Pitchfork is an app I built with AI to scale customisation in presentation design. It lets any sales rep tailor the pitch for Cara, SocialTalent's AI hire for recruiting teams, to each call in minutes, without anyone, human or AI, improvising on the brand or the claims.
Reps add the prospect's name and logo, pick a TA or Finance audience, choose which differentiators to lead with, and decide whether to include a live demo. Then they run it as a live, animated deck built from the design system, or create a takeaway to send after the call.
Reps tailor the pitch by picking from approved options. There's no free-text box that can put an off-brand layout or an unapproved claim in front of a customer.
The copy comes from the messaging system, so claims about Cara are stated the way the company stands behind them.
AI assembles the deck from the rep's choices and drafts the takeaway, but every slide it draws on was designed by hand. The rep decides what goes in and presents it live.
Reps wanted pitches tailored to each prospect. Letting everyone edit slides, or prompt an AI freely, risks off-brand design and claims the company can't stand behind.
Sales, and our CEO, loved being able to focus on the pitch itself rather than pulling slides together. It also let us cut our spend on other presentation apps.
SocialTalent's AI interview tools (a planner, an in-interview assistant and analytics) used to be called Interview Intelligence. They moved under a new product name, Cara: an AI hiring assistant built to grow into a whole suite of hiring features. I wrote the 31-page messaging guide that tells everyone at SocialTalent how to talk about her.
It covers the whole story: how the product and its features are named, the core messages and when to use each, the narrative behind the pitch deck, messaging for each feature, the key differentiators, and voice guidelines for describing an AI that feels human without ever sounding like a replacement for people. The guide is internal, so here I'm sharing two parts of it: the core messages and the story.
Shaded boxes are quoted from the guide. Everything else is my commentary.
Your hiring partner for the AI era.
WhySignals vision. Never used alone: always followed by a line that says what Cara does.
Build a high-capacity, compliant, and consistent hiring function with Cara.
WhyStates the outcome, for sales decks and executive conversations.
Bring your hiring function safely into the AI era with Cara.
WhyPrompts the next step at conversion points: product pages, closing slides, events.
Cara is an AI hiring assistant.
WhyThe fast answer to "So what is it?", for comparison sites, SEO and analysts.
Cara doesn't accelerate bad hiring, and she doesn't replace recruiters.
WhyMeets the fear of AI head on, then says what she does instead.
WhyThis is the narrative behind the Cara pitch deck, built on the Punchy story framework. It leads with the customer, names the change they're living through, and only then brings in Cara.
Interview Intelligence was being renamed Cara and becoming a suite. Sales, marketing and product needed one clear, consistent way to talk about her.
The story became the foundation of the Cara pitch deck, and the messaging now runs through everything we say about Cara, from the website and sales enablement to event booths. It has kept evolving since this first version, as messaging should.
Four videos from ten years of production at SocialTalent. Each shows a different side of the work, and a different role in making it.
SocialTalent had basic brand guidelines. I combined them with my messaging guidelines for Cara, SocialTalent's AI hire for recruiting teams, and rebuilt both as one design system in Claude Design, with rules exact enough for AI to follow without guessing.
It brings two sources of truth together: the Brand Guidelines for the visuals and the Cara Messaging Bible for the words. Customer-facing copy isn't a suggestion: approved lines are used verbatim. Around them sit the palette, type, geometry, 17 named components and the rules for Cara herself.
Shaded boxes are quoted from the design system. Everything else is my commentary.
Diameter 26% of the portrait measured to the outer edge, flush bottom-right, with a 4% border in the surface colour. Below 24px it comes off rather than shrinks.
Why"Make it look right" is a judgement call. A ratio gives a person and a model the same answer at every size.
No away, no busy, no animation: the dot describes the task, never her availability, which is the objection the product answers.
WhyA rule that explains itself can be applied to cases it never mentions.
If it would look strange applied to a real employee's photo, it is wrong here.
WhyOne line rules out robots, glows and holograms without listing them all.
The design system covers colour, type, geometry, components and the rules for depicting Cara. Here are two of its pages: the colour palette, and Cara's avatar.
More people, and more AI tools, were making brand assets. A system written only for designers leaves AI guessing, and guesses drift off-brand.
It powers Pitchfork, other teams use it to make their own on-brand assets, and the studio gets fewer requests. Even where it isn't used for high-value assets, it's our go-to for visualising ideas and rapid prototyping.
I was Team Photographer for Roller Derby Ireland's World Cup campaign: a fast, physical sport in arenas full of fans, where the shots that matter last a second. A brilliant and different experience that opened my eyes to a whole, bustling subculture.
Outside SocialTalent I also take on freelance work: documentary-style wedding videography, corporate event photography and video, and headshots for individuals and teams.