SlideMagic Blog

Some executives still have their assistants print out emails and/or presentations. Recently, I saw a proposal for a major project sitting on a desk for review, printed in black and white. Colours that looked bright on screen were translated into depressing dark grey and black shades. Big captions in light colours were faded and hardly readable. Photos enhanced with artistic filters looked distorted.

Lesson: try out how your document looks when printed. You can even do that using a print preview, no need to waste trees here. This is especially important if your document contains a lot of text, the temptation to print it is bigger.

“Oh, just make a set up, and I will fill stuff in later.” This approach does rarely work for presentation design. A framework is good to guide data collection, but when it comes to creating a slide to communicate your data and conclusions, you need the actual data.

I sometimes have these days where I sit at my desk thinking, sketching, being distracted, and some more pondering. It feels like nothing happened that day, until I sit down the next morning after a good night sleep I crank out the entire slide deck in under 2 hours…

In the spirit of flat design, I am not a big user of gradients in my presentations. It is one of those features: the fact that PowerPoint/Keynote supports them, does not mean you have to use them. Some observations.

Not all gradients work. A background gradient that goes from white to a touch of grey as your PowerPoint canvas often looks “dirty” on the presentation screen. Especially on antique VGA meeting room projectors. The inverse (pitch black to a dark grey) can actually look good. There is another challenge though with a gradient slide background: it is harder to work with shapes and images that have a non-gradient background that is close to the canvas color.

Watch out with gradients that run between clashing colours. If the colours do not go well together (for example green and red) then the resulting gradient is probably not going to be good either. Complex gradients can work though, have a look at the book cover of “Pitch it!” on the blog cover page. You could construct a nice gradient with reds, oranges, blues, and purples.

There is one area where I often use gradients: visualising transitions from one state to another. Even if the colour clash, I would still add that colour transition on a big horizontal arrow.

But still, we have to admit modern display technology falls short in places where ancient artists thrived…

As of this month, I  have worked longer as my own boss than as an employee of my (only) employer McKinsey, and it feels great. All around me, I see more and more people taking the plunge and starting a freelance business, including in the world of presentation design. Some thoughts at the 10 year point.

1. The decision to go freelance is not a permanent or an irreversible one. If you pick the wrong employer, you have something to explain on your CV (why did you leave after 3 months), if you are dipping your toes into the world of freelance, you start with just one project, and if things go well, you do another one.
2. There is no need to define 100% what you do, in which category you fit in. Job descriptions are very tight and precise, a freelance role is not. You do the project you like, and the projects people want to pay you for. The challenge is to find the overlap between the 2. I started as an independent strategy consultant, and ended up designing presentations. Early on, I was obsessed with what to call myself (for example, what do you put in your LinkedIn profile). Not anymore. Self-selection (picking of clients, projects) will lead you to your preferred work, and it is highly likely that there is no role description for it.
3. As a freelancer, you will not get instant status that comes with a regular job, company car, and big office. “I design PowerPoint slides” is not instantly greeted at a dinner party with respect. It takes 5 minutes of explanation for people to get the full picture, and then they usually approve. But most importantly, I have stopped caring about that.
4. Niche design businesses do not scale very well. Super-bespoke presentations are tricky to design and adding a bunch of designers to a team will not recreate the magic with a factor 10. Most bigger presentation design operations fill capacity by slide make-over work that can be scaled up relatively easily.
5. Niche is the way to differentiatie yourself. Presentation design is broad. Business presentations are still broad. Within that, I have carved out an even smaller niche of the type of projects that work for me and for which there are very few people in the world that can do it. Super specialisation is a great strategy to build a global personal brand.
6. Once you have worked for a couple of months, a year, you will notice that the combination of new and existing clients will give you a business flow that is actually reasonably recession proof, and a lot more stable than your friends who are subject to continued corporate downsizings and restructuring.
7. Get a good sense of your pricing potential both from what the value of your services is (usually a lot higher than you think) and what the true costs of running a freelance business is (including office space, hardware, software, holidays, health insurance, pension, lunch breaks, etc.)
8. You will spend a lot of time working on your own. Personally, I love that quiet and productive time, but there are many people for whom this would be social torture. You know yourself best.

Exporting things as a picture can be cumbersome. File types, resolutions (PowerPoint for Mac is horrible), finding where the file was saved, etc. More and more, I use simple screenshots to the desktop as my picture exporting tool. With the added benefit that I can make find compositions in PowerPoint which I often find easier than booting up Photoshop.

Reading this column about Story tellers have more fun led me to an old Seinfeld episode where he is pitching a new TV show to NBV about, well, nothing.

The column by David Pogue in the NYT says it all: the long-expected launch of Microsoft Office for iOS is a non-event.

As I am slowly progressing with the design of my own PowerPoint alternative, I start to realize that phones and tablets require a fundamental rethink of what a user actually wants to do in a presentation design/delivery context. I have not cracked it yet myself either but am trying hard to solve the problem by trying to disconnect my thinking completely from how desktop presentation design applications have been set up over the past 30 years.

Sometimes a horrible-looking deck lands in your inbox that needs to be presented in a couple of hours. What can you do in the last minute? Here are some rescue tools, with specific instructions for PowerPoint 2011 running on a Mac.

1. Squeeze all slides into the same slide template so that titles are all lined up across pages. Select a slide and go to the layout button at the top left of the PowerPoint ribbon. Strip the template of background watermarks
2. Pick 1-2 colours that fit the graphical language of the organisation that is delivering the presentation and use them to replace all standard Microsoft Office colours across the deck
3. On each slide, select everything/every object and set the font consistently to a decent sans-serif
4. Take out excessive drop shadows, gradients, reflections, rounded edges if you can
5. Un-stretch images by selecting them, right-clicking, go to the format picture dialogue, select size, and make sure that the height and width percentages are the same to recover the original aspect ratio. Re-crop if necessary.
6. Cut text, change prose-style text into headline style text. Remove exclamation marks, italics, and underlining. Remove excessive use of bold type.
7. Align and distribute objects as much as possible to get some order back into the slide
8. If you have time, start breaking up busy slides into multiple slides
9. Fix data charts: remove ticks marks, gap width to 50%, replace the Microsoft Office standard colours, round up numbers, put in the consistent font, scale up the chart to fit the biggest area possible.

You have that big presentation coming up in a few weeks from now and you are a bit scared. It is easy to put off working on it, forgetting it, until a few days before the event. Wrong strategy.

Start the design process early on even if the brilliant ideas do not flow, then put it away for a while. Your subconscious mind will continue to grind on the presentation and you will be surprised what you can come up with later. If you start this process 48 hours before the event, this creative energy will never be released.