Lori Chollar and the art of knowing what to leave out

Lori Chollar has an eye for the space between letters. Public signage is among her favorite things to critique. So are its punctuation marks. A sign may have intended only to direct traffic or advertise lunch. It has acquired a creative director.

There is something rather endearing about this particular inability to leave work at work. Chollar also paints, makes things, and travels with her husband, Troy. She has also described gardening, walking her dog Scout, and collecting toys to decorate her desk. The designer who cares about order has allowed a little company among the office supplies.

She is the co-founder, CEO and creative director of TLC Creative Services in Murrieta, California. Her professional life moves between the image and the organization that produces it: choosing what belongs on a screen, helping a team get it there, and running the business around the work. Across those responsibilities, her attention keeps returning to how people receive information.

A phone call changes the brief

Her early career belonged to print. She studied at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo from 1986 to 1990. Her design background eventually encompassed graphics, apparel, product work and temporary tattoos. The last item deserves its adjective. This was another surface for design, rather than a career requiring customers to make permanent decisions.

The move into presentations came through a request. A colleague contacted Troy about a need for graphic designers who could work in PowerPoint. At the time, the couple’s projects included identities, brochures, advertisements, catalogs and large-format graphics. A meeting followed. In Lori’s telling, it changed the direction of their working lives.

Their company name has a longer personal history. TLC contains Troy and Lori Chollar’s initials, and it was also their high-school dating nickname. A private shorthand became a public business name. It is a compact origin story, with the considerable advantage of already fitting on the stationery.

The accounting hat

The initials suggest a partnership. The working arrangement involves a good deal more than two people making attractive slides. Chollar has described a career that passed through an art department, freelancing and sole proprietorship before she became a corporate CEO. Each stage added another set of decisions to the design brief.

In a 2018 conversation about women-owned presentation businesses, she described responsibilities extending into finance, staffing and project management. She also included responsibility for the snacks. Anyone who has worked through a long afternoon of revisions may consider that a consequential appointment. Her account was affectionate about the absurd number of jobs that can fit inside one title.

She enjoys the accounting side, too. Organization has its own appeal when you like knowing where everything belongs. That preference makes a useful companion to creative direction: an idea needs time, people and a workable sequence of tasks before it becomes something a client can use.

By August 2024, Lori and Troy were discussing their project management system in a dedicated podcast episode. They described its development over years. Their premise was practical: better processes could reduce the time absorbed by business administration and leave more time for design. The creative career includes the work of protecting the hours in which creativity can happen.

Making the letters stay put

One of her practical tips from 2017 concerns a small typographic disappointment. A designer chooses a script font for an accent, then realizes the client may not have that font installed. The intended appearance depends on what happens when the file opens on another computer. Chollar’s workaround was to copy the chosen text and paste it back as a picture.

The letters become an image, preserving the appearance she selected. It is a deliberately specific solution for a particular element, rather than an instruction to turn an entire presentation into pictures. Her example makes the intended use clear: an accent whose visual character contributes to the slide.

This is where the print designer and the presentation designer meet. Choosing the type is part of the assignment. Making sure somebody else sees that choice is another part. Even an ornamental flourish has a practical journey to complete before it reaches the audience.

Collaboration has a deadline

Chollar’s 2019 conference session concerned collaboration, a word that tends to sound pleasantly effortless until several people have to approve a slide. Her account included the familiar obstacles: an inadequate template, a deadline, disagreement about a design choice, and the long wait for somebody’s approval.

She wanted designers to understand who else was involved, what those people needed and how the different roles fit together. The ambition was a more level-headed approach to working with others. It is advice with an immediate use in any project where having a good visual idea is only one of the requirements.

Her argument also gave clients a place in the story. Respecting another person’s role helps the work get made; good work helps sustain the relationship. This is a designer speaking with a business owner’s awareness that the next assignment depends partly on what happened during the last one.

From the pool to the podium

Her history with the Presentation Summit began at a distance from the lectern. She recalled being at the pool with their young daughters while Troy attended the first conference. Later she supported his technical talks, became an attendee herself, and eventually began speaking about her own experience in design and business.

That progression contains several versions of participation. First, the conference was part of a family trip. Then it became somewhere to learn, somewhere to contribute, and somewhere to maintain professional friendships. When she looked back in 2024, the relationships and partnerships were what she valued most.

Her teaching makes room for the unfinished view. For her 2024 Backstage Pass session, she planned to break examples apart and rebuild them, exposing the production choices as well as the result. Brand requirements, software limitations and other constraints belonged in the lesson. The attractive slide was the beginning of the explanation.

A finished piece can be admired without being understood. Taking it apart gives another designer a chance to follow the decisions. Chollar’s approach turns a demonstration into something closer to a shared workbench, where the audience can see how a constraint becomes part of the solution.

Make room at the table

In 2021, she discussed a Women in Business evening session for people across the presentation industry: designers, writers and presenters, employees, freelancers and business owners. She wanted a setting where participants could speak comfortably about their experiences and leave with encouragement they could put to use.

Her planned subjects included pay, leadership and barriers in business. She invited attendees to bring questions of their own. The format acknowledged that useful knowledge is distributed around a room. Experience can come from a person running a company or from someone just beginning to work independently.

Her involvement in those conversations extends to podcasts with other women in the field. It sits alongside a company with women-owned business certification through The Supplier Clearinghouse. In her public work, the practical questions of ownership and the personal experience of working in design frequently share the same conversation.

A wider canvas, the same audience

In February 2026, Chollar spoke at CreativePro’s Presentation Design Conference about ultrawide presentations. The following month, a podcast conversation explored how she had prepared the session, along with the technical and creative questions involved in designing for broad LED displays.

A screen of that kind changes the working conditions. The discussion covered display technology, workflow, collaboration and the audience’s perspective. It also considered the experience of presenting prerecorded material. Even a session about making content for a large display has to account for the human being delivering it.

Her next public examples returned to the brief itself. In May, she and Troy discussed a completed partnership pitch deck. Before designing, their team needed to establish the presentation’s purpose and type. A request to inform people and a request to persuade them to become partners require different choices about the material.

In July, she discussed a client who used AI to create a reference presentation before bringing in the design team. The episode considered the usefulness of those initial drafts alongside inconsistencies and the work of keeping the result aligned with a brand. Here was another change in how an assignment could arrive at the studio.

The question before the next slide

By September 2026, Chollar was discussing file efficiency ahead of another Presentation Summit. Her examples included oversized images, accumulated masters and hidden slides. The issue had consequences for editing, collaboration and rehearsal. A presentation’s behavior while people prepare it belongs among its design considerations.

“What is the audience supposed to understand from this slide?”

Lori Chollar · September 2026

That question connects the different parts of her working life. The graphic designer considers what a viewer sees. The creative director helps a team decide what matters. The business owner looks for a process that lets the work proceed. Each responsibility requires decisions about attention, sequence and what somebody else needs next.

There is plenty in her career that can expand: the canvas, the range of projects, the number of collaborators. Her advice keeps a place for subtraction. Remove clutter. Clarify the hierarchy. Allow the important information enough room. The person who notices a wayward space on a street sign is still looking closely when the screen fills a stage.