This week: ‘2-Hour Tasks’ to accelerate your consulting business in 2025, and scratch your itch to work over the holidays, if you must...

2-Hour Task #2: Get oriented with a design tool

As consultants selling and sharing our expertise, you know how far one crisp visual can take you.

Whether it’s:

• a signature framework for your website and sales materials
• illustrative diagrams for a proposal
• supplementary visuals for a social post
• graphics for your newsletter

A good visual goes a long way to communicate your ideas in a way that’s digestible, memorable, shareable, and potentially even viral.

Add in a professional graphic designer, and you can really develop some durable, show-stopping visual assets.

But having a basic dexterity of 1-2 design tools yourself can be a godsend, allowing you to produce your own graphics as needed in real time, even if they’re just remedial drafts.

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Here are 4 tools, all with free versions, and a short exercise you can do to get oriented with each.

Because there’s no better way to learn a design tool than just jumping in.

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1. Miro

I’ve been using Miro since my framework-building days at Reforge. I use it as a no-frills, blank-canvas design and whiteboarding tool.

In fact, all of my Lightbulb frameworks were created in Miro, on my own.

That’s not a humblebrag - that’s a demonstration of how simple this can be :)

Exercise: Hop into this public board in Miro, make a copy for yourself, and try to recreate my Helper persona framework from scratch.

2. Napkin.ai

I wrote a mini-review of Napkin last month. It's pretty remarkable in it’s ability to create simple diagrams from text.

Exercise: Pull one of your longer LinkedIn posts, and copy/paste it into Napkin. Use the design tools in blue to see how your written post could be described visually.

3. Whimsical

Whimsical is like Miro, with a bit more pizazz. I don’t use it too much, but it’s notable because of a pretty handy ChatGPT integration.

After loading in the Whimsical GPT (free from the GPT Store), you can ask it simple prompts like “build me a visual framework about parenting styles in the US”.

It will generate it from thin air, and then link you to a Whimsical board to be able to customize it yourself.

You can also paste a screenshot or saved image and ask Whimsical to re-create it.

Exercise: Load the Whimsical GPT into ChatGPT and ask it to recreate your favorite framework (yours or someone else’s from a newsletter or LinkedIn)

4. Canva

You’re probably familiar with Canva. It’s known for its easy to customize templates for everything from business cards, to presentations, to ebooks.

Canva is great if you already have an end-format in mind (e.g. I need a slide deck), and from there it can help you make a beautiful end-product.

Also, hate stock images? Use their AI features to generate custom images.

Exercise: Create a shell proposal deck, or a one-sheet for your signature service.

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Of course, you could spend hours getting the hang of each of these tools, but just play around and get yourself familiar.

Next time you’re desperate for a graphic, you’ll be glad you did.

💡

-Wes