SlideMagic Blog

Nancy Duarte published her fourth book: Slidedocs, about how to design visual documents in PowerPoint (or Keynote) that are meant for reading rather than presenting.

She is on to something. Business communication is getting shorter and shorter, and the role of word processors that used to write long boring memos is taken over by presentation design software that is used to create more visual documents.

Slidedocs is a free download (it is actually a PowerPoint file) that talks you through an approach to make these documents better. Most useful might actually be the file itself, that can serve as a template for your next Slidedoc!

Some clients ask me whether a project can be cheaper if we cut the number of the slides, the answer is: not really. If your presentation designer is charging you by the slide, it means that she is likely to focus only on beautifying graphics page by page, rather than turning your entire story upside down and designing it from scratch.

Every presentation design project has a big fixed cost component: getting to know the client, getting to understand the story, setting up the overall look and feel of the presentation. After this, you need to put in however many slides it takes to tell the story, and I tend to err on putting in more than less. 30, 40, or even 50 slides, it does not make a lot of difference in the cost of a project.

Bombastic animated introductions are often used to promote movies, and some people might think they make spectacular product presentations. However, I think that a 3D animated product name with loud music does not make a good connection with the audience.

I try to keep ugliness completely out of my design work. Ugliness tends to spread like a virus that wants to take over your work.

Even if you make a quick mockup or even a paper sketch of a slide, it should look orderly, balanced, clean. This is what I learned on my first day at McKinsey, when a client walks in you should be able to talk her through the hand-written deck.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2011 for Mac renders colours of shapes and text differently, it has given me many headaches and inspired many blog posts over the years. So - finally - here is the simplest fix: create a thin outline in the same colour as the text around your characters, done!

The screen shot below shows how normally text get rendered differently even if you apply the same colour code to it (#!@$#@). Below that, the same text, with the same colour, but now with a tiny outline (same colour) around it. In the small preview window at the right you can see that the text and the shape have the same colour.You can see how I selected the text, and picked the line option from the format ribbon to do it.

Microsoft, please acknowledge this as a bug and not a feature (which you suggested in the past) and fix it in the next Office 2011 patch.

Now and then I get stuck on the border of web site design and presentation design. And increasingly, the border is blurring. I am not talking about big eCommerce sites or sophisticated web applications here, I deal with a straightforward web presence for a high tech startup.

How can a presentation designer be helpful here?

1. There is hardly any need for extensive technical content. Viewers are looking for a simple and professional looking page that quickly answers a few basic questions: what do you do and who are the people behind the company. If your page looks like a 800-pixel wide website from 2002, your company is probably from that time as well. If I cannot find details and names of the management team, nor a postal address then the company might actually not be real.
2. Web-based presentations and web sites have the same audience: click, click, click-ing to find out what you were looking for. Elaborate text, buzzwords, spectacular videos, auto-play music all distract and delay in exactly the same way as animation and bullet points do in a PowerPoint deck.
3. There are great what-you-see-is-what-you get tools out there for novices to build web sites. Wix has a very consumer non-professional feel, Webydo is like Adobe InDesign put online, and my favourite is Square Space. My own web site is still based on Wordpress, which missed a great opportunity I think to become a simple web site creation platform.

Basic web presence design will become increasingly standardised, but I still encounter many web designers who continue the bespoke route of the past decade. Prediction: something similar will happen to presentation design and enterprise communication: you can instantly recognise two types of presentations: 1) the bullet list by the non-designer, 2) the presentation that is prettied up by a professional graphics designer (icons, banners, logos, effects). I am working hard to eradicate both.

Many tech presentations contain have the feature laundry list table in them: 15-20 great things your application can do. Here is how to make them better:

• For reading: reduce the font and add more text to make the feature and its benefit explicit: from “historical overview” to “Compare usage levels over the last 30 days and spot unusual drops in demand”
• For presenting: Option 1: if you only want to show that you have lots of features, keep the text short and put 20 boxes in a nice 4x5 grid on the slide, do not even bother to go into the specifics. Option 2: if you want to go into the specifics, create 20 slides addressing one feature/benefit each, make sure you can present each slide in 10 seconds while at the same time being specific enough so people can understand things beyond a vague description.

