SlideMagic Blog

Sorry for the link bait title. The amount of quality stock photos (free, no attribution required, do whatever you want) is growing very rapidly. I am using more and more of them. Just run this Google search and see for yourself.

My presentation style continues to evolve, here is what I noticed:

• Fewer colours: lots of greys with one strong accent colour (maybe 2), more and more black and white images
• Fewer images: out with the overly simplistic or cliche visual metaphor (stunning photo of a guy standing on a mountain overlooking the valley)
• More consistency between image styles throughout the presentation
• Real, functional images: people using the product, our stores in Geneva, the prototype
• I use lots and lots of tables to layout elements on a slide

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a new version of Outlook (the email client for Mac), but at the same time pushes back the launch of a new Mac version of its Office suite (Excel, Word, and of course PowerPoint) by a year to the second half of 2015:

Historically we have released a new version of Office for Mac approximately six to eight months after Office for Windows. However, following the release of Office 365 we made the conscious decision to prioritize mobile first and cloud first scenarios for an increasing number of people who are getting things done on-the-go more frequently. This meant delivering and continuing to improve Office on a variety phones (iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android) and tablets (iPad and Windows)—brought together by the cloud (OneDrive) to help people stay better organized and get things done with greater efficiency at work, school, home and everywhere between. Continuing our commitment to our valued Mac customers, we are pleased to disclose the roadmap for the next version of Office for Mac—including Word for Mac, Excel for Mac, PowerPoint for Mac and OneNote for Mac.

In the first half of 2015 we will release a public beta for the next version of Office for Mac, and in the second half of 2015 we will make the final release available. Office 365 commercial and consumer subscribers will get the next version at no additional cost, and we will release a perpetual license of Office for Mac in the same timeframe.

The average investor pitch deck gets better and better (bad news for presentation designers like me). SlideShare, video streams of startup competitions, TED videos, all create examples of good presentations that people can copy.

Five years ago, version 1 would be a horribly looking bullet point document with standard Microsoft Office fonts/colours, full of small low resolution images scraped from Google with their aspect ratios distorted, that is changing.

Many startups have some sort of designer involved, she gets pulled of the web site work to give the slide deck a much needed make over. The result: decent looking slides, decent colour scheme, decent story flow, still lots of bullet point slides, but at least they are written properly, newspaper heading style.

How to push it one more level up?

Focus on the content, not so much on the local and feel which is already pretty OK. Here is a check list of possible mistakes:

• Think about where to focus your time/slides. Many of these decent presentations spend too much time stating the obvious. Instead go one level deeper: everyone seems to understand the problem, but why is it that in 2014 we sill have not found a solution for it?
• Add more substance to your competitive differentiation. A simple 2x2 matrix with generic sounding axes is not always enough. Why are these other companies doing something different while it sounds like they do exactly the same thing you do? And why do they do it differently? Very rarely, this will because of stupidity, there is probably another reason these companies focus on a different solution for a different customer segment.
• Even if your bullet points are short and well-written, remember that as soon as you start listing more than 3-5 benefits/differentiators, the audience will perceive this as no benefits/differentiators. Bla, bla, bla

A live app demo is not the same as an introduction of what your app does. Getting the technology to work, logging in as a dummy user, creating some dummy files, showing some dummy output, changing some settings, quickly going back to the management console, before switching to the user screen. All this shows that the app is real, it exists, the beautiful design, the fast response time, the powerful algorithms. But it is step 2 in the introduction, the audience is missing step 1, the overall context of what problem the app solves, and what it actually does. Time to throw in some good old slides that can get these messages across faster/better than a live demo. Then, fire up the tablet.

In this blog post, a developer discusses his criteria to pick from an overwhelming menu of presentations at a conference. Some interesting insights for conference organisers and people invited to speak at a conference.

• One person is best. Moderated panels are often an excuse for people to fill time about a subject without preparing much. You get a generic questions, provide a fluffy answer. Everybody sits back, relaxes, nobody takes responsibility for the quality of the presentation. One person on the other hand, feels the responsibility to avoid boring the audience.
• Deep is better than broad. Very generic topics can only scratch the surface. Deep dives on specific issues/problems are much more interesting to watch/listen to.

When confronted with something new, our brains instantly compare what we see, hear, feel, taste with all the 500 million previous experiences we had in our lives. This is why our intuition can say that we do not like/trust the person in front of us, without being able to say why. Apparently, we had bad experiences with these type of characters before somewhere, sometime.

The same is trie for the look and feel of a presentation. If it reminds us of boring experiences we had before, we switch off and anticipate a replay.  A bullet point first slide, a stale clip art image, a cheesy stock photo, all tell-tale signs that what is about to follow is unlikely to be interesting.

There is a positive side to this as well: you can interest your audience, simply by being different. Even if different means that your slides are not very pretty.

Many people are asking me for beta invites for my PowerPoint killer presentation design app. Here is where things stand at the moment. A handful people have been testing the app so far which provided feedback on a few glitches to iron out. The core engine (the concept behind the app) works great (big sigh of relief), there are now some things about workflow flow that needs fixing, so that you can move around faster in the app. Rather than widening the user base who will give me the same feedback, I will fix the obvious issues first.

A self-funded side project, patience please…

If you are are a company shareholder, it is reassuring to see the shareholdings on the first or second page of the company presentation.

For everyone else, the shareholdings can go somewhere in the back.

When you get a question during your presentation, should you abandon your story flow and answer it? It depends.

• For very large audiences, no. One person’s question does not merit throwing out your carefully crafted story line and potentially confuse the rest of the audience. Answer the question very briefly (“Good point, we use super glue for that, I will get back to it later in more detail”) and move on.
• For smaller audiences that have seen the material you are presenting before, probably yes. For example a presentation to the partner group of a venture capital firm.
• In one on one meetings: definitely yes. These meetings are not presentations, they are conversations and you should adjust the story flow based on questions, interruptions of the other person. If there are none, then follow the script, but that is likely going to be a boring meeting.