SlideMagic Blog

I wrote about pptPlex and Prezi before, but for the first time I actually spend some real time to get into the details with 2 tools to let you design presentations on a big canvas, which you can mover around during a presentation, and you can zoom in and out of.

• pptPlex is a PowerPoint plugin developed by Microsoft as part of their Office labs.
• Prezi is a web-based tool with its own user interface, independent of PowerPoint or Keynote.

An introduction video about pptPlex:

An introduction video about Prezi:

Both of these tools have a learning curve, and I would be curious to see whether any of you have tried them out as well. Some of my observations below could simply be because I am ignorant of some of the features of the software.

My overall comment is that I really like the ability to freely move around, zoom in and out in presentation content. For example in fund raising presentations (small smart audience with little time), questions from the audience might take over the pre-set order in which slides are presented. But this also brings me to the main “negative” feedback of these tools: both are basically “frameworks” that link a series of slides or objects. I am missing the ability to design a presentation really as just one infinite canvas. The effect you get in Google Earth: zooming into ever more detail.

When you use very little words on a slide, the position of the them becomes crucial. I always correct the automatic line wrapping manually.

• Make sure that key noun-verb combinations are placed together in one line
• Adjust the text (using different words) to make sure that there are no big empty white spaces in a line because of long words that did not fit in (I rarely use hyphens)
• Re-order “sentences” according to their length

Either the designers of this ad wanted to make something that is hard to read on purpose, or this is a mistake.

Via Ads of the World.

The standard chart templates in Excel and PowerPoint create fragile, thin graph lines. No one can see them. Right-click the line and make it bold and fat and it will stand out.

iQ font - When driving becomes writing / Full making of.

An unusual approach to font design. You can download the font here. Via Swissmiss. If you are into design, you should follow her blog.

The weekend in Israel is starting, I am posting a bit early because of a busy social calendar. Recently I needed a large number of images of young people texting on their mobile phone. Flickr beats any professional stock image site completely in these type of situations where you need “real people”. Click through the presentation below to get a sense of the type of images I picked.

I am not sure whether this is new, but I only came across this tool recenlty. You provide What The Font with an image of a text sample and it gives you suggestions what font might have been used.

Robert Scoble posted a number of videos with previews of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010 release. Here is the one about PowerPoint 2010 (speaking is Chris Bryant, product manager on the Office 2010 team): Here are the main points covered in this video (which does not mean that these are the major new features in PowerPoint 2010)

1. More “cinematic” transitions. More spectacular slide transitions. I never use any form of slide transition, they distract the audience, or worst case: makes them laugh while you are presenting a very serious subject
2. Animation painter. Copy and paste animation effects from one object to another, not essential
3. Better video integration. I like this, I think that video will be used increasingly in presentations. Today, integrating rich media into your presentation is a high-risk activity that is likely to result in things going wrong (technically) in the middle of your presentation. PowerPoint 2010 allows you edit videos and sync them with animations
4. Backstage view: an elaborate screen to control file protection, compression, etc.

Here is my (partial) wish list of features for a new PowerPoint release. Some of them are probably impossible to implement for the moment…

• A powerful 3D engine to control where to put shapes on a surface, where to put light sources, pretty much like professional design programs like AutoCAD. The third dimension is only used to add some effects to a PowerPoint slide, it could be so much more. It would literally open a whole new design dimension to slide design
• Fully integrated canvas zooming a la PowerPoint plex or Prezi, enabling you to work on one big interactive slide that you can zoom in and out of
• A powerful animation control engine, not more flashy effects, but a clear sequence editor to move objects across a slide to exact locations, including a good solution to deal with and edit layers of overlapping objects.
• Tight cloud integration. Files are getting bigger, collaboration changes. This video about PowerPoint 2010 did not address these “workflow” issues, but I think they are being addressed in the overal Microsoft Office 2010 release.

I came across this template in a meeting yesterday. I am not picking on this specific company that is using this PowerPoint template, it is just a great example of templates that almost all companies in high-tech use. “Business-like” settings, professional models and big logos and graphical elements repeated on every page.

Technically, these templates are well executed (images, composition, colors). Your presentations look professional but they do not really stand out. They could look so much better and more original.

I do realize that creating a standard PowerPoint template for large corporations that have thousands of employees, most of them not skilled in PowerPoint, that have to produce documents that look vaguely consistent in format is a challenge.

Some suggestions:

• Avoid professional models in slides, but especially in templates. They are not real people.
• Get rid of “frames” around slides, the blue line at the bottom is not required
• Avoid heavy graphical elements on the page, especially at the top. It makes the slide too heavy
• I do like using images as separators for different sections in presentations. Instead of using images of models, hire a photographer and use real images: anonymous people in the street of cities your offices are located, images of a delivery truck unloading your product for different stores, cafes that feature your beer brand on their building facade. If you want to use people, take real ones (employees from all over the world that use your software) and include many, many, many images to avoid boredom of seeing the same face

Mark Suster, an entrepreneur-turned VC at GRP Partners, is in the process of creating an excellent outline for a VC pitch presentation. Subscribe to his blog “Both sides of the table” and/or follow his progress on this very useful overview page.

More VC pitch resources here, and my own contributions on the topic are here.

Overheard in the office:

[Person walking into the office] “That’s a nice chart you are making there, what is it for?”

[Me] “A fund raising presentation for a new interesting startup.”

[Person] “Tell me more about it.”

[Me] "OK. It’s not confidential. Here is the deal"[Short and sweet story follows]

[Person] “That sounds like a great investment opportunity”

[Person leaves the office]

[Me thinking] “I need to re-write this presentation from scratch…”

Sometimes the best presentations get created after the work is basically finished. All the pieces of the puzzle fall in one place. There is nothing wrong with opening up a blank screen and re-writing the entire deck in one big burst of creativity. It would not have been possible without the time spent on the first version.