SlideMagic Blog

I do a fair amount of presentation design work in the medical field and in every deck there is the challenge of explaining the technology to a layman. The medical profession uses elaborate, highly realistic, illustrations to visualize a condition or a procedure. I actually find the other approach much more effective: highly abstract, minimalist sketches that show only what needs to be shown, and eliminate everything else. The visual needs to explain what is going on, not what something looks like.

A nice and short video with tips for pitching your startup to investors on #startupstories. The lessons from entrepreneurs are useful, but pay special attention to what the investors have to say, they are your audience.

Spirals are a great way to visualize an endless repeating of something. Stock image sites are full of images of real staircases, rendered ones, or other images that have a spiral structure. You can use the visual as-is, or add text (maybe in circles that get smaller and smaller) to shows that something is going on forever, that something is repeatable.

Some people associate a diagram like this with a downward spiral. I do not see it that way, you?

Almost every pitch presentation talks about something that is missing. A simple image of a paper hole is a great way to visualize it. You can have one, you can have fifteen, you can cut out the white background and put the whole into something else. You can find hundreds of paper holes on stock image sites.

I recently used my iPhone as a remote control to move between slides for an on-stage Keynote presentation.

This is one of 2 ways you can now use an iPhone/iPad to give a presentation. The first is to run the presentation in the device itself and connect it to a screen via an Apple TV (or a cable if you are sitting around a conference table). The second, is to use your iPhone/iPad to control a computer via WiFi or Bluetooth.

I used the latter. While it did work there are 3 glitches, one of which is a big one:

1. Both your iPhone and your computer need to be hooked up to the same WiFi network, which requires some fiddling with technology. For some reason Bluetooth failed to connect the devices. So it is different from using a standard plug and play Logitech remote that works always in a second. Budget time to make it work.
2. You move between slides by sliding the screen, which is a movement that is a bit hard to do with one hand. I would have preferred it when the volume + and - buttons would have been allocated to do this, like in the camera application.
3. And here is the big one, your remote can get stuck in the middle of a presentation. It happened to me twice where I had to wait for some buffer to clear before I could move on to the next slide. Not good when you are standing in front of a big audience.

When your company has an ugly corporate color scheme it can be hard to make good looking charts. Here is one solution: go mainly for shades and grey and use one or two of the corporate colors as an accent color to highlight things. In 99% of cases this will look very elegant and nobody can accuse you of deviating from the prescribed colors.

CEOs should not spend time writing their own PowerPoint presentations and as a result, most of them did not get around learning how to use the software. That is a shame. I recommend that every CEO should familiarize herself with some basics: editing text,  moving/deleting/pasting slides and inserting big comment boxes electronically on slides. It can be picked up in a 2 hour training and will make life so much easier for them when they fine tune the final 1% of the deck before going on stage.

Using a visual cliché can happen to the best of us… I recently was guilty of this one. “We are scalable!”

The NYT published an infographic that compares technology IPOs over time, including the facebook IPO of last week. At first, it looks really nice, it resembles bubbles going up in the air (a sentiment shared by many left out in the golden rain). It shows just how many of these IPOs we have had, and the billions in value they have created. And that is probably all the casual reader is left with when clicking to the next page.

On closer inspection, things are less clear. The value on the y-axis is the same as the size of the bubble. A good description of the axis labels is missing. And the things that the graph wants to display, could be visualized much better in a dedicated data chart for each conclusion:

• How many IPOs in what year: column chart
• Top ranking of IPOs by value at the opening day: bar chart
• Top ranking of IPOs by value in 2012 $: bar chart
• % share price movement on day 1: bar chart (probably only show big, well-known offerings)
• % return on investment 3 years later: bar chart (again for household name IPOs)

Still, if you are a newspaper, maybe getting across that bubbly feeling is more important than the visualizing the insight.

The star burst is often used in retro advertising. You can pick one up from any stock image site to create a background for a composition with a lot of depth.