SlideMagic Blog

Making a grid of images in PowerPoint is tricky. Images never have a consistent aspect ratio, and when you place a lot of them on a page, the guide suggestions always snap in the wrong place somehow. Here is a survival guide.

• Copy all your images inside the page and select them all
• Right click and go in “format picture”
• Tick the “size” icon, and click “size”
• Hit “reset” to kill any aspect ratio distortion
• Hit “lock aspect ratio”
• Now select each image one by one, hit “crop”, hit “aspect ratio” and pick one
• After this, select all the images again, and give them the same width with a numerical value
• Position the images on your grid
• Take each image in turn, select “crop” and move/zoom the image mask for the right composition

The above was a major consideration when designing the image grid system in my presentation app SlideMagic.

…never look good. At least, I have never seen ones that do. Soft edges are right up there with standard PowerPoint colors, low res images, clip art, and distorted aspect ratios: all tell tale signs that it is going to be “that kind of” presentation.

If I sit down with a client, in almost all cases, the pitch of a company comes out fine verbally. People know how to tell their story. The order might not be perfect, there are some repetitions, here and there one of my questions needs to be clarified, but all in all, in 30 minutes we got a pretty good understanding of what is happening.

My work is to translate that story into visuals. And given the above, there are different types of slides.

Some slides are absolutely crucial to understanding the pitch. These are the ones that people are opening their laptops for, and pull up page 37:

• Screen shots and images of applications/products, in many cases it is actually unclear what the product does. This is specifically the case in internet applications, or medical devices where a picture of the actual product explains a lot.
• Data visualization that emphasizes how big something really is compared to something else, how fast things are growing or declining. Visuals do a much better job here than spoken word
• Complicated relationships, competitive positionings, IT architectures. These cases require a map on which both brains can sync to disentangle these complex structures.

Other slides are mere backup for the spoken word. They help to make the story more powerful, but are not essential: large photographs of metaphors (endless road, squeezed orange, confused customer) or simple text charts that support the flow of the story.

The purpose of the last group of charts is 1) to give your company a professional look & feel, and 2) make it possible for people to read/digest the story without you being present.

When searching for an image, there are 2 steps:

1. What sort of image works best?
2. What actual image is the best (and can I use without copyright issues)?

Recently, I needed a panorama overview of a retail store. Most stores do not have 20 meter high ceilings (a waste of space, a waste of energy), and stock image sites only provide images of actual stores under an editorial license (news papers can use them, marketing presentations not).

A broad Google search brought me to the Galeries Lafayette in Paris (step 1), after which it was easy to find a nice, high-res, creative commons image (step 2).

Most of the corporate promotion videos I see are enhanced presentations: text movements with animations, still images with slow zoom added, piano background music and maybe some custom made illustrations. They look good, but have 2 problems when it comes to pitches to busy people:

• They make files very heavy (email attachment bounce and/or consuming 500MB of mobile download data)
• They take too much time: like a bullet point chart, you will have read that one sentence 10x by the time the pianist is finished with the 8 bar melody and ready to move on to the next shot.

That is the reason why I often “flatten” these videos, take the 5 best screen shots and paste them as images in a regular presentation deck. Looks great, quick to read, easy to download.

Anticipating this issue, when you brief a video production company ask them for 2 versions of the video, one with all the graphical elements, and one with less text, so you can use it as source material for still images over which you can place your own text in a presentation. Also handy when your messages change over time.

There are many other situations where you might actually need to keep the video in its full size: demonstrations of products, interviews of people, etc. If it is just about adding drama to a still visual, why not go with a well designed still visual though.

Often, my clients want a cover image on the presentation that says it all: the entire message of the presentation in just one smart visual. There are 2 problems with this approach:

• A technical one. The ideal image will probably not exist in some stock photo site, so there is significant photoshopping and editing required to get that elephant to balance on a skateboard while enjoying the benefits of flexible ROI. This image is unlikely to look good from a technical point of view.
• Even if you were to make this happen, it is highly unlikely that the audience who walks into the auditorium while sipping a coffee will actually understand what it means.

Lower the ambitions, and pick a professional looking cover image that is somewhat connected to what you are going to talk about and use your presentation to get the full message out.

I have noticed that my purchase of stock images has gone down dramatically:

• I stopped forcing myself to find an image for every slide (what I tended to do 10 years ago)
• Stock image sites are now overloaded with cheesy compositions
• There are many excellent free image sites around

I stumbled across yet another stock photo site that tries to offer “real” rather than cheesy, stages stock photos: Twenty Twenty (www.twenty20.com)

What I like: good images, big library, useful “collections”. Pricing is relatively steep for the casual user (starting at $20 per image, or a $225 monthly subscription for 25 images compared to some of the free stock image sites that are popping up everywhere. Still, only marginally more than the big brand stock photo sites.

My prediction: iStock and shutterstock will add a “non-cheesy” filter option to their image sites soon.

Selecting profile pictures for a presentation or web site is always tricky. My advise is to take a huge amount of photos to have as many options as possible to select the best one.

The first and most obvious selection layer are obvious mistakes. Closed eyes, the tie not sitting straight, basic face expressions.

The second layer is more tricky. If you look carefully at a portrait image, it is usually possible to guess the sort of mood the subject was in. The face can be smiling, the eyes not. The person can look embarrassed, amused, shy, uncomfortable, curious… Pick the one that suits best.

Think about this when your picture is being taken. Look at the lens of the camera, the way you would want to look at a potential investor or client standing in front of you. Professional actors can do this for every possible mood they want to project. For you, it is enough to do what comes naturally to you.

In order to make a nice profile slide about a company, you need to find good images of their products, ads, head office building (no, not the reception desk). One good trick to mine one specific web site for images is to go to the main Google Image search page: https://images.google.com/, and enter a query that says “site:domain.com”. Here are the images that are stored on slidemagic.com.