THE THING WE BUILT:

Presentation Sandbox

The classic struggle in any design presentation: do you show one great option, or do you bring a few, even if you clearly have a favorite?

Technology has changed a lot, but this question hasn’t gone away. You either walk into the room with one idea that could land or completely miss, or you bring a set of options and manage the conversation from there.

There’s also the version designers flirt with but rarely stick with: designing on the fly. Sitting down with a client, opening Figma (or Photoshop back in the day), and just making it together. We’ve all tried it at some point. It sounds collaborative, but it usually ends with you losing your footing a bit. You stop being the designer and start reacting. It’s hard to hold a point of view when the canvas is wide open.

Most of the time, you end up somewhere in the middle. You present a few strong options, the client leans toward one, and then asks something like, “what if it were green?” You can open Figma and tweak it live, but it doesn’t make for a great presentation. It feels reactive, a little messy, and not particularly confident.

So we started thinking about a different version of this. What if you could answer those questions in real time, but still hold onto the structure of the work? What if the presentation itself was the tool?

So we built a thing.

This is something we’ve been trying with clients and seeing real success with. So we decided to rebuild it using this newsletter as the “client” to show how it works. This is a peek into a process we’ve been piloting and refining.

How It Works

• Pre-work foundation: We didn’t start here. A while ago we shared some thinking on this with Moodboarder, a tool for gathering feedback early. Much of what makes this work happens before the “design work” even starts. Interviews, looking at inspiration, building a moodboard in advance. Pull out every question and document preferences explicitly.

• The sandbox: Then we build this lightweight sandbox where clients can actually react instead of imagine. It’s less of an ‘app’ and more of a repeatable process.

• Live manipulation: This sandbox let’s us swap colors, backgrounds, and logo variations instantly.

• Context preview: Drop any option into a homepage concept without spinning up new mockups.

• Real-time reactions: Answer “what if” questions in the meeting, not a week later, and without derailing the presentation.

Notes from Building

Constraints make real-time feedback safe. Fast feedback was always possible. You could sit with a client in [INSERT DESIGN TOOL OF CHOICE] and take commands on the fly. But that shifts you from decision-maker to pixel-pusher. When the canvas is wide open, you lose authority. The sandbox works because it has guardrails. You can swap colors, but only where we’ve defined. You can change logos, but only from options we’ve already designed. It feels like instant feedback without opening the whole canvas to chaos. The client can only pick from options we’ve already validated.

Speed compounds. Faster feedback means fewer wasted cycles. Instead of saying you’ll explore something and circling back later, you resolve it in the moment. That means building faster and spending time on the things that actually make a design great, not worrying about whether you’re going to blow the budget on another round. When clients can make decisions in a meeting instead of marinating for a week, projects keep moving. Nobody loses the thread.

And that scope creep… it just doesn’t happen in the same way, because maybe you never enter the revision spiral in the first place.

Building the tool is the trust. When you show up with a custom sandbox instead of a static PDF, you’re demonstrating how you think. Clients see the care, the thinking, the intention. That builds authority faster than any case study ever could. “Show, don’t tell” applies to your expertise too.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, this sandbox is probably worth at least two meetings.

Built with ❤️ by Township

You’re receiving this because you signed up for Township’s “We Built a Thing” newsletter. We'll only send these when we, well, build things.