofa from a workroom can take twelve weeks or more, and the client should hear that now, not in week nine.
- The decisions. The choices the client has to make before you can order anything.
That last beat is missing from most decks I’m shown, and it does more work than the other six. A meeting that ends with “we love it” and no decisions is a meeting you’ll have again next week.
For the Marsh living room, the three decisions are: keep the existing oak floors or refinish them darker; sofa in the oatmeal performance linen or the rust bouclé; and whether the built-in shelving goes into this phase or waits until spring. Each one moves the budget band, and each one gets its own slide near the end.
Feeding the board to Quillbot
Quillbot’s ai presentation maker works from a prompt plus whatever files you attach, which suits a designer’s pile of mixed formats. Through Attach Files it takes images in PNG, JPG, JPEG and WebP, along with PDF, Word and PowerPoint files. Supplier product shots usually arrive as WebP or JPG already. Photograph the physical board in daylight, flat, from directly above, and scan or export the floor plan sketch as a PDF.
One snag: it won’t take a spreadsheet. If your budget lives in Excel, either paste the category totals into the prompt as plain text or print the sheet to PDF and attach that. I prefer pasting, because then I know exactly which numbers the tool saw.
The process runs in four steps. You add files and a prompt, it generates slide titles and speaker-ready text, you pick from the layouts and themes it offers, and then you edit, export and share. Most of the quality comes from the prompt. This is the one I’d write for the Marsh project:
Create an 11-slide client presentation for Dana and Luis Marsh, a living room redesign in a 1950s ranch house. Audience: the two clients, non-designers, meeting in person. Tone: warm, confident, plain English, no design jargon. Use the attached mood board photos, fabric swatches and floor plan PDF. Structure: their brief in their words (“we host Thanksgiving for twelve”), the concept “Warm modern with a 1970s Milan accent,” the palette with each swatch labeled by where it goes, the furniture plan, budget bands (furniture $14,000 to $17,500; lighting $3,200 to $4,000; textiles and rug $4,500 to $6,000; labor and install $2,800 to $3,500), a timeline that flags the 12-week sofa lead time, and three decision slides: refinish the floors or keep them, sofa fabric, shelving now or in spring. End with one slide summarizing the three decisions.
Set the slide-count selector to match the prompt, eleven here. If the two disagree, you get a deck that either crams or pads.
Fixing the pictures before anyone sees them
The first generation will put your images somewhere sensible and get the text roughly right. Then you edit. The editor lets you change titles and body text, reorder or delete sections, add new ones, and work on the images directly: crop, remove backgrounds, apply filters.
Background removal is the feature I lean on hardest. Product photos from supplier sites come on every backdrop imaginable, from a gray studio sweep to a styled room in somebody’s Copenhagen apartment to a white void with a drop shadow. Strip the backgrounds from the accent chair, the floor lamp and the side table, and they sit together on the palette slide as if they were shot for it. Crop the board photo tight so the push pins and the edge of your desk disappear.
The floor plan needs a different kind of attention. A pencil sketch that reads fine on paper can turn to gray fuzz on a projected slide, so go over the walls in a fine black marker before you scan it, and add dimensions in feet (or meters, if your client is in Lisbon or Dubai) large enough to read from across a table.
Leave the filters off the fabric swatches. A warming filter turns oatmeal linen into camel, and then the client is let down when the sample arrives. Color on a screen is shaky enough already.
For the budget slide, the tool can suggest or generate a chart. A simple split by category (furniture, lighting, textiles, labor) reads better than a table for most clients, because they see at a glance that furniture takes more than half the spend. Check every figure on the generated chart against your own numbers before moving on. A chart can look tidy and still be wrong.
One paragraph of notes, one slide
These were my concept notes for the Marsh room, exactly as they sat in the project file:
Concept: want it warmer than the current gray everything, they said “cozy but not cluttered.” Thinking walnut + rust + oatmeal, brass in the lighting, maybe a globe pendant (Milan 70s vibe). Keep sightline to the backyard, sofa floats, no TV over fireplace (Luis wants it, Dana doesn’t, park this). Rug needs to handle a dog.
And here is the slide that came out of it, after one round of generation and about four minutes of editing:
Warm modern, with a 1970s Milan accent Walnut, rust and oatmeal replace the gray. Brass lighting and a globe pendant over the reading corner. The sofa floats so the view to the backyard stays open. A wool-blend rug that stands up to the dog. Image: the cropped board photo, with the pendant and chair cut out on the right.
The TV question didn’t make it onto the concept slide. That disagreement between Dana and Luis is a conversation for the room, not a bullet, and I’d raise it out loud after the plan slide.
What goes on each slide
| Deck section | What goes on it | Image or words |
|---|---|---|
| Brief | The client’s words, room size, the pieces they’re keeping | Mostly words, one photo of the room as it is now |
| Concept and palette | The concept name, swatches tagged with locations | Mostly images |
| Plan | Floor plan with furniture and walkways marked | Image, with three or four labels |
| Budget bands | Ranges per category, a split chart | Chart plus a few words |
| Decisions | One choice per slide, the cost effect of each option | Words first, two small images |
The timeline has no row because it’s nearly always a plain horizontal bar of weeks, and the tool handles that fine from the prompt.
Sharing it with the client, and with the showroom screen
Once the deck is right in Quillbot’s ai presentation maker, you can send it before the meeting or after, depending on how you like to run things. It supports real-time collaboration by email invite or shared link, and the shared link is handy when a client wants to leave comments on a slide. Dana will have opinions on the rug. Keep the editing to yourself, though, or the plan gets rearranged at midnight by someone who has never measured a walkway.
Export options are JPG, PNG, GIF, PDF (standard or print) and PPTX. Send the client a PDF, since it opens on any phone and nobody can accidentally drag a sofa off the plan. For a showroom or studio screen, export PPTX and open it in PowerPoint. That’s also where you add speaker notes and any transitions, because Quillbot doesn’t include automatic animations, slide transitions or speaker notes. If your studio runs on Google Slides, export PPTX and upload it, since direct Google Slides export is listed as coming soon.
A designer in Melbourne who works with clients in Singapore over video does it this way: the print PDF goes out the night before, and she screen-shares the PPTX during the call, so both ends are looking at the same slide numbers when someone says “go back to seven.”
Can it show the client the finished room?
No. The tool can suggest or generate images, but a generated “warm modern living room” is somebody else’s room with invented proportions. Put one in front of a client and they’ll fall for its 12-foot ceilings and then feel cheated by their actual 8-foot ones. If the client needs to see the room before it exists, that’s a rendering job for your own software or a visualizer you hire, and the finished render gets attached as an image like everything else.
It can’t make the design calls either. It will lay out eleven slides of whatever you hand it, including a palette that fights itself. Whether rust and blue ticking belong in the same room was your judgment before you opened the tool, and it stays yours.
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Team Home Spacess shares simple, practical design ideas that work for real families. The team focuses on cozy décor, soft colors, and natural textures that make a space feel truly lived-in. From everyday decorating tips to creative home projects, Team Home Spacess is dedicated to helping readers create warm, comfortable, and inviting spaces with a fresh and personal touch.