SlideMagic Blog

Many new technologies in enterpriseA software help you see the bigger picture that is hiding in various bits of information and data scattered across the organization. One option to visualize this in a presentation is through impressionism (painters such as Monet).

Another one is through a photo mosaic. This ancient post on Engadget still holds. You can download the software AndreaMosaic here. It’s freeware, as you as you give it credit when you use it. Hereby. Installation and use instructions can be found on the site.

I watched in amazement the other day when I saw my child’s kindergarten teacher calming down a rioting group of 5 year olds in a matter of seconds. Maybe there are some presentation lessons here:

• Start telling a story, build anticipation
• Lower (and not raise!) your voice
• Ask people to imagine/see/hear something
• Maintain direct personal eye contact with everyone in the room
• Ask people questions, encourage them to contribute, have audience members listen to each other, even put them on the spot (in the center of the circle of kids)

These 5 year olds are most certainly a more difficult crowd than a grown-up presentation audience…

I have been working on a probono project recently: designing a presentation for free for an organization pursuing a great cause. I can recommend this to any professional presentation designer.

• A much larger leverage than simply donating money. Fund raising presentation case example: you use a unique skill you have, giving your pro-bono client the ability to raise a large amount of money, which in turn can be deployed for the good cause.
• These companies are a dream to work for as a presentation designer. The stories that they need to tell are so strong that your presentation is almost guaranteed to be a great success. Moreover, you will find that these pro-bono clients are more willing to push the boundaries of presentation design and try new techniques than your regular corporate clients.

Some guidelines for selecting your project:

• Pick a cause that you are really passionate about and believe in
• The best pro-bono clients will actually interview and test your skills as if this was a paid-for project. Don’t be offended, it brings me to my next point:
• Treat the relationship with a pro-bono client as you would do with any other client: agree deliverables and deadlines, and meet them. Once you promise a presentation, these people need to rely on you. There is no room for “sorry, a paying client called me, you’ll have to wait 2 weeks”
• Don’t even think about pay back, putting a logo, a reference, etc. The cause should be your motivation. Chances are that if you did a great job, the word will spread and benefit you somehow in the medium term. But if it doesn’t, that is fine too. If you feel the need to make a return-on-investment calculation, the pro-bono project is not the right thing for you

I am catching up on Dave McClure’s blog. Here is another good post (strong language alert): when pitching to venture capitalists (VCs)::

1. When people emotionally connect to the problem
2. You earn the permission to introduce your solution

Many startup pitch presentations are designed the other way around:

1. Take some technical architecture slides from the product roadmap deck
2. Add some stuff upfront to show that the world needs this (“that $1bn IDC number sounds good”, “hey, let’s plop in this Gartner quote and leave the date February 2007 out”)

OK, there is more to an investor pitch than just talking about the problem. The relative importance of the problem pitch on the development stage of the market you are operating in.

• If you would be pitching Twitter 5 years ago, you will have had to spend 99% of your presentation on why there is something missing in the way people communicate on the Internet. “Yeah right, people are interested to follow SMS-es from 1,500 strangers all day?”. Pitch the problem.
• If you claim to be able to beat the Google search engine, you better spend 99% of your presentation showing that your technology works. “OK, let’s see what comes up when I type [VC PARTNER NAME]”. Pitch the solution.

Presenters should pick their own slide design style. The safe option is to read this blog, read Presentation Zen, read Slide:ology, and other resources and apply the principles as best as you can to your deck. But hey, the world would be pretty boring if all of us did this.

Why not do the exact opposite what the presentation design establishment is trying to teach you - on purpose?

Dave McClure is an investor in startups that does exactly that. Random colors, bullet points galore, “love that clip art”, arbitrarily placed images, and some pretty rough language. Kicking the presentation etiquette. Building businesses is all about getting your hands dirty, passion & energy, and ignoring slick packaging. It’s the substance that matters.

Here is a recent presentation (some strong language):

Startup Metrics for Pirates (FOWA London, Oct 2009)

The resulting presentation is actually pretty good. I am sure the “show” on the London stage was great. And through reading the slides I get the main point about feature focus. If you have Dave’s substance and confidence, there is nothing holding you back to deliver a presentation like this. Another example of a presentation by Dave: how to pitch to a VC (strong language)

Sometimes a stable situation can easily be knocked out of balance, triggering an irreversible chain reaction of events. How to visualize this? A nuclear mushroom might be slightly too explosive. An image of a series of falling domino stones might be too cliche. Here is another idea based on a toy:

UPDATE: if you would like those domino stones, there is not a template with dominoes ready for download.

While I am getting a bit tired of stock images (first only the cliche ones, and now actually almost every image that is not real), I find new inspiration in textures of real-world materials (there are lots of these on stock image sites). See the ad below for the folding bike (via Ads of the World).

Do not forget to compress your images before saving. High-resolution textures can consume a lot of disk space on your computer and as an email attachment.

Dan Roam has won SlideShare’s 2009 Best Presentation Contest with a napkin-style presentation about the U.S. healthcare reform plans. A good choice I think. The bar is rising. The idea of how to make beautiful presentations using large and stunning images has spread. Next challenge: how to use visual communication to get incredibly complex subject matters across. Congratulations Dan.

Healthcare Napkins All

A related post: my review of Dan Roam’s book: The Back of the Napkin.

The book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is the “sequel” to Influence (earlier review here). Building on the approach of Influence, the book discusses 50 techniques to influence people’s behavior. A psychological science experiment is the basis for each technique: the results are discussed and general lessons are drawn out.

As both books are similar, so is my review. The research case examples are great, the generic lessons are sometimes a bit dry. It could have been left up to the reader how to use the findings. There is a lot of overlap with techniques presented in the first book, if you do not have tim to read both, I would recommend reading Influence, since it takes you through the process of thinking about psychology in a more fundamental way when trying to persuade others.

Reading this book once again confirms the potential for visual communication. A lot of these psychological experiments involve people allocated in groups (test group, control group) and various changes in the experiment. Putting the outcomes in simple tables or graphs would have made it much easier to understand the outcome. Now, the reader is left to plough through the text and construct the visual picture in his/her head. Some of the 50 techniques in the book are more powerful than others, some are more relevant to the field of presentations than others. A few here:

• Create a bond with a group. “The majority of people who stay in this hotel room re-use their towels”
• Create scarcity: “If operators are busy, try calling again”
• Very relevant for presentations: watch out for data that can backfire. “22 million single women did not vote”. “Hmmm, that’s a lot, maybe I shouldn’t either?”
• Create 2 extreme options around the desired outcome: people usually buy the middle-priced wine bottles in a restaurant. (Useful when presenting strategic options to your Board)
• Big threats don’t work, people block them out. “Smoking kills”. You need to complement the threat and provide an easy, step-by-step action plan to solve the problem.
• Hand-written post-it notes as a message really work. Thing about adding that personal touch to your presentation slides (by using selective hand-writing fonts for example)
• Get people to write down a goal at the beginning or the end of the presentation, it dramatically increases the probability that they will act
• Ask people whether they would be willing to do something later on. If they respond, they are actually more likely to do it themselves in the future.

…on your slide, you might as well re-design the entire slide just around that message.

This image of kites with red arrows highlighting random elements of a city landscape reminded me of dense bullet point slides with last-minute arrows added to make sure that the audience does not forget to get the point…

Details on this art installation here on the Core 77 design blog. See one of my earlier posts on a similar subject.