SlideMagic Blog

Screen dumps are often used in VC pitch presentations; either to showcase the company itself, or to give examples of competitors in the market. These screen shots are often filled with excess visual details:

• The Windows title and scroll bars (sometimes with personal information such as instant messaging windows or the names of other web sites that are open on the screen)
• The menu navigation structure, login windows, banner ads that surround the core web site.

Cut this clutter to create a much calmer slide that allows you to focus on what feature/aspect you would like to highlight.

Usually, animated GIFs drive me crazy. The more subtle ones like this one could actually work in a presentation. If you copy and paste an animated GIF into your slide it will start to play if you switch to presentation mode. Via this isn’t happiness.

PowerPoint is slowly adding features that have been standard in Photoshop for years. One useful one is the image blur filter to increase depth of field of your photos (earlier post). It adds some extra realism to this composite image trick (discussed earlier here and here)

1. Find an image for the foreground and use the PowerPoint format/remove-background function to get rid of the white background
2. Find a background (nice image of Cafe de Flore by DarkB4Dwan)
3. Combine the 2 images
4. Blur the background with (click the image, format, artistic effects, the right one in the 2nd row)

One other application is to repeat a blurred version of a busy chart for additional comments (see post here)

PowerPoint 2010 has now incorporated some of the shape manipulation techniques that until now were the domain of Adobe Illustrator: union, combine, subtract, and intersect (read my earlier PowerPoint 2010 review here).

Until now, I never got into understanding Illustrator. Until now, because I (ironically) start to experiment with integrating more hand-drawn shapes into my presentations (I am even thinking of picking up my old highschool habit of drawing cartoons of people). Fonts are no issue (earlier post). The line/curve manipulations capabilities of Illustrator however are still far better than PowerPoint.

Here is how to move an Illustrator shape into PowerPoint, not just as an image, but as an editable vector object.

1. In Illustrator export your shape in an EMF format
2. In PowerPoint, select “insert picture” (a bit counter intuitive)
3. Right-click the object and un-group it. Say “yes” to the question whether you want to convert it

Converting is this simple. Unfortunately, understanding Illustrator is not…

I stumbled on this image this morning: such a true quote. Whenever I allow myself to get upset in a Tel Aviv traffic jam, or on the phone to the useless support desk of my ISP, I simply cannot get myself to design a good presentation. The rest of the day is best spent doing the monthly accounting.

Via Diego Zambrano.

A situation probably familiar to many of you:

• Corporate conglomerate needs update from country business units
• Analyst creates PPT template with just headings: “key successes”, “key issues”, etc.
• Template gets sent out, “fill in by next Tuesday (please), our review meeting is Friday”
• Towards Thursday evening: pages and pages of dense slideuments start popping up in the inbox, (of course) not following the template, but Frankensteined (earlier post) from other presentations
• Analysts cuts and pastes an overview document together (Friday 3AM) and sends it up the hierarchy as a status update.

If your goals is to provide a 20 minute update on the status in the business units the analyst might as well write the slideument herself. The writing of the slides will not take the time, it’s getting the information, and internalizing it. An alternative scenario:

• Analysts schedules 15 minute interviews with counter parts in the business units
• In a phone call, the real story comes out.
• Analysts write the summary slideument and sends it out for comments to the BUs
• Analyst incorporates the changes and is now ready to answer any question senior management might have on the situation in the business units

This approach works for high level qualitative updates. For detailed financial information, a proper management reporting system needs to be put in place. It is easy to analyse and compare financial data mechanically across business units, hardly any phone calls are needed. To take the finger on what else is going on in the business, the good old human interaction cannot be eliminated.

I often hear this advice to make sure something gets stuck in the audience brain: tell it 3 times. I disagree. This is the approach of the (poor) teacher asking a class to recite the alphabet over and over again. Here are some better approaches:

• Tell a story that stitches the elements of your message together
• Create a memorable visual to highlight the concept
• Give them something they will never forget (see Duarte’s post)

Everything is better than boring your audience with saying the same thing three times.

Clicking through some of the black and white images on this incredible page on Smashing Magazine shows you once more the difference between an average stock image and a photograph taken by an artist.

This image is by Andrzej Laskowski

Today’s post on Seth Godin’s blog made me think (probably his objective). Bluntly speaking, he argues that the marketer of cigarettes or the lawyer defending a criminal should take responsibility for her actions, or refuse to take on the challenge.

My profession is to help other people tell their stories in a more convincing way:

• to sell a product,
• get funding for a company,
• close the IPO on the stock market,
• increase the company’s share price,
• seal an important strategic partnership,
• secure a distribution franche,
• etc.

In most cases, I am 100% behind the story that I am writing. In very few cases, I stumble on something that is a “hard sell”. Fortunately, I have never encountered an occasion that would trigger the debate Seth is talking about. He just convinced me that it should stay that way.

Falling in love with an Israeli woman 15 years ago has put me in this slightly unusual situation today: experiencing Yom Kippur as a non-Jew in Tel Aviv. (Read more about Yom Kippur here.) While I do not have the religious tradition of this “holiday” and even think it can be dangerous for people not to drink for 25 hours in a 30C+ climate, there is something special about this day. Everything comes to a complete stand still. No cars, no shopping, no noise, no polluting smells (see graph below, air pollution drops by a factor 100), no nothing. I live right on the sea shore just north of Tel Aviv, very close to the busiest highway crossing of Israel. It is magical to see human society grind to a halt, and you can almost feel the energy of a few million people near by reflecting on what contributions they have made over the past year.  The sun setting and the only sounds remaining are those of the sea, the wind, and the birds. This is not your average car-free day, it is really about letting nature taking back over.

As designers, we need more of these moments that enable us to get rid of the clutter in our minds.