In the past, teams from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte College of Engineering two semester capstone senior design class first presented their project design at the end of the first semester. Their design consisted of a report and a poster presentation submitted to the faculty mentors, course instructors and company sponsors. At the poster presentation (and in their report) we found that 35% of the teams did not include enough design detail and 25% had virtually no design details, which indicated they had not spent much time on the design effort. This caused project teams to start their second semester efforts behind schedule. By the end of the second semester, about 28% of all projects (but especially the late-starting projects) failed to meet their project requirements. During the fall of 2009 we introduced a model in which each team presented the conceptual design of their project in the middle of semester one. This presentation, along with the discussion afterwards, has helped teams to focus on details of the design concept. The presentation has also given students a chance to enhance their presentation skills. The major beneficial result of the presentation is that teams are better able to complete the detailed design by the end of the first semester. Our goal from the early conceptual design presentation was to improve the quality of all projects design, and to eliminate the 25% project design failure from occurring. Our initial results are that, based on our early focus on design instruction and presentation on design detail, nearly all teams had complete designs by the end of the first semester. Only 4% of the teams were judged as having virtually no design content, while 70% of the teams had completed designs.