SlideMagic Blog

The concept of this ad for a dental care product can be very useful for a slide conveying “solution x helps you see the forest through the trees”. It is a bit tedious to generate rows of random words, but the end result will be effective.

A larger image can be found on here on Ads of the World.

I discussed similar concepts earlier here and here.

This question was asked by David Semaria on Mark Suster’s excellent blog “Both sides of the table”, a must read for anyone who needs to pitch to VCs.

Here is my take on the question why TED presentations are so “polished”:

1. A tough pre-selection: you need an interesting story even before the PPT slideware is opened to create the presenation
2. A ruthless 18 minutes cutoff makes you practice
3. Peer pressure of a good speaker line up makes you practice
4. The “threat” of a global video audience makes you practice

You can argue that it can be hard to sometimes to meet point number 1. Number 2, 3 and 4 are all about practice, your presentation can benefit from it too. There is no excuse not to practice, practice, and practice.

Highly graphic and gruesome ads that should stop you from smoking or driving dangerously are not only not pleasant to look at, but also often fail to achieve their objective (according to books like “Influence”).

This U.K. “wear your seat belt” ad shows that you can communicate these messages in a different way. I like the way it triggers the brain to fill in the missing pieces in an emotional way. (Books such as “Brain Rules” show that your mind is very good at this).

Watch the full 90 seconds of this ad, it is very powerful.

Via Ad Freak.

Apple launched the iPad yesterday (watch Steve Jobs present here): a device positioned in between a smart phone and a laptop computer. The big differentiator is a very large screen and a user interface that can be manipulated using the touch of a finger, exactly the same way you interact with an iPhone.

Would could this new device mean for presentations? My first thoughts:

• The iPad runs the iPhone operating system, which means that you cannot simply port PC or Mac applications on it. Apple announced a version of iWorks (including Keynote) for the iPad, but for now it is impossible to run Microsoft PowerPoint on it.
• The devices seems like a great presentation tool for one-on-one meetings. A bright, big screen and an informal user interface enable a dialogue-style presentation.
• The need for an application like Prezi becomes more urgent. Prezi seems made for the iPad: easy zooming in and out of slides, and a non-linear way to move between slides. I have not seen the details of iWorks for iPad, but I assume that Apple is going down the track of creating a Prezi-style user interface for office productivity applications.
• It would be great if you could use a virtual marker during your iPad presentation: drawing circles to emphasize elements, adding comments, pretty much in the style of the napkin presentation I talked about a while ago.

I am very excited about the iPad. The geek reviews might have found technical imperfections (no multi-tasking for example), but the fundamental revolution is the big touch-based user interface that have brought computing in general and presentations specifically a bit closer to a natural human interaction.

This post will be slightly off-topic: Seth Godin published his latest book yesterday: Linchpin (affiliate link) and I think it is important that as many people as possible absorb the ideas that it contains.

Seth’s books have evolved over the years. What started with insights about marketing (he is the one who opened up our eyes to the fact that anonymous spam email campaigns are not effective), is now moving into the area of leadership and in Linchpin even broader: what is the purpose of the time you spend day in, day out. 

If there is one unifying theme in all his books it would be: “the good guys can win” (came up with this while listening to Leonard Cohen’s song “Everybody knows”). You can be successful by doing remarkable things, without a need to cheat, interrupt, or lie.

The book opens with a grim analysis of history. Over the past 100 years we have built a society (education, advertising) that trains people to be cogs: cheap, willing, replaceable, numb, insecure people that man the production lines and purchase the stuff that the factory churns out.

It is time to escape the trap and change. It’s urgent. Not changing will get you fired, and/or bore you to death, and/or rob you of your dignity, and/or paralyze your abilities and talents as you live and work in constant fear. On top of that, all of us own so much stuff that we do not even know what to do with it anymore.

Mathematics has given us the ability to perform complex calculations, reducing real world quantities to simple numbers and variables that can be manipulated without interpreting what they actually mean.

In your presentations, try to go back to the stage of a child before the first mathematics class. Describe measurements and quantities in a way that they can be visualized, internalized.

Recently, one of my presentations covered agricultural land yields in emerging markets. Rather than using abstract hectares and tons, I decided to use the soccer field analogy. It is easy to re-calculate figures from tons per hectare, to tons per soccer field, and maybe even going further: truck loads per soccer field.

You can even use the visual of the soccer field:

3D effects can add impact to a PowerPoint slide if used at the appropriate occasion.

