SlideMagic Blog

There is a component to visual design that cannot be learnt from studying books. On some presentations/slides I can spend a lot of time, because they simply do not look right, even if the content is pretty simple. And the worst thing, I cannot tell why.

After fiddling with a number of parameters, things can all of a sudden start to look acceptable:

• Changing the balance in the colour scheme, often focusing on grey with just one strong accent colour, instead of using all the colours that are available in the corporate colour scheme.
• Using lighter colour/shades in slide shapes
• Making all images black and white
• Endless repositioning of slide shapes to get the balance right
• Reducing the font size (yes, you read it right), and/or rebalancing the number of words in one line

Why? I do not know, it somehow works…

Images are much better than words to amplify a message, but sometimes they can be too distracting. If people are staring in awe at this stunning photograph you found, they might just forget for a second about the message you are showing/talking about.

Image source

Twitter is keen to find ways to become more accessible to a broader audience, beyond the tech-savvy early adopters. The answer so far: images. Images grab the attention better than obscure hashtags and @ reply’s, and - sneakily - provides a way around the 140 character limit on a Tweet.

The results, lots of poor visuals. This large headshot is an attention grabber, but I am not sure whether Twitter users will take the time to read through the dense bullet points.

Business presentation design requirers a combination of skills:

1. Content story: the strategy consultant. Somehow all the raw material, content need to be in place. All in a logical order, no holes, no overlaps, all the items of check list need to be ticked off: need/problem, solution, market, competitors, business model, financials, etc. etc.
2. Slide layout: the designer. Colours, fonts, look and feel, white space, layout, image cropping/scaling/positioning, diagramming.
3. Data visualisation: the strategy consultant. Challenge one: pick the right message you want to emphasise from the thousands of options that a data set gives you. Challenge two: actually emphasise it with the right chart, the right colours, the right rounding.
4. Pitch story: the movie director. Now take all the structured, analytical, and boring base material, and turn it into an exciting, emotional, convincing 20 minute pitch. (Note the difference between content story and pitch story)
5. Outside reality check: seasoned business executive. What are the weaknesses in the story, what are the difficult (and/or obvious) questions the audience will ask, what elements of the story are totally obvious?

I was trained in 1 and 3, got 5 through the years, taught myself 2 (clean, good enough, but not at the level of a master illustrator), and trying my best at 4.

Many professional designers in the market will lack 1, 3, and 5: but they will still do fabulous work on presentations that have less hard core business content.

Many corporate executives lack 2, 3, and 4. They also will have trouble with number 5: being able to look at their story from a true outside perspective.

Many people write bullet point slides because they find it hard to come up with a visual composition of what they want to say. The trick: look at the basic action in your sentence:

• We are the biggest: bar chart with ranking
• We are going from [a] to [b], to boxes with an arrow in between
• We are the best of both, Venn diagram
• We are different, box on the left, box on the right
• We are growing, line or column chart
• We need to do a, b, c; gantt chart
• We have the best looking product: pictures
• Etc.

In a recent project, I had to visualise the 5 year IT spend plan of a very large company: different business processes, different applications, different responsibilities, different timing, some were build, some were buy, different budgets.

Rather than pages of bullet point slides, I went for a simple table that showed the applications by business division, around 60 boxes. Then this - relatively complex - structure was repeated over and over again, each time with a different set of highlights and colour codings. After the first few repeats, the audience will slowly start to recognise the position of the applications on the grid, and i can introduce more complexity.

Here are some techniques to deal with complex tables and lots of different data set:

• Colour: use similar colours to highlight similar items. Pick how you use colour: colour an entire box, add a coloured dot to a box, colour the line around a box. Use muted, calm colours for larger surfaces, use very bright, highly contrasting colours for small accent objects.
• Semi-transparent white to cover parts of the table you do not need for a slide. Use shape booleans to cut out pieces of the cover.
• Elimination: take the audience through a process where you throw out items bit by bit: here are the applications that we are not responsible for (out), here are the applications that we will not work on (out).
• Re-order: Flip rows and columns until you get a layout where similar items are grouped together.
• Shapes: squares, triangles, circles can make nice small objects to highlight different aspects.

Before starting a presentation design project, I need some basic guidance from my clients: dark or light background, custom fonts or not, Mac or Windows. Useful information.

A few times, I made the mistake of asking design (not content) input on specific slide elements: this way of putting pictures or that way, this type of titles or that, black & white or colour. It somehow did not work. As a designer you need to select the entire design approach in a consistent way.

I sometimes see something similar in interior designs of houses: individual elements look OK, but the whole composition together does not make sense.

Mixing and matching gives mediocre results.

Here is another argument against dense bullet points.

Most business presentations today are read on a screen (increasingly a tablet), rather than watched live. You might think that bullet points are actually good for reading on a screen. They are, BUT. People have become so impatient, and overloaded with presentations that they just “page down” a document quickly, reading the headline and thinking “OK, I get it, next…” [click] [click] [click]

The only way to slow that reader down is to break up that bullet point chart in multiple slides and write the important messages clear and in her face, supported by the right visual.

Everyone loves reading cartoons, and they can make great content for presentation slides (watch the copy right). But for an audience to get the cartoon, they need to be able to read it. And given the scribbly nature of cartoon fonts, fonts sizes in the bubbles need to be bigger than what usually works on a regular slide (i.e, font 20 or up). If the bubble text has to be 20 points, that means that the overall image needs to be pretty large, often you do not have enough space for it.

When creating slides that are meant for emailing in advance and reading on a screen, font size is less of an issue.

To get the audience to focus on the cartoon, chop out all the usual slide clutter (titles, footers, logos), just a plain page with a cartoon graphic. Cartoons are usually busy graphics.

Putting an image smack in the middle of your composition often kills the sense of action in your slide. Experiment with cropping to make things more interesting and dynamic.