SlideMagic Blog

Most web sites are designed around functional content rather than story: find our address, learn about our environmental policies, see how we value compliance, here is a list of all the products we sell. But is that what should get all the attention? Maybe a first-time visitor of a company web site is more interested in the story behind the company? That story should be eye catching. The functional information should be accessible, but does not have to jump at you when you enter.

Similar to PowerPoint templates, web site templates waste too much space on screen clutter. Multiple menu structures, lots of links, buttons. It is all too busy and confusing. The language on corporate web sites is full of clichés. The text sort of all say the same thing. Images are often the cheesy stock photos that good presentation designers try to avoid.

Corporates probably copy each other. They brief a design agency with “I want something like that”. As a result, the same concept gets repeated and repeated. Web design is probably mostly lead by technology developers, not story tellers. The structure, the layering, the architecture come first.

Maybe corporate web design is also ready for a revolution, and maybe story designers can play a big role in it?

Here in Israel, people always answer their phone and then say: “I will call you later, OK?”. That interruption just broke your line of thought, your concentration, you probably going to check that Tweeted link, catch up on some email. So much for creativity.

Email is much better for small admin-type message exchanges. And I am going even further, slowly phasing out the use of voice mail. Voice mail is very inefficient to access, and it does not enable you to use your inbox as a todo list. In the end, voice conversations will be to talk to close family members or remote meetings.

Until everyone moves into this direction I will get “Did you get my message?” a lot.

UPDATE: After a reader email, I will clarify and assure you that I do communicate with people, just at set time intervals.

You emailed the presentation to your boss, and it comes back the next day with the comment: “I edited it for clarity”. What this means is that she edited the text in the first few slides, but probably ran out of steam after page 14.

Bosses have this urge to take out the fountain pen and start scribbling (could you print that slide deck please?), especially on first pages. They do not take the time to digest the entire slide deck (20 minute story), but rather want to make sure the summary page is right. Make sure the vision is in. Make sure that we mention that benefit. Make sure to emphasize the long history of the company.

Editing text is useful for books or legal contracts, text on a presentation slide can only absorbed 50%. The audience will not remember how you put that sentence exactly.

So, spending a lot of time on carefully crafting sentences is not the best use of your time. Given that, why not focus on writing short, punchy headlines and add the nuances in your verbal explanation.

Whenever you present a piece of analysis (a table, a chart), round up the numbers so you are left with a digestible amount of numbers; so $1.3m instead of $1,354,673. And when you add up numbers, make sure the calculations are correct. And I do not mean just calculation mistakes, it is obvious that you lose credibility if you get the basic math wrong.

Adding rounded numbers can slightly alter the total of your sum. I usually make sure that the total is exactly what it should be, and make a short adjustment to the largest number in the addition.

For example: 3.49 + 2.55 + 1.25 = 7.27. But when you round up you get: 3.5 + 2.6 + 1.3 = 7.4. So I adjusted the 3.5 and will put in my chart 3.4 + 2.6 1.3 = 7.3.

Why? If you have to explain why numbers do not add up, it will cost you credibility. Secondly, most people actually will not ask, they will just go and check every number in your document. And an audience that is running mathematical calculations does not have time to listen to your story.

Watch out the quarterly results presentations to investors though. If you bump into rounding issues, you might have to add in those extra digits to make sure you are not misrepresenting the financial situation of your company,

The site of the IMP Awards has an excellent database of movie posters, searchable by year, title, actor. Useful inspiration.

Last week in New York, I used both Keynote and Adobe Acrobat for the first time on stage in a live presentation. Keynote worked great (it is designed to do just that). Presenting in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) was interesting.

I presented at a large conference (this one) where it is hard to switch hardware (I needed a Mac for Keynote) in the middle of the conference program without disrupting the experience of the audience (engineers walking back and forth, screens going on and off). Hence, I went for a PDF version of the deck. (An earlier post on why I think we are going to use PDF for presentations more and more)

With CMD-L you can put Adobe Acrobat in full screen mode, and it responds perfectly fine to the Logitech remote control I am using. The only adjustment you have to make is to make sure that any animated slide builds are spread out over multiple pages.

The one thing I am missing though is the ability to have presenter view in Adobe Acrobat: having a pre-view of the next slide displayed on the monitor that only the presenter can see. Adobe, are you listening? (An old post about PowerPoint presenter view)

To take this a bit further. The one thing that Apple can do to increase the penetration of Keynote is to develop a Windows application that can run Keynote presentations with animations. Editing is not necessary.

This was the question I got after my high-paced presentations full of impressionist paintings last week. Here is what is different about a Board presentation:

• Often you need to go through and approve detailed financials, so some slides will be dense
• Board members will have gotten used to certain type of slides, because many of them get repeated in every quarterly review. The slides might be bad, but everyone knows exactly where to look for a specific number.
• The corporate culture might not completely be open to impressionist paintings and other unusual images in a Board presentation

Having said that, Board presentations are actually very similar to other presentations:

• A well-functioning Board will have read the homework before entering the meeting room, so the detailed number slides can be left for the appendix
• If you need to convince the Board of a major strategic decision, it is a presentation like any other. Boring, dense bullet points is not going to help you win the hearts and minds of these people.
• Using visual slides with large images does not mean that you have to pick impressionist paintings. Highly conservative slides can still be highly visual.

So maybe Board meetings are not that different after all…

Read more about designing good Board presentations in this earlier post.

Last week I attended a Creative Mornings presentation by John Maeda in New York. He is the head of the Rhode Island School of Design and a well-known designer, artist, and author (more information about him here).

He made an interesting point about the graphics design industry. What caused the creation of the graphics design industry as we know it today? The fact that in the 1950s and 1960s, it became customary for publicly traded companies to have well-designed annual reports for their shareholders.

I think we are seeing something similar in presentation design. The bar is rising constantly. Presentations, and videos of presentations are being shared online and are getting wider and wider audiences. Corporations start seeing the value of good slide design. Enterprises will start allocating budget to it.

I do not think this investment will solely go to the design of PowerPoint slides. The corporate story needs to be brought out consistently in presentation slides, documents that can be shared online, videos, and the web site. A new discipline in graphics design, and a new design market is emerging.

Recently someone asked me: “How much time do you need for your presentation, 30 minutes, 45 minutes?”. While I can fill 2 hours with just talking about presentation design I chose to go for the 30 minutes. It focuses you to be to the point and interesting.

TEDTalks can discuss very complex subject matters in just 20 minutes. I have designed 6 minute presentations for startups participating in pitch competitions that managed to convey the entire company’s story. Often I find that a time constraint results in a better presentation.

The idea of visual presentations is spreading and I see more and more decks that I would call “80% there”: very limited use of bullets points, big images, one message per slide. For those experienced amateurs among you, here is how to get it to 100%:

• Use only high res images, instead of low res ones borrowed from Google Image search
• Scale up your images either to full page size, or stick to the same white frame on each page.
• Think of image aesthetics: people in toilets, eating gross food, a close up of an ugly animal might be funny, but they are in a college humor kind of way. Deep down, humans do not like to look at things that are not pretty. Not every image has to be funny. Funny images can also be beautiful.
• Resist the temptation of the image barrage. An onscreen presentation is not a SlideShare presentation that requires a click to go to the next word in a sentence. Not all points need to be supported by an image. It is scary, scary face image. We are confused - confused face image. It is difficult - child doing math image. Use images or graphs to show why you are scared, what is confusing you, and how come it is so hard to solve. Much better than pictures of scared and confused people.