SlideMagic Blog

A new stock image site Picfair joins the crowded market. It is a market place where photographers set their own price for their work. You can search by theme and keywords.

The good: The site has not been invaded (yet?) by the producers of plastic, cheesy, generic stock images. Photographs are interesting, spontaneous, and original.

The bad: Because of the lack of stock libraries, the range is (still) limited, and this is not the site to find banal but practical images (a bucket on a white background).

Hopefully one of the many small sites that try to provide an alternative to the stock photo giants will rise to become a player that is big enough to serve as a one-stop-shop for quality images.

(Image in this screen shot by Adam Batterbee)

Fred Wilson can wing a presentation, scribble down 10 points, 10 minutes before going on stage, and delivering a great 10 minute presentation (see his blog post).

But is he really winging it? My guess is not. He has spoken about these issues dozens of time before, everything is completely prepared in his head. He just needs to decide what to talk about, and what not.

Fred cannot wing a presentation, neither can you.

Today, everyone is talking about “story telling” in presentations. That is great: stories are much more memorable than dry descriptive bullet points. But business presentations are not action-packed thriller movies, and when you force story telling on a business presentation, you will know, and the audience will know as well.

I take a pragmatic approach to story telling in business presentations. Rather than forcing myself to come up with a story, I take a step back and think about what makes a good story, and what makes a good story teller, and applies those elements to my business presentation.

• Use human language, and cut all marketing speak and buzzwords
• Establish some sort of connection to the audience before you dive into the content. Tell something personal that explains why you are passionate about the subject you are talking about.
• At the starting point, set a setting, or a stage that is familiar to the audience. In a sales pitch, this is often the confirmation of a specific problem that a customer is facing.
• From this starting point, build up to the surprise, the unexpected, the contrast. This tension makes a story stick. If possible you would go through multiple waves of the familiar setting, and the contrasting surprise. As a result you might well have to give up on your business school style logical presentation structure.

The Business Week magazine asked presentation designer Emiland de Cubber to redesign the information-loaded slides of Mary Meeker’s annual State of the Internet deck. Here is the original:

KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins

You can see the result of the make-over here.

The Meeker presentation is a dense deck full of facts that can never be (and should never be) converted into a TED-style slide deck with a few words and some pretty pictures. And Emiland did a great job of making that information more visually powerful. Muted colours calm down the slides. The use of colours in the graphical language of KPCB eliminate the need to be reminded of KPCB by a huge logo on each page.

Here are some of my additional comments, the key point is that you can even be more radical in improving this presentation. These are all constructive ideas, Emiland did a great job!

I invite you to open the Business Week alongside this text, I am not sure whether I can copy all the slides into this post for copyright reasons.

The dark colour scheme does work better for large rooms and big projector screens. A huge wall of white light overpowers the stage presence of the presenter. However, I suspect the majority of the audience of this presentation will be sitting at a desk when watching the information, in that case sticking to the light background might keeps things more readable.

I disagree on the use of icons to simplify categories in slides. Icons simplify too much in these technical presentations. Instead, I would opt for dramatic text simplifications. Emiland did both, I would have taken the icons out, and put more emphasis on the shortened text. (The second make over example slide).

The other day I had a potential client on the phone who was under time pressure. She asked me whether I could work on the structure/framework of the presentation (and the template) while in parallel they would start filling things in.

When you start a project and need to cut up work among multiple team members, a skeleton or presentation framework can be really helpful: someone works on the market, someone works on the competition, while someone else takes on the financials.

When you get to the stage where you have to present your conclusions to others (i.e., the analytical work is done), putting structure before content is wrong. As a presentation designer you need to know the content first, translate that into a story, and in the process you come up with a structure which is engaging and convincing, a structure that often will deviate from business school presentation templates, consulting pyramid structures and other logical frameworks.

Problem solving: structure first, then content. Convincing: content first, then structure.

People want to be helpful in giving feedback on your presentation, and often when you send a draft to an experienced executive she will say to cut it down to 8 slides. She sat in far too many boring meetings where eager young managers try to pitch ideas with endless and endless pages of bullet point slides. She probably has not read the content of your slides, and just looked at the page count.

We have discussed many times that a 50 page visual presentation can be presented in the same time as an 8 page bullet point deck, but there is something else here.

A bullet point deck can easily be compressed: reduce font size and combine 2 slides into 1. With carefully designed visual slides, this approach will not work. The moment you start cutting and combining, you are back in bullet point land.

Instead of agreeing page count, agree the time you have to present the story.

In presentations, clear and stunning are not the same thing. I have seen many stunning infographics that are not clear at all. And more importantly, it is perfectly possible to make a clear and convincing business presentations without stunning visual effects.

Especially in business presentations, people often want to go for stunning first, and commission expensive graphics design or video creation work. It is wiser to hold of with this until you have a simple presentation that 1) makes it clear what you want (touch the head) (believe me, I have seen many presentations that do not even pass this hurdle) and 2) convinces people to do something (touches the heart).

The audience does not see the difference between 4 consecutive slides with different images, or 1 slides with 4 consecutive image build up, so there is no point in trying to cut slides by consolidating 4 images into one. Four slides are easier to edit, and four separate slides are easier to email as PDF.

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has put 400,000 super high resolution images of their collection online, free to use. Great for use in presentations.

The new Keynote creates files that look like a single file on a Mac, but on other machine appear as a folder with multiple files in them. This has implications for online file sharing:

• Gmail: emailing a Keynote file as attachment does not work
• Box: file syncing, or sharing a download link does not work
• Dropbox: seems to have fixed the issue.

Has anyone had issues or is it just me?