SlideMagic Blog

Sending a deck to someone who will open it without verbal explanation is a problem. The slides work great on stage, but reading them stand alone does not provide the required context. There is no obvious solution:

• Making changes to slides (either modifying them all together, or adding text box subtitles to them) is a lot of work, and maintaining two master files is a big pain
• Converting them to video and adding audio tracks prevents people from skimming through, they might just give up mid-presentation
• Adding comments in the note pages does not look very nice, and many people do not know how to find them in PowerPoint.

So at the moment, I am trying something different. Over the past week I trained myself up on Adobe InDesign and am creating a framework to drop high-res images of slides into a template that adds a nice formated paragraph of text to the right of the slide. When you PDF the document, it creates the feeling of a spread with facing pages in a nice book that reads very well on a wide screen monitor. It looks beautiful, and it is easy to modify. Let’s see how it works out for my clients.

Matthias Pöehm, a speech coach from Switzerland is trying to create a global movement: The Anti PowerPoint Party or APPP. For the time being, he is trying to establish a regular political party in Switzerland by collecting signatures. He has a point when he says that many presentations would have been much better off if no PowerPoint slides were used. Matthias is offering a book on his site with suggestions on how to present without PowerPoint.

In case you signed up for Google Plus, you can find me here. I share my blog posts there as well.

In a recent blog post, VC Brad Feld discusses job interviewing. One of the suggestions: give the candidate something to do, for example have potential sales people do a presentation. An excellent suggestion.

To take this a bit further. If you are up for a job interview, think of it as a presentation of your story. What do you want to tell? What clutter can you get rid of? And yes maybe, what visuals do you need to bring along (probably 1-page printouts)? The organization structure of that big project you managed? The personal thank you letter you received from the client’s CEO?

Today is the anniversary of my blog. Starting it back in 2008 was one of the best decisions I ever made. It gave me many new friends all over the world, it convinced me to devote 100% of my time to presentation design, and it opened up a global client base to work with. I will be hitting post #1000 soon. I cannot believe that number myself. Thank you for reading!

For most images I use in PowerPoint, I use Photoshop to extend the background and create more white space for type. You can only do this when the edges of the image have a nice neutral pattern background.

Stock photographers crop their images to get more interesting compositions. The result is that many images will have hard cut offs that cannot be extended. Here is my call to stock photographers: let the designers of the final products do the cropping for you and make the full version of your file available as well.

Maybe stock photography sites should do for images what they already do for vector files: offer a ZIP file for download that contains multiple items: one example crop that creates a nice thumbnail to drive sales on the site, and the original that designers can work with.

Image via iStockPhoto.

Update: Linda Lor linked in the comments to her video on how to extend images in PowerPoint without the help of Photoshop. I am embedding it here:

Here is the video of the webinar on presentation design I hosted together with SalesCrunch last week. The focus was specifically on sales presentations.

All the reasons can be prevented:

1. You let PowerPoint take over the story. Rather than using the story flow that would come naturally to you in a 1-on-1 informal conversation, you go in writing mode, think of structures (market inefficiencies, demand drivers, core competences, strategic sustainable advantages), and fill the standard Microsoft bullet point template with them. You are not bold enough in designing the visuals that you actually need to support your story.
2. You make small, lazy mistakes that make your slide designs look amateurish: a childish font, screaming colors, images in low resolution and in distorted aspect ratios, and slide elements that are not aligned.
3. You walk around the elephant in the room. You pad the story with fluff, talk about issues that your audience is already convinced about, and avoid taking on the real questions that the audience has about your pitch.

Here you have it.

Most corporate PowerPoint templates are ugly and take up too much screen real estate. Most corporate PowerPoint templates are designed by professional graphics designers. This does not make sense? I just realized, here is probably why: graphics designers design the template on an empty screen (or Microsoft’s bullet point opening screen). Uh oh, need to fill up that white space with something interesting.

The solution: next time your PowerPoint template is up for renewal, hand the graphics designer a real slide deck and tell her: put this presentation in a new template. My guess is you would get far better results.

Recently, I designed an investor presentation for a real estate developer. Most PowerPoint presentations designed by people in this sector look like a real estate catalogue: page after page of small images of buildings with square meter indicators.

I did something different. One property per page, one page-filling photo of a close-up of the building, with a short story about the property in a subtitle at the bottom. You get the feel of the quality of the building without seeing the entire structure. Similar to a fashion catalogue where it is actually hard to see a full photo of a suit.

Remember your audience. This presentation was for institutional investors, not for architects or property buyers.