SlideMagic Blog

Marketing, Investor relations, corporate communications, business development, everyone likes to have a say in the design of the next keynote address of the CEO at that important industry conference.

When the team “works” on a presentation, you usually get the following pattern:

• Long meetings in a conference room, with a few people dialing in by phone (people who cannot see the slides), discussing the key messages on each slide
• Long email exchanges without an organised discussion thread to log changes

Design by committee also does not work for presentations. Here is why it goes wrong:

• In the end, you need to pick a consistent approach to the story. Mixing and matching parts of approach A and parts of approach B is not going to give you a “best of both worlds” result. The only way to get something consistent is to have one person write it.
• A committee focuses on the slides, adding footnotes, changing headlines, shuffling the order. And while doing that, they feel like they are “programming” the verbatim of the CEO (who is not in the room). Wrong, in the end the CEO will pick his own story, sometimes despite the slides.
• In a committee there is no one doing the real work, at the end of the meeting, the most junior person at the table probably gets tasked with “incorporate all comments into a new version and email it around by 9AM”. That junior person might have dropped / not understood a few comments, and probably lacks the spine to push back against more senior executive in the company (who made a point that does not make sense).
• You will for sure miss the contribution of introverts
• The casual observer in a committee meeting often does not have the in-depth understanding of how the presentation is built, and what is written on which slide. As a result, noticing that important elements are missing, she will suggest to add comments, bubbles, and footnotes on random slides to make sure that the key messages are “at least written down somewhere”.
• Committees under time pressure like to give drastic input. After a 3 hour discussion: “oh yeah, the deck is too long, collapse 35 slides into 10”, leaving the junior team member confused what to do.

Some of you out there are probably still afraid of using a new presentation design tool that is still in beta for live presentations. Here is another way to get started: use SlideMagic as your sketch board.

Many of you use bullet points to sketch out the content of a presentation. Maybe in a word processor, maybe in PowerPoint. The problem is that once you have iterated those bullets and everyone agrees to them, it is hard to turn those lists into visual designs.

Here is where SlideMagic could come in handy. It is very easy to set up charts that are not lists: a quick table, a quick contrast between two options, a quick 2x2. Jot your ideas down, and if you set your accent colour and logo, the whole sketch board will probably look better than a finished end product in PowerPoint.

Use SlideMagic to form your first ideas of your presentation, until the moment has arrived when you “have to” translate the designs to PowerPoint or Keynote. You can of course, but I think many of you will find that it is much easier to stick to SlideMagic after trying a few pages.

Art: an unfinished painting by William Berryman, created between 1808 and 1816

I tend to work on presentation design projects in bursts: dive in, get stuck, put it away, work on another project, get back to it, put it away again.

Even when you stop working on something consciously, your subconscious mind continues to chew on things. This article discusses recent research that proves that the subconscious brain can solve real problems.

There is another benefit of this delayed approach. When you get back into things some details of the story have faded to the background a bit. It is this “numb” state of mind that is useful to piece together the story that really matters, you have to explain it to yourself again and it might come out clearer without the distraction of these details. In addition, other details might come to the forefront which you thoughts were not important.

All of this explains why presentations that are created at 3AM at night before the 9AM meeting are not very creative (most management consulting projects). It also explains why an outsider or senior executive/partner can walk into a room and articulate a story much better in 3 minutes than an entire team who has been working on it 24/7 for the past 3 months. It not all experience, it is also being able to take some distance from the subject.

What to do? Start thinking early about the presentation of your results. The problem of how to communicate your project, is a different one from the problem that your project solved (read that sentence again). While you still might end up finishing your presentation at 3AM, if you started early enough to think about it, your presentation will be much more effective.

After years of design work, many of my presentations start to develop a similar signature style or look-and-feel. (Secret: it looks remarkably close to the templates in SlideMagic). I think there is nothing wrong with that: you can easily recognise the work of famous poster designers, painters, architects. Presentation designers should be no exception.

I would encourage you to find your own signature style. Once you have figured out a distinctive way to make any chart look good, you are free to focus on its content. No need to worry about fonts, image crops, data chart layouts, and all the time to worry about composition, content, what image to put and what data to visualise.

Art: detail of Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1908

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The web is full of freelance presentation designers and full of sample portfolios. How to get a true feel for the style/skills of a designer: go beyond pages 1, 2, or 3, and look at a page somewhere in the middle of the deck. What does the designer do when no one is looking?

There are 3 types of people:

1. People who can spot that a chart is beautiful or ugly, and can design a beautiful chart in a snap
2. People who can spot that a chart is beautiful or ugly, but cannot figure out what it is that makes it that way
3. People who have no sense of design

Most of us are in category 2. How to get to number 1? Save screen shots of designs you liked somewhere on your hard drive. Try to mimic techniques the designer used, and see what effect it has on your own chart.

[Commercial break: I am targeting my upcoming presentation design app at segment number 2]

As a presentation designer, you need to understand the substance of your slides better than what is reflected in your final work. Here are the levels of understanding:

• Level 5: the expert, your boss, your client
• Level 4: the level you need to get to as a designer
• Level 3: what is reflected in your slides
• Level 2: the audience right at the end of the presentation
• Level 1: what the audience remembers in 3 weeks
• Level 0: where the audience and you start out on

The key lesson for the presentation designers: you need to shoot beyond level 3, if you cannot stand above your substance, you cannot make the right design trade-offs. So ignore the strange looks you get when asking probing questions during the briefing.

In many presentation design projects, I start by building some sort of overview slide that is highly dense, complex, but has the whole story/solution on it. This enables me to shuffle things around, split things up, merge things, until I feel confident that I can move the other way: simplify. The designer has to go to the bottom of complexity in order to save the audience from having to do the same thing.

I usually start a presentation design project by digesting all the available information, listen to a verbal version of the pitch, Google for market and competitor information, create a slide template based on a straightforward slide (the profit and loss account for example), and let the whole thing cook in my mind for a while.

I know when I leave the “cooking” phase when I am able to draw up the key idea of the presentation in one slide. That one takes a long time to design, but when it is done, all other slides follow really quickly.

I try to keep ugliness completely out of my design work. Ugliness tends to spread like a virus that wants to take over your work.

Even if you make a quick mockup or even a paper sketch of a slide, it should look orderly, balanced, clean. This is what I learned on my first day at McKinsey, when a client walks in you should be able to talk her through the hand-written deck.