SlideMagic Blog

One of the new slides I included in my presentation lessons for entrepreneurs deck: talk about the elephant in the room. Some issues are just so obvious that you have to address them (Mark Suster gives a few examples here).

OK, you can decide to ignore them. The potential investor will say “thank you very much” and mentally shelf your pitch already while shaking your hand on the way to the door (peaking over your shoulder to that enormous animal standing in the corner).

Image via David Blackwell

I never saw this before: infographics on food packaging. Nice work by Audree Lapierre.

More pictures here. Found via FFFFound.

A nice video based on a speech by Daniel Pink about what makes us tick. It is being drawn for you live.

Thank you Orli Naschitz.

Many presentations are about ambition: “we want to double in size in 5 years”. That’s basically creating another company exactly as the one you have now. You can use the concept of a biological cell division to visualize this.

The stretching of the circle is done using the edit points function in PowerPoint. The text is stretched using the function “text effects” in the format ribbon of PowerPoint.

I do not use standard Microsoft PowerPoint templates very often, but I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by this 2010 calendar template on the Microsoft web site. That saved me a lot of time in designing a kick off presentation for a new project. Tons more here.

Low hanging fruit, it is easy, a shot for open goal, come on: you can do it.

Image via iStockPhoto

Recently, I spoke for the finalists of the BizTec business plan competition in Tel Aviv on how to pitch to VCs. The slides were an adaptation from an earlier talk on the same subject. Here they are.

It is very hard to capture the sensation of a wide panoramic view in a photograph. Making a picture of that stunning view will look boring when you view it later. Not when you capture an object nearby as well.

Impressionist painters use this technique in the composition of their works. See this painting by Alfred Sisley (Village On The Banks Of The Seine at Villeneuve La Garenne). Unusually, the background of the scene is actually lighter than the foreground.

I used this lone tree in one of my own photographs of a recent visit to the ruins of the Masada fortress near the Dead Sea here in Israel.

Think about this when your pick your next stock image in your presentation.

Most presentations are written by people without a professional graphics, design, or art background (including me). While it is almost impossible to catch up on the technical skills of these professional illustrators, it can pay off to take a daily dive in their work. The blog unstage (link here) is an example of a daily source of information that you should add to your RSS reader. Example below: a poster by Network Osaka. (I find poster designs especially useful as a source of ideas for slides.)

This ad about safe driving uses an interesting concept: the eye test. You can use it in a PowerPoint presentation exactly as it is used here: one variable is declining/increasing and visibility of another goes down.

Another use could be some sort of health check: “how well protected is your business?”, using a different image that repeats and gets smaller all the time.

Via Ads of the world.