A TED Talk is highly exclusive and offers massive returns for speakers, organizers, and audiences alike. Our challenge was to follow TED’s brand guidelines without imposing our own company brand. We also had to keep the narrative strictly focused on the problem our company exists to solve: reducing global CO₂ emissions.
Team
Michael Chen - Graphic Designer
Renee Edelman - Junior Designer
Powerpoint
Illustrator
Photoshop
Brief
Ryan Gilliam, Co-founder and CEO of Fortera, will deliver a roughly seven-minute TEDx talk, “A Concrete Plan for Sustainable Cement,” to a general, non-technical audience. The talk should leave viewers understanding the urgency of reducing cement emissions and their global impact, and convince them that a practical fix exists that works with the existing cement industry rather than against it.
The Challenges
Focus on strong, high-resolution pictures, graphics, or visual models rather than dense text.
Keep slides to fewer than 10 words. One powerful word or line is enough.
Slides must be branded in accordance to TEDx (not Fortera) brand guidelines.
Keep graphs and visual aids clean and easy to understand at a glance.
The Solutions
Visuals built around a pre-written script support proper pacing and avoid splitting the audience’s attention, which increases engagement.
Homing in on key talking points allows audiences to process information faster and makes the presentation more memorable.
Pinpointing Issues
Scientific processes are difficult to explain to a general audience especially in the form of a presentation without going into too much detail.
The presentation should help the audience understand the urgency of reducing cement emissions and their global impact.
Although bulleted lists and on-screen reading are common in scientific presentations, slides should support your spoken story, not replace it.
By limiting a presentation to a maximum of ten slides, the presenter keeps the audience’s focus, reduces preparation work, and avoids audience fatigue.
Simple graphics can reduce cognitive load, make scientific formulas easier to grasp, and guide the audience toward the key talking points.
Final Slides
The slides were kept black to reduce prevent “stage blinding” and reduce eye strain. The visuals were created to be understood without additional context.
Slide 1
Slide 2
Slide 7
Slide 4
Slide 8
Slide 5
Slide 6
Slide 3
Highlights
Presented on October 2024, the talk has drawn over 350,000 online views since its March 2025 release. CEO Ryan Gilliam says cement causes about 8% of global carbon pollution, and Fortera’s process recycles its waste into limestone using existing infrastructure.
