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After the introduction presentation by venture capitalist Mark Suster, the people over at SalesCrunch are now starting to post the videos of my own NYU presentations online. Yesterday number 1 (out of 7) went up, and it provides a much needed audio track to my slightly cryptical slides.
Just a heads up that I will be speaking at the Technion university in Haifa next week June 1. My presentation will be part of BizTec’s Annual Pitch Competition. I will be talking about how to design effective fundraising pitch presentations to venture capitalists and other investors. The details of the event can be found here.
I reviewed Art Authority, this great art catalogue for iPad earlier, and I just bought the same application for the Mac.
The bad news, the user interface is a lot worse than the iPad. You browse art in finder windows, sometimes via HTML pages.
The good news, working with the images is a lot easier. Since a good keyword search mechanism is still missing, a very large monitor makes it easier to browse icons of paintings. You can have multiple thumbnail windows open, and leave them open for a long time.
Ten dollars well spent. Twenty dollars well spent if you buy the iPad app as well.
Someone asked me how I managed to create this image of my office location in a recent presentation.
The secret is in an earlier post about tilting Google maps. Pay attention to the angle that the satellite camera took when taking images closer to the ground. Rotate the image in such a way that shadows look natural.
In many of my presentation design projects, the content of the presentation is already 80% available on the client’s web site: a startup with an exciting new technology, the strategy of a big Fortune 500 company. But it clearly does not a good job at explaining the messages in an interesting visual way. (Otherwise you could just put a modified version of the web graphics as the background to your presentation).
Over the past years, we have learned a lot about effective design of presentation visuals. Maybe web design is next, and can learn from this process? Fewer buzzwords, fewer environmental policies, less prominent contact details. If bullet points and clutter do not work in a presentation, why would they work in a web site? Instead: the web page as a clutter-free presentation canvas that tells your story.
The implication will be that, similar to presentations, we get a level playing field in web design. A good web site template that can handle big images and sliders is all you need from the technical site. That is the easy part. The difficult bit is to get the story right.
Photo editing software can do a lot, and it is getting increasingly used in advertising. This ad however shows its limitation. When you try to be photo-realistic and it is not 100% right, it just hurts the eyes. The concept behind the ad is good, the execution not.
Via Ads of the World.
The great people of SalesCrunch are beginning to put the videos from my New York presentations online. First up is Mark Suster, a well-known venture capitalist from LA who introduces my presentation on pitching VCs
Mark is one of the best VC bloggers around, and I was honored when he offered to introduce my presentation in New York in person. We found out the night before that we happened to be in the same city (it is a statistically low probability that 2 people from Tel Aviv and Los Angeles are at the same time in New York).
More videos to come. Thank you Ann Lupo for the video recording and editing.
Here is an interesting article about voice pacing on the BBC web site. Researches analyzed voice patterns of 1,400 attempts to get people to do a phone service. Here they are:
You could re-write these findings as follows:
In short, have a human conversation.
I do not agree with the design approach of the majority of free template databases on the web. Many of these sites are built to attract Google traffic and host cluttered templates that seem nothing more than a more colorful extension of Microsoft’s standard bullet point opening screen.
Presentationmagazine.com fits somewhere in the middle. Managed by Jonty Pearce, It hosts some standard PowerPoint templates that I would not use in a design, but also has a number of useful articles.
The really useful content of this web site however is its library of free editable PowerPoint maps. You can download them and color states, countries and continents with your own colors. An excellent resource.
My wish list of features to be included in PowerPoint. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
PowerPoint 2011 for Mac
PowerPoint 2010 for Windows