SlideMagic Blog

I am reading the book How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer (affiliate link) by Debbie Millman (picked up at Rizzoli in New York, a great place to find design books). The book comprises of a series of interviews with famous graphics designers. Here are some common themes in all the discussions.

• The process to getting to a good design is messy: you try, try, try, and then all of a sudden it happens (or not). Different from churning out analysis and data charts one after the other.
• The standard career path for a graphics designer (start at the bottom in a big studio) inhibits success later on. Multiple designers spoke about finding a career setup that frees you from a big corporate structure in your formative years (a financial challenge).
• You need to find time to do work away from the day-to-day pressure of a client. Again, this is a financial issue. Designers quoted lucky family situations and/or a large steady client as the enabler for creative freedom.
• Pro-bono work often brings out the best in a designer, since “the client who is not paying has no right to interfere with the work”
• Many designers are introverts, like to work by themselves, and stay in the front line of design work, i.e., they do not move into the management ranks.
• Almost every designer talks about art versus design. I think deep in their hearts they regret not having made it as an artist.

Drawing guides are a pain in PowerPoint (when you need to move an object close to the grid, you always end up moving the drawing guide line by accident). Also, grids can change from slide to slide.

My solution, quickly plop in some dummy shapes that define the grid for the slide you are working on. With snap to shape, you can create the slide layout you need, and get rid of the temporary shapes when you are done.

I get asked this question frequently by people who are considering a career change. Here is my story.

The first 10 formative years of my career were spent with McKinsey, a strategy consulting firm, working in the London and Amsterdam offices with projects pretty much in every country in Europe. My stay there was a bit different than the norm: 1) I stuck around for about 10 years, versus 2-3 on average, and 2) I did not specialise in one industry (banking, consumer goods, etc.), but rather did a functional specialisation: mergers and acquisitions, usually on the sell side. In short, I helped big Fortune 500 companies sell themselves to other big Fortune 500 companies. As a result, every project that I worked on was in a different industry, and I had to adjust rapidly to understand a completely new field of work (beer, pet food, DIY retailing, petrol retailing, grocery, retail banking, asset management, insurance, private equity, e-commerce, mobile payments, postal services and logistics just to name a few). Little did I know then, how useful this skill would come in a decade later in a briefing for a new presentation design project.

After leaving the Firm, I moved with my family to Tel Aviv where I started out as an independent strategy consultant. Soon, I got in touch with the Israeli high tech industry. The small startups could not afford (and probably did not need) me as a strategy consultant for 6 months but saw value in my PowerPoint slides for meetings with potential investors (these charts were still B&W, highly organised, full of consulting speak at that time). It was here that my gradual transformation to a presentation designer started. Gradual is important here, I think no freelancer figures out exactly his professional niche from day one. In my case it probably took around 2-3 years to stop calling myself a strategy consultant.

I have seen big improvements in the presentation design of my startup clients over the past year. In some cases when the design is adequate, I have to admit that my involvement might not be the best return on investment for a start up on a tight budget.

Whereas startups are adopting new design and story telling ideas rapidly, the opposite is true in big corporates. Corporate culture (“This is how we do things here”) is reflected in PowerPoint decks that look pretty much the same as they did 5 years ago. Managers go through the ranks by continuing to use PowerPoint like they used to do, and new recruits get told to stick to the format.

When designing for a startup, we can dive straight into the content of the presentation, when designing for a big corporate we first go through a process to convince them that a visual presentation can still be serious.

Parallels (best know for enabling virtual PCs to run on Macs) now offers a product that allows you to run any PC or Mac app (including PowerPoint and Keynote) on an iPad: Parallels Access.

How does it work? You need to install software on your PC or Mac that beams your application screen to your iPad. But Parallels Access is more than a simple remote access tool: adjustments have been made to add iPad-specific controls to PC or Mac apps (copy/paste, scrolling, etc.).

The service costs $80 per year, per machine you want to broadcast.

My take? I still think that the current iPad user interface is not suitable for intensive office work: you start missing a keyboard and a big screen when working for 8 to 10 hours per day. So I do not expect people to use this app when they are 5 meters away from their desk machine. Instead, it provides convenient access to crucial office applications when away from your desk (last minute changes in the taxi on the way to the sales pitch for example).

The pricing is also clearly aimed at the large corporate market. If you are interested in this type of solution, it might be worth to check out Splashtop.

I noticed that I am using fewer and fewer stock images in my slides. Not so long ago, almost every slide started as a brain storm about what image concept to use. Not anymore for 2 reasons.

1. Stock images are often cheesy and unnatural and have a very specific style, which makes it hard to mix them with other stock images in the same deck. I also suspect that stock image providers have been adding a lot of content to their databases thereby diluting the quality of the search results.
2. My slide designs are getting simpler and simpler and often I can design them without the need for an image. A simple message written on a slide can be more effective than a slightly forced visual analogy in an image.

A question to you, to be answered from the point of view of 2 audiences: 1) you, people who are interested in presentation design and early adopters of new ideas, and 2) everyone else struggling with PowerPoint decks.

 I have the option in my upcoming presentation design app to eliminate features that contribute to bad slide designs. The result will be that you simply cannot do what you used to do for 20 years, and you will also have to say “no, not possible” to your boss who just asked you to do something to a slide.

Will this be a liberating experience, or will tired employees just switch back to PowerPoint at 23:15 in the evening to get the deck out for tomorrow morning 09:00 and still get some sleep?

Here are creative design killers that are common in many big corporate offices.

• Constant interruption by phone, walk-ins, or your boss who cannot find that slide deck you created last week. Open plan office layouts are especially difficult to work in. After an interruption it can take some time to get back in the flow. A 10 second call can equal 30 minutes in lost time.
• Meeting schedules that fragment an entire day so you do not have time to start any major piece of design work (manager versus maker schedule).
• Feedback and input from colleagues who have not taken sufficient time to digest what you actually created. Things get read over quickly, not internalized, and people provide some high level comments that do not build on the work you already did.
• People start working on the presentation of the story, when the actual story is still not clear. At the last minute a whole slide deck needs to be re-written to support a different conclusion.
• Long work hours turn employees into robots with little energy for creativity inside them. Work has become a process to try to empty the in-tray, rather than produce beautiful presentations.
• Multiple authors try to write the overall storyline, each with their own structure and style.
• Throughout a project, team members usually develop a common language where one simple concept can depict a very complicated issue. For the insiders, writing the name of the concept on a slide makes it all clear, the outsider, has no idea. The result: pages and pages of hollow inside jargon. (The curse of knowledge)

Especially for my pharmaceutical clients I often need to produce scientific presentation slides. I tend to take a different approach to the industry standard when I need to present to a non-scientific audience: split the chart in 2.

1. Chart 1 focusses just on the message and is highly simplified (“Survival rates went up 35%”)
2. Chart 2 provides all the details about the study (number of patients, patient profile, confidence interval)

Springing the full combined chart with all the detail will just overwhelm the laymen audience. Medical professionals have trained decades to extract chart 1 from the combined chart in a nano second. The average investor lacks this experience.

We try to fit any new idea that comes our way into our mental model that we have built up since we were born. Every aspect that fits the model is absorbed easily but also easily forgotten, it does not stand out. It becomes interesting when things are counter intuitive, when it does not seem to make sense. Two implications for presentation design:

1. Use this to build your story line. Here is how things are done, here are the limitations, but we can solve things by coming at it from the a completely different angle.
2. Use this to predict the type of questions the audience will have. It is better to answer the big obvious question in your presentation, rather than rely on Q&A to bring out the key point of your presentation.