SlideMagic Blog

An aspiring presentation designer asked me this question. “You really are confident that you can grasp any story that is thrown at you (scientific, financial)?” I answered positive.

Yes, I have some background in business, engineering, and financial analysis, but there are cases where I do not get it the first time around. I do not think that that is my problem though, if I do not get it, the audience of reasonably intelligent people will not either. Time to try to explain it to me again.

I am not embarrassed to ask stupid questions, and never say that I got it when I did not.

PowerPoint is not very good at creating line breaks in a shape. With lots of space left, it breaks your long word (&lquo;management” is a favourite) to the next line. Two things you can do:

1. Right click the shape, hit format shape, select text box and un-tick the wrap-text-in-shape box. Now you can make your own line breaks
2. For bigger fonts a 1.0 leading between lines is too much. Select the shape, click format, go to paragraph, and set the line spacing to multiple and put in the value 0.8 or 0.9 instead of 1.0.

What is clear to you is hardly ever clear to everyone in the audience. A screen shot with a cleverly integrated login feature, a photo of a long line of people who cannot wait to try your product, an image of an unhappy customer. When in doubt, put a big call out or title that says what the audience is expected to see.

The big challenge of website design is people clicking away to more interesting places. when you send a pitch deck without verbal explanation, you have the same challenge. Will your prospective customer or investor make it all the way to the end? Maybe presentation designers can learn from web designers?

 I was brainstorming this with a client the other day. We were thinking about how to include a fake demo in the presentation. Demos always look better with the biggest possible screen shots. The result however, is a very large presentation and the viewer might not make it to the end. A possible solution: add big PREVIOUS and NEXT arrows to the left and right of the screen, maybe a counter (Demo slide 4/12) and a bit SKIP button to keep the viewer on board.

Just a random idea, I need to think more about how to add navigation that is actually useful inside a presentation.

Most sales presentations go on and on and on about an issue that the client might already be convinced of. Worse, if you present slide after slide in an amateurish format making the same point, your client might actually start to doubt what she believed when entering the meeting room.

That is time and slides wasted. More time efficient and effective ways to tackle this:

1. A couple of really professional and serious looking slides with the highlights, plus an invitation to visit your web page for all the details
2. Discussing the weakness of your competitors verbally and informally: it is hard to put this on paper. Suggest your client some tough questions to ask when they meet the competition. Note that this is actually a presentation design challenge, without creating the actual slides. You need to have this story prepared, maybe even with the help of a “spontaneous” flip chart sketch

Now spend the time you gained on the issues that really matter: are you expensive, is it hard to switch supplier, etc.? Preaching to the converted is never a good use of time.

I am brainstorming names for my upcoming presentation app and am currently using the working title “Pitchera”. You can start signing up for the mailing list to stay updated on progress here. In that same form you can indicate what sort of presentation designer you are, I am still pondering to what type of audience the app should be targeted at launch.

That is what many experienced executives say. It is true that not every point your want to make in a presentation needs to be spelled out in a slide. But sometimes the crucial message of a presentation gets omitted.

Some slide that has been used for a thousand times (often a bad one) is the trigger for the experienced presenter to tell her story that has been told a thousand times before. It looks like a slide presentation, but in practice the presenter is telling the story without slides.

In a focussed one-on-one meeting, the message gets across. It might get lost in a presentation for a big audience, and it will for sure not be communicated when sending the deck by email without verbal explanation.

A really fundamental point in your presentation deserves a slide. It often takes an outsider to point out to you what that point is. “Hey, that is sort of obvious, I can talk to that!” Not really.

As I am making slow but steady progress with my presentation app I have had a chance to sit on the other side of the table: being the one who pitches an idea, rather than my usual role as a presentation designer who gets pitched with business plans. Observations:

• Yes, not everybody loves your idea like you do (but all designers do)
• Most people form an opinion about your business without actually understanding/getting to what the truly great thing about it is
• Spending dollars on designers becomes a whole different thing when it is your own money
• When you live and breathe your own story, you actually do a lousy job pitching it to an outsider who has never heard of it. Having a pitch deck at hand (guess what, I do not have one) might actually be handy to slow myself down and take someone to the story that I assume to be common knowledge.
• People point out - rightfully - that it is not only about product, I need a market strategy

When listening to these people I hear myself speak when discussing client presentations. Funny. In any case, the process is making me a better presentation designer.

Most business presentations address the financials of an idea at some stage. Resist the temptation of using a cartoonesk clip art image to introduce the topic. Financials are serious stuff and you are not asking for your weekly candy allowance from investors or corporate decision makers.

I just gave a client some feedback on new PowerPoint template options, I might as well share my thoughts with all of you:

• Flat: no drop shadows behind fints, no gradients, no reflections. These look dirty in a world of razor sharp retina displays
• Out with the subtle waves and watermarks, they 1) make slides hard to read and interfere with the slide design and 2) make your presentation look like 2003
• Lighter fonts: there is no need to scream to get your point across. Keep a lot of white space around the slide title.
• If you have to put a logo on each slide, put it at the bottom right, not top right (or even left), you want to leave the maximum space for the slide title.
• The client spent a lot of time on the cover page, but my suggestion is to worry about it last.
• Design your template around a real presentation rather than empty pages.