SlideMagic Blog

Tel Aviv uses a very dominant street painting scheme: red-white and you cannot park, blue-white and you can park but have to pay. The colors are so bright that the city looks like one big Formula One circuit. Why not use more modest colors? Grey blue and olive green? The picture below gives an example, freshly painted pavements (you have to re-paint often in the sunny climate here).

The same is true for PowerPoint shapes. Whenever I can, I omit the lines around shapes (shape outlines). It makes your chart a lot calmer.

Image credit: Flickmor

Finally the business plan is ready. You Googled and asked around to make sure everything is inside: the market pain, the technology solution, the team, the market size, the competitive differentiation, the financial forecast, the intellectual property and patents. The result: 150 pages of PowerPoint.

Do not use this business plan to present the business plan. OK, you used PowerPoint, but not to design a presentation. You used PowerPoint to write a document that is not suitable to put on a projector screen.

How can you figure out what presentation you do need? Invite a friend over without any knowledge about your business venture. Take an empty piece of paper or a white board. Start telling your story. Scribble things on the white board. If need, zoom deep into the business plan PowerPoint file and put one chart on the screen (i.e., an overview of the competitors). After 30 minutes take a step back and see:

• What issues did you discuss, which topics did you ignore?
• In what order did you discuss them?
• What were the hand drawings you needed to explain your idea?
• Which charts in the 150-page deck did you have to pull out?
• What questions did your friend ask that caught you by surprise?

Here is the outline of your investor pitch presentation.

Here is a video of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey explaining the success of Twitter and other ventures he is working on (with the benefit of hindsight). Interesting from a presentation perspective for 2 reasons:

1. The importance of visualization to crystallize your ideas
2. How a minimalist presentation approach (hardly any slides, restraint presentation style) still can inspire an audience.

Found via Fred Wilson

I grew up next to a rail track and always wondered why friends who came over to play looked startled when a massive freight train would shake the house. Currently I live close to an airport and my guest are running to window to see whether that plane actually hit our building or not.

I hardly notice anything. The brain - in a form of self defense - is filtering out the noise.

The same is true in presentations. Endless bullet points, cliche language, we heard it so often that the audience is filtering things out. Speaking louder or using bright colors does not really help. Try to be different/original and people will start paying attention again.

In the 1990s, when we were still relying on print documents at McKinsey, I would hold the deck against a strong light source to look through it to see whether repeating elements such as titles and page numbers were lined up properly. (Something like this cartoon machine)

“Jumping titles” are the result of slightly misplaced items on a slide sequence: when you hit page down and scroll through a series of slides quickly you see the titles moving up, down, right, and left. How to prevent it?

1. Use drawing guides (excellent post on PowerPoint Ninja)
2. Control-C object on one page, control-V on the next page. The element will appear in exactly the same location. Good for sequences of diagrams with buildups.
3. Set the exact location of an object in PowerPoint (format ribbon, size, position)

• Bullet points are bad for presentations, so use the opportunity if you can get away with just one brief sentence on a slide: resist the urge to put a bullet point in front of it, even if the Microsoft PowerPoint template really encourages you to do so. Bullets are only for lists of 2 or more sentences, (and lists of 2 or more sentences should be avoided if you can).

In the middle of the video, they show you how they did this. After you’ve seen that, you still don’t get it.

“Low-hanging fruit” is a term that is over-used in corporate meeting rooms. Recently I used a nice giraffe image to create a tongue in cheek slide explaining that all the easy opportunities have been picked away. (Yes I now giraffes eat leaves and not fruit…). Image found on iStockPhoto.

I think yes, but really tiny ones, in a color with a very low contrast with the background. Standard PowerPoint templates put huge page numbers, dates, and other graphical distractions on every page. It looks ugly, and having a visible counter running on your pages might make your audience wonder how many more numbers there are before the end.

Why still put them on (in a very small font)? It makes it easer to discuss comments/improvement suggestions on your slides, it is easy to run a meeting with printouts and related to that, it makes it easier to put your print deck together if you drop your pages on the floor.

Many presentations start with a summary page, and most of them are stuck in the middle. They give a bit more information than “I am going to tell you why this is the best investment in cloud computing that you can make” and a bit less information than what is needed for the message to stick (the audience internalizing the logic in their head, and more importantly, their heart).

Worst case scenario: you give the presentation twice: spending 20 minutes on the summary page (which the audience does not understand), then repeating the whole story in the presentation (which bores the audience that misses the details and nuances “oh, we covered that already”). Blackberry on, attention off.

So, have the courage to keep the summary page really, really short. On the first page, tell the audience vaguely in what “box” they should put you in. “We do cloud computing platforms”. Then use a fast-paced sequence of slides to explain the idea that you try to get across. So, now your audience knows, feels, and understands.

After this, the more traditional stuff can come in, even summarized by an agenda page or summary.