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I get this question sometimes. Almost all content on this blog are disguised client examples. Every morning I sit down, reflect on what happened yesterday, and extract from it a small piece of advice that could make you a better designer. The advantage of being in the trenches of presentation design day to day.
Sometimes bar charts have a clear order, a ranking of items. In other cases it is less obvious. Still, you slide looks visually more appealing when you sort them in descending order even if the ranking is not the core of your message.
If you are writing an investor presentation you can Google what questions should be covered:
Or, you can take it one step further and already anticipate the most obvious questions an investor might have:
Smarter questions lead to smarter investor presentations.
Back in my days as a management consultant, I would surrender to an illness only when I had a really big fever and stay in bed. Now, as a designer it is different.
My work no longer involves in running around, chasing things, sitting through meetings. And even the slightest disruption of your health has a direct impact on your design work and creativity. I often sense the onset of a cold before the first real symptoms such as a soar throat: not being able to focus, a simple chart that I simply cannot get right.
Well in these cases, there is always the end of the month accounting to do…
I will be in New York at the end of April. Let me know if you would like to connect in person.
When I get the brand guidelines from a client (explanations about logos, colors, fonts), the PowerPoint section is usually at the back, put there as an afterthought after brochures, business cards, and letterheads are being discussed.
Designers usually do not pay much attention to PowerPoint (PPT is uncool for serious designers) and you end up with fonts, shapes, and concepts that are 1) hard to incorporate in presentation design software (no, most people do not have Frutiger installed on their machines) and 2) - more importantly - are very hard to understand for the layman designer.
The face of a company used to be the letterhead, but today it is the website, and yes, the PowerPoint presentations that are cobbled together by the amateur designers and shown to customers everywhere, all the time.
So, when designing a new corporate look, think about those amateur designers, and the best way to do that is to design your look for PowerPoint, then adjust it to other canvases. Sorry.
As a former management consultant, I can say it: consultants make very poor presentations. But what about these fancy looking documents full of graphs (exhibits as they are called)? Well, they are decks meant for reading, not for presenting to a live audience.
And as documents intended for reading, they are pretty good. Consultants have replaced a word processor with a slide design program, which adds more writing freedom:
Still, consulting reports meant for reading can be designed better: cutting jargon and using simpler language (synchronising key performance indicators across behaviour segments takes up a lot of space and does not mean much to the layman), and think better when to use data charts (often one single data point gets put down in one single column chart with one single column).
Now, this document is great for people who have been deeply involved in the project (consultants on the team, team members from the client). To win over the hearts of people who will see the recommendations for the first time, a whole new presentation needs to be designed from scratch. And unfortunately, most consulting firms do not make this final step.
I was asked to answer this question on Quora the other day. My hypothesis that it does not have anything to do with the preinstalled templates or the software’s underlying capabilities.
I think that on average the population of Keynote users are better designers. If you invested the effort to get to grips with a new presentation design tool, you are probably likely to be able to design better slides.
For boxy charts, I find it very convenient to use tables as the basic organising structure. Use big fat lines to separate the cells. In this way, it is easy to add, delete cells, combine, and split them. The Mondriaan look.
This question often comes up when we start discussing the first sketches of a presentation.
Videos are great, it is a studio quality recording of a presentation, you can do it over and over again until you get it perfectly right. In addition, you have more visual tools at your disposal to support your message.
Having said that, if there is no story, a flashy video is not going to change that. That is why I advise my clients to start with a regular presentation, slowly add more video-like slides to it (faster sequencing of images / shapes) and only then make the leap to video (and that can go in 2 stages, one a narrated recording of your video-like presentation slides, and two a professional animation).