SlideMagic Blog

Readers from the early days will remember similar posts, but I want to bring up the subject of cutouts again. Recently, I started using them more, especially in combination with randomly drawn shapes.

1. Fill the background of a slide with an image. Right-click the slide, select [format background], select [Picture or texture fill] and select a file. Note that this is different from simply copying a page-covering image on your slide.

2. Copy another image over it.

3. Draw a shape, I like using random shapes.

4. Right-click the shape and select [Format shape], [Fill], [Slide background fill], and add an inner shadow for additional effect.

Images found on iStockPhoto.com.

OK, this concept is somewhat hard to explain. I will give it a try, but I am not sure I can get it across in a blog post. Here we go:

Paint is irreversible: therefore a painter must get it right a first time, or otherwise face extensive fix up work. The more experience the painter gets, the more confident a painter becomes. It is better to make a (small) mistake than restrict yourself to making timid and boring paintings.

The starry night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889, oil on canvas, 74x92cm, MoMa, New York

I notice something similar in presentation design. Be confident as your design your slide in “analogue mode”, scribbling on a piece of paper. Be confident to open the PowerPoint screen, delete all Microsoft bullets and start adding elements from your design: box, box box, align, arrow, etc. Make them big, bold, confident, but minimalist.

In this way you work faster, and slides come out more natural. It is all about confidence.

Maybe this post does a better job in explaining.

Following my recent review of the book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, here is a nice presentation summarizing the content of the book.

The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs

Thank you Nancy Duarte for pointing me to this. Disclosure: links on this blogs to Amazon are affiliate links, I earn a small commission when you purchase products through them.

At 11PM on the evening before the Board meeting, the finance department emails you a horribly looking PowerPoint deck full of copied tables from Excel with the latest quarterly results. There is no time to start designing beautiful data charts. What emergency fixes can you do?

Here are a few suggestions:

• Select the the table and set the fonts and font sizes to the ones you are using throughout the presentation. (Get rid of that Excel Arial)
• Remove as many abbreviations as you can
• Right-align the row labels
• Right-align the numbers
• Take out decimal points, or add decimal points so that the numbers align
• Round up to whole millions, billions if you can
• Select the columns with data and distribute them, set them to be exactly the same width
• Put repeated words (“M&S” in my example) to the right
• Center the column headings
• Bold up the totals
• Get rid of as many borders as you can
• Add some subtle grey tones to differentiate columns

Click on the image for a bigger picture.

This ad reminds me of many poor PowerPoint slides I see. It sure grabs the attention, but that’s probably also the only thing it does.

Let people communicate like never before, let’s try to achieve that in 2010 but in a more positive way. A happy new year to you all.

A bigger picture on Ads of the World.

It is important that your audience “gets” the image on a slide immediately, otherwise they will be staring at it, thinking about it, trying to solve the puzzle, in short everything but return their attention to you as the speaker.

Some reasons why an image that makes perfect sense to you in your office might not work for a big audience:

1. The clue is in the small print (as in the image used in this post). Put a big marker to draw the attention to the sentence that matters
2. Incredibly busy compositions, Times Square in New York, a screen shot of a video game
3. Cartoons with a lot of text. Things get worse when a small cartoon image is scaled up, leaving a poor picture quality. Give your audience time to read it, and may black out the screen to focus attention back on you
4. (Too) interesting people: an image of the red carpet during Oscar night might make people wander off and examine those beautiful dresses rather than listen to your story about Business Process Redesign
5. Clever graphics such as an Escher drawing. “Hey, how did he do that?”

I really like red as a bright contrasting color to put comments or circles on busy slides. Until a meeting with people in the Finance Department of one of my big corporate clients. “Can you please take the red off, in our (financial) language red equals bad news”.

Three things to avoid in slide design:

1. Bright red highlights in fonts, especially when talking about numbers
2. Arrows pointing down (if you want to visualize something positive), why not redesign the slide and have them point up?
3. Lines, sequences, or page elements that force the eye to go from top left to bottom right. The milestone graphic in this earlier post is a good example.

As always, these are not rules to be set in stone, it is just another piece of slide design context that you should be aware of.

Printers will always try to sell you the heaviest paper with the glossiest finish. If you are not printing the new corporate brochure or annual report, but need to make nice books of your PowerPoint presentation, I would go for a more modest choice of paper. It looks a lot better and costs a lot less.

Image via airgap

I would like to wish all readers happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous 2010. From a presentation perspective, try to make a difference in 2010, for example:

• If you are working in an organization with a conservative approach to presentations, try to find an opportunity to demonstrate a different way to get your message across, spreading the ideas we talk about here to more people.
• If you are a professional presentation designer consider donating some of your time to a really important cause and design the best possible presentation for it.

Since Tel Aviv is bright, warm, and sunny today, and probably the only Xmas tree in the city is put up in my apartment, I actually enjoy watching some of these old masters that have been put too many times on post cards:

Pieter Breugel the Elder, 1565, Hunters in the snow**, Oil on wood, 117x162cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

You can learn a lot from regularly checking out the SlideShare front page. Here is a presentation that caught my eye. What I like about it:

• A consistent theme of the images throughout the presentation: (mostly) black and white, retro images of workplace scenes
• Original typography
• A very simple list structure, counting down from 14 to 1

Some items that I like less:

• Inconsistent use of colors (probably done on purpose though)
• The grunge font and use of colors make the text sometimes hard to read over the image background
• Putting text in vertical boxes, it looks cute but is hard to read
• The transition from the presentation content to the “contact me” last page, the beautiful presentation falls back into a more common PowerPoint format including bullet points

14 Signs You Need A New Approach To Performance Appraisals San Francisco