• 3D for the sake of 3D adds complexity: the slide becomes harder to understand, the only thing you showed is that you know where to find advanced formating buttons of PowerPoint. 3D data charts are a good example of this
• 3D adds value if you need to convey distance: I use 3D for what it actually is, a way to add a third dimension to your slide, to show depth… (Notice in the previous post I linked to that you often do not need to use sophisticated 3D effects to create depth, colors or differences in size can do the trick equally well).

Here is an important thing to remember when using 3D rotations in PowerPoint: rotate a composition of objects as a group, rather than a collection of individual objects. Grouping them preserves one vanishing point in your slide composition. An example:

Sometimes a reader emails me with a question about a chart makeover. It is hard for me to free up the time for personal 1-on-1 answers, but if I can discuss them here for the benefit of everyone, it is a good deal. So here we go, I am obviously removing any reference to the specifics of the situation.

This case example is about supermarkets. There is a plan to open a new one, one that will be far bigger in floor space than all the surrounding super markets. This floor space will be the main competitive differentiator.

Before

Because of confidentiality I cannot post the actual image, so I will describe it (apologies for the bullet points):

• A copy of a Google map with all the grocery stores in a 2km area marked with red circles
• Each red circle (store) is connected to a descriptive label at the edge of the map.
• In the middle of the map, a bit green circle where the new store will be opened.
• At the bottom is a sentence explaining that “Our surrounding competition are mostly supermarkets which are severely space constrained, we can use this fact to our advantage”

My suggestions

Ideally you want to break up this chart into at least 2 charts with different messages:

1. A Google map with competing stores and the new stores marked. If possible, get rid of all other clutter on the map: parking lots, bus stations, etc. etc. Make it as clean as possible. The key message: “yes, we are going to open another store in a catchment that is already full of competitors”.
2. To make the “our store is bigger” point, you have multiple options, depending on data and images that you have available:

By now everyone knows that using professional images in your presentation is far better than ripping images from Google image search or clipart: higher quality photographs, isolated subjects on a white background, detailed search capabilities including required colors or available white space for type, and last but not least: no copy right infringement issues.

With the increase in popularity of stock images also came a backlash: many photographs were so cliche and/or over-used that designers increasingly start to look at other image sources with creative common licenses (I like Flickr a lot).

Price is another issue. Online stock image sites used to charge around $1 for each image. At that price you could afford to buy volumes and volumes of images, try them and discard them if they were not appropriate. Prices have gone up significantly recently, requiring a change in the creative process: design your presentation with low-resolution comps and only buy your images at the very last stage of the project.

Technology is about to put new power in the hands of stock image buyers. Many stock image sites contain the exact same image, but offer them at different prices. Differences in price are the result of general pricing policies (driven by the strength of the brand of the stock image site) or sophisticated dynamic pricing algorithms, setting image prices based on the number of downloads/views (more popular images become more expensive).

SpiderPic is a price comparison search engine for stock images and let’s you decide from which source you want to buy the image. You key in the search term, the site presents the available options, and once you select a candidate it lists other sites that offer the image (and at what price for what resolution). Once you made your selection you are linked through to the relevant stock image site to complete the purchase transaction.

I kept track of the phases of a recent presentation design project:

1. Quickly racing down an existing PPT, checking out the client’s web site (“what is it that they do exactly”?)
2. Break
3. Listening to the full pitch via screen sharing software: PPT on screen, client on the phone. Asking naive questions all the time, jumping back and forth between slides and web sites, interrupting the presentation all the time (some people might get offended)
4. Jotting down all impressions immediately after that, to make sure that I do not lose the richness of the discussion (especially comments and ideas that do not appear on a slide)
5. BIG BREAK including a night of sleep
6. Putting together the template, setting fonts, colors, spending time on finding a perfect and beautiful image/graphic for the front page (yes, open up the slideware!). Thinking about a style of images, the style of presentation. Most people might embark on some analogue story boarding exercise here, but I find it useful do dive into the detail of color codes to get my mind focussed.
7. Break
8. Start designing a few absolute killer charts that are instrumental in getting the story across without worrying where they exactly fit in the story. In VC pitch presentations, these are usually charts describing the pain that the world-without-this-great-invention is suffering. These will be the most important charts in the presentation.
9. BIG BREAK
10. Going analogue to design the overall story of the presentation on a piece of paper
11. Filling in the blanks with slides, starting on page 1 and working my way through to the end. Finishing each slide to final quality (i.e., I do not create quick PowerPoint dummies)
12. BIG BREAK
13. Look at the draft again, make some small changes and send it off to the client
14. Here is where the regular iteration process with the client starts. Feedback, correction, feedback, correction.