Your marketing team can do a lot. They look after the brand, they produce great content, they know the guidelines inside out. So when an event comes up and someone asks whether they can just handle the slide decks, it seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion. They already know the brand. They know the software. They’re right there.
And in some cases, for a small internal meeting or a low-key presentation, it probably works out fine.
But for anything with a bit of scale to it, a live audience, a proper show, a conference with multiple speakers and screens and moving parts, you’re asking your marketing team to do something they haven’t trained for. And that’s when the cracks start to show.
It’s not about design ability
This isn’t a slight on your marketing team’s design skills. Most in-house designers are excellent at what they do. The difference isn’t talent, it’s context.
Marketing design and event design are two separate disciplines. A graphic designer who works in marketing is brilliant at social assets, brand campaigns, printed collateral, web graphics. They understand how things look on a screen when someone is browsing at their own pace, clicking around, deciding what to engage with.
A freelance event Graphics Designer understands how things look on a six-metre LED wall from twenty rows back. Those are genuinely different problems, we covered the differences between the two roles in more detail here.
The technical side nobody warns you about
Here’s where things tend to go wrong when marketing teams take on event graphics. It’s not the design itself, it’s the delivery format.
Event screens come in all sorts of aspect ratios, resolutions and configurations. A deck that looks perfectly fine on a standard widescreen monitor can look stretched, cropped or pixelated when it hits a particular screen setup on site. An event Graphics Designer knows to ask the right questions before they start work: what screens are being used, what resolution, how many, in what arrangement.
They also know how to optimise files for live playback so there’s no lag, no drop in quality, no moment where a video stutters in front of a room full of people. They know which file formats cause problems in certain playback software. They know that fonts need to be embedded or the whole deck can collapse when it’s opened on a different machine.
Your marketing team may not know any of that, and more importantly, they won’t know to check.
Version control under pressure
Events have a particular kind of chaos that happens in the days and hours before go-live. Content arrives late. Speakers change their minds. Someone’s CEO wants a slide adding at 9pm the night before. The client’s branding team sends through a new logo at 7am on the morning of the show.
An experienced event Graphics Designer has dealt with all of this before. They have a process. They know how to keep track of versions, how to update files cleanly without introducing errors, how to field last-minute requests without losing their head. They’re also able to make quick design decisions under pressure without needing sign-off on every tiny change, because they’ve learned to read what the event needs.
Someone pulled out of their normal day job to also sort the slides doesn’t have that experience. And the pressure of a live event is not the best time to be learning it.
They’re there on the day
This is probably the biggest practical difference. An event Graphics Designer doesn’t just hand over the files and disappear. They’re on site. They’re the person loading everything into the playback system, checking it all works, liaising with the Showcaller and the AV crew, and sitting backstage throughout the show ready to fix anything that needs fixing.
Your marketing designer, even if they’ve done a brilliant job on the decks, is probably not going to be able to take a day out to sit backstage at your event. That’s not what they’re there for.
When it makes sense to use your marketing team
To be fair to the question: there are situations where your marketing team can and should be involved. They’re the custodians of the brand, so having them review content for brand consistency before it goes to the event designer makes complete sense. They might supply templates, assets, logo files, colour palettes. That collaboration works well.
What doesn’t work well is asking them to own the whole thing, including the on-site delivery, without the specific event experience to back it up.If you want someone who knows exactly what event graphics involves from first brief to final cue, take a look at what a freelance event Graphics Designer actually brings to a show.
And if you need one, you know where to find us.
