SlideMagic Blog

Writing a good presentation is a process that takes time. There is the time to complete the analysis and make the graphs and tables, but also time to ponder the story and the flow.

If you somehow end up rewriting your whole deck in 30 minutes the day before the presentation, and leaving out many of the data charts that took you days to make, then it does not mean that you made mistakes, got it wrong, or wasted your time. You actually had to go through the whole loop in order to pull off that 30 minute rewrite.

I looked briefly at Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for SlideMagic a couple of years ago, but never really pursued specific ideas. Recently, I revisited things and was surprised by the amount of progress that has been made. Not so much the actual technology itself, but more how accessible it is for anyone to use.

“AI” and “ML” are big buzz words at the moment and many of you are probably be wondering what it could mean for the industry you are working in. You read some blogs, books, watch some videos, but don’t really get it.

I would recommend to actively dive in and follow an online video course. The actual coding knowledge required is now very minimal, it is all about learning how to select and apply models. Sometimes, all the “AI” you need is basic statistics and regression. Sometimes, highly advanced image recognition software has already been cracked and can be used and accessed with a few lines of code.

Such a course is great fun, helps you understand what these technologies could really mean for your business, cuts through the buzzwords and makes you a better manager in case you are hiring people or service providers to build things for you.

Many of you readers are independent presentation designers. Having done a large number of online courses now, I think these udemy, coursera, etc. instructors could be great potential clients for you. Most of them talk through a set of poorly designed bullet point slides with a picture in picture video super imposed on them.

• These slides can obviously be improved, by a lot
• The narration and creative brief is there for you: the instructor gives verbal instructions as audio and often in a transcript
• These presentations can have a huge audience, and the overall visual quality can make a big difference in their marketing strategy: if the free sample lessons look really good, students will convert and buy the course
• As a presentation designer, you can specialize in a certain field: you start a self reinforcing loop: you understand the subject area better, you do better work, you can attract more work in that same speciality area as a result.

I myself don’t have the time to all this design work, therefore I leave it up to you :-)

A smart online instructor can do 2 things:

1. Outsource design work to a great freelance presentation designer
2. Do the slides herself, but in SlideMagic

How do we end up with so many presentations that are mainly slides with bullet points?

A pitch usually has 2 types of slides. The clear cut ones: head shots of the team, columns with revenue forecasts, pictures of the product, screenshots of the app, table of the budget.

Then there are the ones that are less clear, the ones that need to tell the story behind your idea. When we start off,:

1. we don’t exactly know what they need to say,
2. we don’t know exactly what they should look like

These are 2 big challenges. It is not obvious to craft the story line with messages, and after you did that, it is not obvious to design a slide that delivers the message.

What happens? We open a slide editor and start putting in sentences on slides, move slides around. We can’t think about design, because we don’t know the content of the slide yet. As a result, the default bullet point list becomes the design that actually sticks.

We work really hard on the messages, get our colleagues to comment on them, get our boss to “sign off” that exact message (after we added the qualifying comment on line 3). And more and more, the presentation starts to make sense to us (the writer). The slides become mental placeholders, and in our bullet point frame of mind, every new slide will look exactly like the previous one. This is the mental model we are working with.

We have been iterating a presentation for our new venture for months and months, and then just before we had to send out the first deck to a very serious potential partner, I re-wrote the whole pitch in just 30 minutes. New format, new colours, new sequence, new everything.

Unfortunately, you need those 6 months of pondering in order to pull of 30 minute trick. There are no shortcuts.

But on the positive side: if you have been using a deck for a very long time, you could give it a try and come up with a completely new visual approach for your story.

Here is an interesting article about how our mind works. The brain is constantly predicting impressions to save energy. It has a number of layers. A higher layer creates a prediction based o a lower layer. The lower layer can report inconsistencies to the layer above, in case we can go a level deeper.

This is probably the same mechanism that intuition uses, as long as we observe something that is in lie with our prediction, we maintain low energy mode, if things start moving apart, we add brain power.