With smaller screen sizes, icons are becoming an increasingly important element of user interface design. Not everyone of you is likely to be using PowerPoint to design a web app (hey I do), but icons can also be useful in regular presentation design.

I am not talking about floppy disks and other ancient icons we still use, but stylised symbols that can be an effective visual short cut to a category of (pick the appropriate) products, benefits, user problems, etc.

One option is to create your own icons in PowerPoint, set the zoom to 400% and create miniature shapes using shape booleans. Often you can use a quick Google Image search to find inspiration for your icon.

Stock photo sites sell endless amounts of icons, but there are compatibility issues when using them in PowerPoint or Keynote. Most icons are design as a vector graphic in Adobe Illustrator. It makes them infinitely scalable (like a PowerPoint shape), but PowerPoint does not read this file format. Copy-pasting Illustrator objects (if you have the software installed) is unpredictable and results in a shape that is hard to manipulate (changing colour for example).

Cropping icons out of a JPG or PNG file is not a solution either, if you forget to compress the small image file, you end up storing a huge image file with all your icons multiple times on a PowerPoint slide. Cropping also kills the vector-like scaling of icons, and background transparency.

A recent trend in web design might provide a solution: custom icon fonts. Modern successors of Zapf Dingbats (what?) provide clean icons that are scalable and can be manipulated (colours, shadows, and - do not use this - reflections).

A partner in VC firm Andreesen Horrowitz confesses that his love affair with the tablet is over. People will stick to a desktop device the laptop and a pocket device, the phone (which will get slightly bigger).

Putting things in context of presentation design (leaving the consumer world aside for a minute):

1. I think tablets are here to stay for managers that need to view documents, but do not make edits beyond small corrections
2. Serious presentation design work will never work on a small touch screen (maybe a similar statement to that of IBM estimating the world market for computers). One, there is the physical constraint, but more importantly, I think you need that space, that big screen, that calmness, to think/focus and create beautiful presentations
3. One thing that the tablet has done is change user interface design forever: I predict most new desktop software will slowly migrate to a tablet-like interface (simple, big buttons).
4. I think we are likely to see another big innovation in laptop user interface design. Either very large touch screens (still, the distance to the screen will be an issue for a workable user interface), or giant touch pads (maybe integrated with a keyboard) that allow us to scroll through information Minority Report-style.
5. Document creation and design software is too complicated and a left-over of ideas from the 1980s. Enterprise documents can be much simpler/uniform while still being effective and distinctive (watch this space). So the innovation in enterprise computing/communication might be in software, not hardware.

VC Mark Suster reconfirmed how important in-between-the-lines-body-language is when pitching investors.

If I had to put a number on it I’d say 1 in 20 pitches – maybe 1 in 30 – are by an entrepreneur who comes across as truly passionate about her project. Y […]

The other 29 pitches consistent of many smart people who “think they have an angle on making a buck” which I know is an unfair over-characterization of the situation but you can genuinely tell when somebody isn’t “all in.” 

I am not sure about the 1 in 30 ratio, but I have seen similar dynamics when clients approach me to upgrade their investor presentation. When you are a professional manager-for-hire that makes a career in big firms, your affinity with the product is usually not that super important, you manage people and deliver the goods. When you are the CEO of a startup raising its first round, it matters a lot.

If the CEO herself cannot portray the required passion for the product, maybe it is wise to include the person on the team who can. I have seen many successful combinations of a CEO who is focussed on a execution and a “product guy” obsessed with the technology, but slightly disconnected from the harsh reality of budgets and timelines. Still, if you need to rely on this combination you definitely lost some points with VCs that you need to make up for in other areas.