SlideMagic Blog

Sometimes it is not possible to create that perfect presentation. For example, your boss landed a pile of slides (written by someone else) on your desk, to be sent out in the next 3 hours after some “fixes”.

The presentation below provides some tools for dammage control. Especially useful for PowerPoint files that are intended for offline reading, rather than TED-style ballroom presentations.

• Use consistent colors. Even is the color scheme is not pretty, even is the color scheme is the standard PowerPoint one, recolor all objects with the same 2-3 colors, throughout the file
• Align and distribute, wherever you can. Make boxes the same size
• Wrap bullet points correctly (there are for sure too many bullet points in these type of last minute documents but not time to fix that now), cut words if you can
• Un-stretch photos, select format/reset to regain the original image and re-size them by dragging the corners to keep the proportions intact
• Put all the titles in the same place using guides to prevent jumping titles. In the good old days, I used to hold a prinout of a document against the light to see whether everything is lined up
• Stay inside your guides so that all charts look aligned.

Good luck. By the way, you can find the “For Dummies” book cover generator here. The “For Dummies” series contains a lot of books related to presentation design and communications. Here is the full liston Amazon, here is one:

It is Holocaust memorial day today in Israel. Sometimes it has hard to graps/visualize big numbers. I tried below. Let’s not forget.

For some points you want to make in a presentation, it doesn’t really matter whether the audience can read the content or not. Example: “here is my long list of scientific publications”.

• The text was simply “3-D rotated” in PowerPoint (make sure to set the perspective to the maximum 120 degrees).
• I left the text (that nobody will read) “bleeding” off the page to leave room for white space around the title line (that should be read)
• In my case I filled the text box with nice lorem ipsum, but these charts are most powerful when you use actual text (that nobody will read): my actual list of publications with ISBN numbers and publication dates for example

Look around you and see how powerful simple graphical shapes can be. The ad below is an example (text below Chaplin: “It’s the hat.”).

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

This presentation was uploaded to SlideShare yesterday. Simple colors. Beautiful fonts. No stock images. OK, some bullet points, but nicely formated. A great example of a presentation that can stand on its own, without the presenter being present.

Designers & Developers Sitting in a Tree (Web09)

More on picking the right presentation style for the right presentation occasion in a previous post.

A question like “What happened to sales last year?” sometimes requires a complex answer. “Well, it is a bit complicated: volume went down, but then prices went up, but as a result sales were up”. A simplified mathematical equation can help you visualize this.

Sometime in the near future I will post here how to do a proper “sources of change” analysis.

Computer network diagrams are hard to make in PowerPoint. Finding the icons, positioning boxes, connecting them. The web application Lovely Charts might be a good solution. Also for flow diagrams, organization charts etc.

If you are in to designing network diagrams in PowerPoint, be sure to visit the Cisco icon library.

Via Armano

Amazing, there is one person who designed the “logos” and store fronts of almost 90% of all independent fried chicken outlets in the U.K. “Mr. Chicken” is interviewed here, there is even a book available on the phenomenon.

Amusing reading. However, it is not completely justified to pooh pooh these logo designs. Because they all look the same, they are actually pretty effective. If you find yourself in a U.K. high street looking for some fried chicken, you find one of these outlets in 2 seconds.

But, you do not want to be “Mr. Chicken” when it comes to your PowerPoint presentation. Get rid of the generic logo. Free up the screen real estate that is consumed by heavy banners with empty slogans. Instead, let people see the “what you have in store” with great content in your slides, all in a nice and consistent color scheme.

Via Noisy Decent Graphics.

Seth Godin writes in his latest post about the importance of showing your imminent breakthrough:

If it’s a foregone conclusion that you’re going to break out, that all systems are go, then only an idiot wouldn’t jump on board.

It didn’t happen yet, but it is about to happen. Useful advice for people writing VC pitches.

Sometimes you want to show 3 data sets in one chart with very different data ranges, for example:

• 1,000s of customers
• $ sticker price per unit
• Number of products bought per customer

One solution:

• Set the column of the first data point of each series to 100
• Calculate the 2nd value relative to the 100
• Manually paste data labels with the correct factors

The chart below gives an example:

1. The first chart contains the unadjusted data
2. The second chart shows the adjusted version
3. The third charts shows the values I have entered in the PPT columns

Click on the example image below for a larger image.