SlideMagic Blog

I am a big fan of the web design tool Squarespace and am currently turning a restaurant web site template into the marketing site for my presentation app. Hidden inside Squarespace is a cute free quick logo design tool that uses icons from the noun project. If you are a startup on a tight budget, it could be a good source for your first graphical identity before you are ready to pay serious designers.

Most investment banks and management consultancies have the luxury of an overnight, low-cost slide production factory in countries such as India. Raw slides (even hand-drawns on the fax machine in the evening, the result in your inbox when you are back in the office the next morning.

SketchDeck is now opening this production capacity to everyone. Prices are very attractive, and they can ramp up capacity quickly to work under very tight timelines.

Not every presentation is an all-or-nothing investment pitch or TED talk, and most PowerPoint presentations are visual documents that are put together quickly to support decision making inside big corporates (Nancy Duarte calls them SlideDocs in her new book). It is for these types of presentations that SketchDeck is a good solution.

As it competition for me? Yes and no. For long-standing clients, I have done slide make-over work helping them in emergency situations, going at such a speed that I could probably be price competitive with an India operation on a s $-per-slide basis (I have the advantage tough of having the confidence/ability to edit/cut/change wording put in by very senior executives in a company, something they might not appreciate from everyone). But ultimately, my 1-man operation will not be able to keep up with the race to the bottom (as Seth Godin calls it). I will continue to focus on bespoke work that is in a different price category, and - in my spare time - am busy developing a web app that can hopefully automate a large part of the work that a mass volume slide production facility typically does.

Fellow presentation designer Nick Smith is starting a weekly series of short videos with presentation design lessons. Worth checking out and encouraging him to keep on going! Watch Advance Your Slides TV here.

An executive summary that sits on top of a management consulting document is usually a page that summarises the recommendations, next steps, and decisions. It is meant for an insider, the executive reading it is likely to have a 90% understanding of what is inside the document. There is no need for graphics here, a few dry bullets with decisions will do the trick to remind everyone of what will happen next, and who will do it.

So, this is totally the opposite of the other use of an executive summary that I come across often: a short teaser to someone who has no understanding at all of what you want to achieve. Here, a dense text, or a dry list of bullets will do the opposite of attracting attention.

Feel free to step away from the habit of sending dense text pages to get people excited about your project. Instead, think of the time you want the recipient to spend on your document. Now, fill that time with the most visually pleasing and exciting way to present your case. Lower your expectations, you do not want to close a deal at this stage, you want a phone call, or a next meeting. Sending a short, visual presentation that can stand on its own without verbal explanation is a perfect reply to the request for an executive summary.

I see (and work on) a lot of presentations that investors use to raise their own money from high net worth individuals or institutional money managers.

Pitching an venture capital (VC) fund is harder than pitching a regular company. Companies are different by nature, different market, different product, different type of people. Investment funds on the other hand, or more or less the same when you listen to pitches “from a distance”, i.e., with the same level of attention that VCs would use themselves when opening the email inbox in the morning and page-downing some decks that hopeful startups have sent overnight.

Most VC/PE (private equity) pitches would talk about that there are lots of great companies out there that cannot get financing, that the team has a stellar track record, and that - unlike all other VCs - this fund will work hands on with their portfolio companies to create value (strategic help, contact network, access to more financing).

So when to the untrained ear all of these pitches sound the same, it is really important to bring out the distinctions. Bring hard data that show that your target companies cannot get financing. Discuss example deals and show why other investors would not be interested in them, and why you can turn them around. Beef up your track record with quantified exits (unlike most presentations, here the more detail, the better). And - sometimes - reconsider your investment strategy and make it very focused and specific, because believe me, you are not the only one out there pitching for money.

Listing pages and pages of market size numbers that are related to your industry are hard to digest for the novice (for example, a potential investor in your company). This number includes devices, that number is 2011 only, this number excludes Eastern Europe, that one is number of users, that one is in Euro, and this is the percentage growth, but the growth of the average basket size.

An investor who is seriously considering putting money in your company will try to piece this data together to come to some consistent picture. You might as well do the work for her with reasonable assumptions. Size up the 2011 market to 2013, add your estimate for Eastern Europe, convert everything to dollars, etc. etc.

Start with some sort of overall market estimate, compare it to something the investor can relate to, then start adding complexity, break things into pieces.

Obviously your estimate will biased and very optimistic, but your analysis has at least provided the investor with a framework of how to think about your market. Put all the raw data that you used in the appendix so that the investor can do her own homework when she returns back to her office.

Getty Images (a huge database of both stock and news photos) is open sourcing non-commercial use of its collection if you publish an image via their embed widget. Web sites only for the moment, presentation design software will have to wait…

No one likes the plain, white, standard PowerPoint slide. And sometimes when I design a slide with an image on a white background and a lot of white space I get the comment that it looks very similar to a boring, plain PowerPoint slide. I beg to differ.

You have a sales presentation that - despite the fact that it is loaded with bullet points - has been very successful in 1-on-1 meetings with customers. Now you have an invitation to speak at a conference for an audience of more than 100 people for a maximum of 20 minutes. What next? Here is a recipe.

1. Trim down the content. In the conference audience are competitors, analysts, journalists, all kind of people that might not be suitable to receive the ins and outs you would discuss with a prospective customer. Remember, the object of a conference presentation is not to close a deal, it is to tease people into calling/emailing you to set up a first meeting.
2. Flatten the story. Take out overview/summary slides, and spread them out: one slide covers one bullet. We want a story, not a structured table of contents of a business school text book.
3. Beef up the “problem” section of your presentation to let the audience connect with the issue you are trying to solve. The problem might be totally obvious to you, and 60% of the audience, the other 39% is not there yet.
4. Avoid repetition. If you talk early on in the presentation how highly accurate your product is, group that together with the a slide in the back that shows test data confirming accuracy.
5. Find big bold visuals that support your points (one point per slide). Stretch images to a full page size, and cut text.
6. Take out any live demos or demonstrations
7. Use your videos (if you have them), BUT only if you can integrate them seamlessly in your presentation flow. Embed it and test it 300 times to make sure there are no technical glitches. Think where you want to insert the videos. Videos are excellent wake up calls, anticipate where in your story the audience runs the risk of getting bored.
8. Practice, practice, practice, until you can deliver the whole talk in 15-17 out of the allocated 20 minutes.

Another source of images that are in the public domain: the publicdomainreview.org You could pick one set of images and use them throughout a presentation to get a consistent look and feel of all your slides. Below a preview of a car polo game in the early 1900s.

Thank you Joann Sondy