SlideMagic Blog

The little details in a presentation might not make or break its message, but they do count. A spotless presentation shows you made an effort, that you take your audience seriously.

The result of some maintenance work downstairs in the parking lot of my building

Here are some things to look out for: typos in common words (if your spell checker flags something, there is probably something wrong), typos in names of people, inconsistent use of fonts and/or colours, small misalignments of objects, a text wrap gone wrong, or making sure that the positions of titles on all slides is the correct. I remember the senior partner on my first McKinsey project coming into the graphics design room to hold all the paper slides against a strong light to check these things.

Yes, I know that I am contradicting myself now and then as I get reminders about typos in my blog posts…

Most of my clients actually know how to present visual slides. Their problem: they don’t have the slides. But once I create them, they get used quickly to the new presentation format without a lot of training. This is probably because they can identify with the target audience. A CEO pitching a startup idea is the sort of person you would pitch a startup idea to.

Scientists have a double problem. Yes, their slides need work, but the bigger problem is that they often need to cross into a different audience type than they are used to presenting to. Scientist, engineers, lawyers, have their own language for talking to each other, which can actually be every effective. But if you put a scientist with newly designed visual slides in front of an investor audience things start to break down without the proper training.

When deadlines were very short, I have recommended these clients to stick to their existing slides and practice their delivery, postponing the make over of their entire slide deck for the next conference a few months down the road.

Art: Louis Pasteur by Albert Edelfelt, 1885

Shortly after writing my post about cold emails, I received a cold, automated phone message. They did one thing right, don’t call from a number with hidden id. But then:

• It took a few seconds to start the message, presumably enabling me to say “good morning, who is calling”?
• Then the message started (I heard the crackling recording background noise kicking in).
• The voice that of a famous radio news reader, did not sound natural
• And worst of all it started of with: “I know that these type of message…” [beep] [beep] [beep]

I wasted 2 seconds on this.

Now, automated sales messages are not the same as follow up calls for checking whether your recipient got the presentation you emailed, but still think about the parallels. An unplanned incoming phone call is always a disruption, an apology makes the experience even worse and will cost you valuable seconds.

Image by CGP Grey on Flickr

Impatient audiences of senior management or investors often complain (rightfully so) that they have been listening for 10 minutes, 10 slides, and still the main point of the presentation has not been made.

The common reaction to this feedback:

• Shuffle slides around, and drop slides from the back of the presentation all the way upfront. The result: a broken story flow. The sequence of slides in the front does not make sense anymore, and the left over slides in the back don’t connect together.
• Cram a lot of content on the first 3 slides and call them “summary”. The result: your audience never gets to see you beautiful, highly visual slides in the back, as you are fighting your way through the bullet points in the front.

What causes the delay?

• Think about why it takes you so long to get to the point. Does the audience needs all that background? The company mission? The company history?
• Think about what the audience means when they say “getting to the point”? Do they really want the full detail of your solution on the first page, or would simply telling your audience what you are about quickly be enough to calm them down and stop them from guessing?
• Think about whether your existing summary is stuck in the middle: too long to serve as a real teaser for what is about to come, and too short to give the full detail of the pitch.
• Are you taking too much time to present your slides? Uuuh, uuums. Side tangents. Details, exceptions, apologies for rounding errors, footnotes.
• Are you going off script: you put up a slide, but take the story in a different direction (“let me give you some context first”)
• Do you spend too much time on the obvious: explanation of buzzwords (“let me explain what the sharing economy is”, “look at this data about the stellar growth of mobile phone penetration”).
• Are you reading out all the elements of a slide one by one, but because someone else designed the slide for you, they don’t really fit the way you want to tell the story. So after you are done reading, you tell the message the way you wanted it, effectively presenting each slide twice.

A good pitch of an idea provokes feedback of the audience. If people are just sitting there, watching politely, smiling, and walking out of the room, you are unlikely to land an investment.

When you get feedback (praise, criticism, difficult questions), it is important to realise who it is coming from. Do people care about you, want to help you? Do you they have the right background?