Remember that this is how an audience will be looking at you when presenting.

This is the approach I take when making drastic changes to computer code, a presentation, or a spreadsheet. When you decide to turn a big piece of work upside down, you can’t simply tear up the whole thing. Instead, you change things carefully, constantly monitoring whether the program keeps functioning, and/or the spreadsheet still produces more or less the same answer. When it does, take the old stuff out bit by bit.

This is the only way to manage mistakes. If you changed 5 things and see that all of a sudden your average price per bottle is way off, you cannot tell which of the five is the culprit.

What if all of a sudden your boss, customer, or user wants an intermediate new version of the model. If you are mid-way in some major rewrite, you cannot produce it quickly.

Or, maybe you discover halfway through that the 2nd change of the 5 you pushed through actually does not make sense. Unwinding everything is hard.

A clickbait link popped up on my phone with songs that were written in less than 20 minutes (I am linking to another post with the same subject).

Yes, these songs might have been written in 20 minutes, but I am sure that those 20 minutes are the result of years of practice, trying, and noodling by these musicians. All that effort that was built over a long time just fell in the right place.

I think this is true for every creative process, including presentation design and storytelling. In Hemmingway style: ‘gradually, then suddenly”, Seth Godin talks about it in “The Dip”, a tank filling up drop by drop until it finally bursts with great force.

Many presentations are good because there are many steps involved between the “source” and the “receiver”

1. You have the story in your head as a complex set of ideas that are entangled and interdependent
2. You start writing it down in short hand, which require you to “flatten” the multi dimensional story into a sequence.
3. The sequence of bullet points now becomes a visualisation of your story. Instead of listening to a complex verbal argument, your eyes glance through the points and you can change the order at lightning speed. Cut, paste, slice, dice, until it looks good to you (without taking into account how it sounds).
4. Many people stop here and jump to stage 6
5. Now, chunks of this “visual” bullet point story get translated into visuals, another transformation: sentences, words, paragraphs get turned into visual compositions and graphs.
6. The presentation to the audience is no longer your story, it is you translating the visuals back into sequential verbal text.
7. The audience listens to the sound track of your slides and tries to reassemble the story that was in your head when you started the whole process.

Photo by Eirik Skarstein on Unsplash

Hiring a creative agency is a bit different from negotiating with a building contractor or a car dealer. And talking to a small 1 - 2 person firm as a different story than dealing with a large design firm. Let’s talk about hiring a small firm (I used to be one these myself).

A good designer is busy and can basically decide which projects to take on and which not. Good designers will be expensive, but there are limits to budgets that people have for creative work, so besides “can you afford me” there is a range of other factors which makes a good designer pick you.

What is a good designer after: delivering beautiful work for clients that inspire and are fun to work with.

• Crazy deadlines, “you know how this works, we really need something yesterday”. If you are not an existing client, is unlikely to fly. Working under extreme time pressure is not only unpleasant, it also hurts the quality of the work you can deliver. If the designer is will to accept this, it might be bad sign for the buyer
• Disrespect: showing up late for calls, not replying to emails, taking other calls are all indications for how it is to work with you and whether you are going to pay the bill (in time) when all the work is finished
• Taste mismatch, if the sort of examples you discuss totally do not match the style of the designer, the project is a no go.
• Getting pushed outside of your speciality, “you would have no problem finding someone who can turn this into video right?” Any good designer would refuse this since the end result is almost guaranteed to be suboptimal.
• Creative freedom, if your hands are tied, and you need to follow someone else’s ideas literally, you will get bad end products.
• “We are big, and can give you lots of work, so please discount”. Big design agencies need to fill their fixed cost base of designers with a predictable work stream, the freelance designer who is running out of hands to work with has no such issue.
• “Can you give us some ideas, examples [free of charge]?”. If the designer agrees, she is not busy.
• Very complicated processes: lots of different people involved, lots of decision makers. Big design firms can deal with high maintenance clients via project managers and account managers and more managers. One person creative shops cannot.