SlideMagic Blog

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.

The first ever guest post on my blog! The contribution below is by Roger Kethcart,  a writer for Cable.tv who “fell in love with public speaking watching courtroom dramas as a boy”.

Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking: Tips from TV

Public speaking is perhaps one of the scariest, most frightening things that one can experience in their lifetime. Sweaty palms, shaking hands, stuttering, queasiness- all unfortunate symptoms that public speaking can have on you.

Whether you are a seasoned public speaker who still gets the occasional jitters, or an amateur seeking a way to stay calm through the storm, taking cues from beloved shows may be just the tranquilizer you need.

Go Slow

One of the reasons people suffer from public speaking is the feeling that they need to speak quickly to get the speech over with. In reality, however, the faster you speak, the more likely you are to mess up, stumble over your words, or skip parts of your speech. By simply slowing down, breathing and relaxing, as best you can, you will greatly enhance your speech. The King’s Speech was a great example of what slowing down can do for one’s public speaking. He’s a clip of the original speech by King George VI, where you can see his pauses when a stutter would have incurred.

Tip: If using note cards for reference, write “BREATHE” and “SLOW DOWN” at places where you find yourself speeding up. The written note will help you relax and focus on what you are saying and your speed.

Hey, Compfight is a neat Flickr image search engine.

I discussed a presentation with a company the other day that was in the field of measuring and analysing human behaviour in companies. My main recommendation for their sales presentation: humanise your story and translate the pages and pages of cold statistics about people into case example and organisational behaviour situations that anyone can relate to. Because that is how people will use the tool in the end.

Immediately after the iPad launch, doing a presentation on the device was cool and innovative. Now that the new car smell has worn off, the iPad has become another common device in our IT setup (light, small, touch, crappy file system). What are the implications for presentation design?

• More people do not carry their lap tops everywhere anymore. As a result, you might find yourself running a presentation from an iPad in a 1-on-1 meeting. Not because of it is cool, but because it is the only screen around.
• Increasingly, people open email on mobile devices. Remember that a PPT file does not look great when opened on an iPad without the right apps. And it is unlikely that your boss, or potential customer, or potential investor has this software installed.

So what I end up doing is saving a animation-free PDF version of my important presentations (no font rendering issues) and keep them in Dropbox alongside the PPT master file. The iPad has become a workhorse.

Yesterday, Seth Godin posted about us thinking that we can absorb anything in 140 characters. Part of it is true, but part of it is that we fail to fully immerse into something.

Busy venture capitalists often show this behaviour. In the first few seconds they try to put your idea inside the framework of other similar ideas in your field of business and they get it, they think.

Think about this when you prepare your investor presentation and put emphasis on those aspects that are different, not that obvious. Even to the point where you make it extremely explicit: “I see what you are thinking, but no, this is not the [FILL BLANK] for [FILL BLANK]. Let me explain why.”

Some venture capitalists might invite you for a “5 minute meeting”. The idea is not to conduct a full formal pitch, but rather have a casual get together to get to know you and start a longer-term relationship that could end up in funding later on in time.

Of course the meeting will be a bit longer than 5 minutes, the time limit is just a deterrent for your to craft a huge 1 hour pitch deck. Also, the 5 minute meeting enables to VC to interrupt and question more without coming across as rude by cutting you off all the time. This dialogue is a quick way for her to zoom in on issues.

How to prepare?

1. Prepare a very short verbal pitch: cover yourself, and cover the idea.
2. Cover the idea. Make sure that the VC actually can understand what it is your doing (I have seen many pitches in pitch competitions where the presenter failed on this very basic requirement). This means, using normal buzzword-free language, and cutting content that is not yet relevant in this stage of the fund raising process (detailed financials, system architectures, etc. etc.)
3. Present yourself in an interesting way. There is all the professional stuff, but maybe add a bit of unusualness, so the VC will remember you as the guy who likes to monocycle (for example). And do not forget that the main way you present yourself is in between the lines, how you come across in the meeting.
4. Only prepare slides when your really cannot describe things with words: a 2x2 matrix of all the competitors in the field for example, which takes 30 seconds to describe but can be communicated in 2 seconds with a drawing. Have these slides in your back pocket: either on an iPad, or - yes - as a paper print out.
5. When the VC is not deciding whether to invest right now at this moment, it is actually OK to show some uncertainty and vulnerability and ask advice about how to build your business.
6. Listen. Pay attention to what feedback you get, answer the questions you get asked rather than pressing play on your standard pitch. This is a dialogue and a test case for what it is like to work with you in the longer term