1. Your mother: she totally admires everything you do, but in most cases might not have deep knowledge of what it is you are actually doing
2. An industry incumbent who cannot see any change happening having worked in the field for 30 years
3. A (potential) competitor who is jealous
4. A friendly investor who does not understand the field
5. A friendly investor who does understand the field
6. An interested investor who is negotiating with you
7. A friend of a friend of a friend who is an expert in the field but who was arm twisted in listening to you to return a favour but does not really have time for this and/or you
8. Etc.

Pay special attention to people who know what they are talking about, or people that are an example of a type of audience you are going to pitch to a lot (confident, successful investors, that might not fully understand the ins and outs of your market). Group one helps you bullet proof the content, group 2 helps you bullet proof the presentation.

What sort of feedback do you get:

I got to speak with a high school teacher yesterday and he made an interesting remark about the use of on-screen presentations in the class room. He uses pictures and very simple visual concepts to keep the attention of the teenagers focused. The charts’ main purpose is not to transfer information, they are there to keep people focused and interested.

What a different approach than most of my teachers in the 1980s: copy a page from the course book on an overhead transparency and uncover paragraph after paragraph, slowly. Or, turn your back to the class and re-write the book on the black board.

Image from WikiPedia

Communication in the work place in general has its problems:

• Email wording
• Making a point in a meeting
• Trying to get to a decision in a meeting
• Annual feedback sessions
• Handing over web/app designs to the implementation team
• Product one pagers
• Press releases
• Keyword-loaden blog posts
• Marketing slogans
• User manuals
• Travel policies

In presentations, the issue is most visible but it is sitting everywhere. People are used to transferring ideas in a dialogue where the recipient asks questions to help her understand what is being said. All this breaks down in one way communication.

Art: Tower of Babel by Pieter Breughel the Elder

I have written about the poor quality VGA projectors that are still sitting in conference rooms of many companies before, but I myself fell into the trap again yesterday. A presentation that looked great on my computer screen was barely readable in a conference room, I have gotten used to high resolution screens and the option to use thin fonts and very subtle colour shadings. Reminder: these do  not come through on projectors.

Now we have a dilemma:

• Presentations designed for retina displays are not readable on crappy VGA projectors
• Presentations designed for crappy VGA projectors look “1990” on a retina display

My presentation app SlideMagic should be OK, it uses fat Roboto fonts and reasonably blunt shadings. For PowerPoint, think about where your deck will be used most: a person reading the attachment of an email or an audience watching things on the screen. If the latter, test your presentation before the all-or-nothing pitch.

A SlideMagic user asked the the other day what to do with a 30 x 10 feet (10 x 3 meter) projector screen that he was supposed to use in a presentation. A 10 x 3 meter screen has a 3:1 aspect ratio and is incredibly wide and “low”. Displaying a regular 4:3 slide on it will leave huge black bars to the left and right of the slide.

The first decision you need to make is whether you want to use the entire screen or not. Pro: you can create spectacularly large slides. But there are drawbacks:

• A huge screen might overpower you, the speaker
• It is actually very hard to design slides in this unusual format. Image crops are not natural, and there is almost no avoiding to putting content in boxes from left to right on the slide
• Finally, it is work to do the above

If you decide to go for the full big screen redesign, then you do not need to create a 30 x 10 feet custom slide format in PowerPoint, any 3:1 aspect ratio will do.

No, my presentation app SlideMagic does not support custom screen aspect ratios, that would go against its philosophy.

One of our clients back at McKinsey in the 1990s used to say that “the paper in McKinsey documents is always warm”, i.e., they came of the printer only minutes before the meeting. Now that documents/presentations are all in digital form there is even greater opportunity to make last minute changes, especially if you travel by taxi to the meeting.

It comes at a price though. First of all, last minute analysis is prone to mistakes. But secondly: “frankensteining” quickly a chart into a presentation might break that super professional and impeccable look of the presentation.

If the change does not involve the correction of a major error,  it might be better to make that missing point verbally.