SlideMagic Blog

The best graphics design work is often the most simple one. Noisy Decent Graphics pointed to these beautiful Olympic posters designed by student Alan Clarke. (They were not adopted by the organizers of the Olympics though).

The bouncing ball in the tennis poster gave me inspiration for a concept that I can use in PowerPoint charts. Semi-transparent circles (with different levels of transparency) flying over the screen are great to show movement. Be sure to remember the law of reflection though,  :-).

Sometimes two things go together hand in hand, they make each other stronger. Big interlocking wheels are a great way to show this in PowerPoint. Add some nice circular text and here you go. Resist the tempation to make them turn using an animation though…

This cover of a PwC report is an example of an excellent use of images.

• You get the point instantly, even from a far distance, the concept is right
• Both the report cover and the image have lots of “white space”
• The image is a completely natural and real one, no artificial models, compositions
• There is a great sense of depth and perspective in the image, search “sheep + road” in a stock photography site and you get a whole bunch of very unexciting pictures
• The picture is cropped nicely, see the road running on the golden proportion
• The image colors blend in with those used in the report (blue highlights)

Your colors scheme is the most important driver of your presentation’s look and feel. Much more important than logos or other graphical elements on the page. Adobe’s kuler is a popular example of an online tool that helps you pick colors (even from an image if you want to) and define a nice matching color scheme.

Recently, ColoRotate has been released. ColoRotate uses a 3 dimensional approach to picking colors wich it claims is closer to the natural way the brain processes colors. It relies less on the sliders that are common in kuler and other tools. Color schemes you create can be shared in an online community, similar to kuler.

I have played around with the tool a little bit and like it, but it requires a bit of studying and practice before you get the hang of playing with the 3D axes and their impact. This tool is likely to appeal most to graphical professionals.

Having said that, the web site contains a good introduction article to the art and science behind picking beautiful color schemes.

Underlining words just doesn’t look good. Especially not in headlines. Use a bold font instead, or italics inside body text to emphasize.

Weekend reading. I was reading some stories of George and Martha this weekend to my children, and was reminded of a great blog post by Nancy Duarte about leveraging your audience’s anticipation in your presentation. Let them do a bit of the work as well, rather than just sitting down while being spoon-fed with content.

The “slide” with the grinning George is a more powerful one than Martha walking away to get a towel while the information conveyed is the same.

The images are scans from this book. Recommended for any parent.

Speaker notes are a great tool to prepare a presentation. You can write out your thoughts in sentences, independent from the visual structure of your slide (sequential instead of parallel). In PowerPoint presenter view, you can display them on your own computer, while the audience only sees the clean slide.

Speaker notes are usually somewhat hidden. You can see them if you have the editing window open at the bottom of the slide edit screen, or when you print the notes pages. It is easy to forget that you’ve entered them.

Nonetheless, they are an integral part of the PPT file. You send the PPT, you send the notes. So be careful in case you use notes to add side comments like “note to self: do not bring up the poor 2008 performance! :-)”. A sure guarantee that it will be brought up during the presentation. UPDATE: Akash Bhatia provides a wonderful solution in the comments. I have re-written my post below:

One solution could be to send a PDF version of your docoument. But there is a smart feature in PowerPoint 2007. Hit the Office button, select “prepare” and then click “inspect document”. It lets you purge all kind of personal information from your presentation, including presenter notes. Make sure to save your file under a different name before saving.

Taking two more slides from my presentation about investor presentations.

There is no point in going on, and on, and on about something that is already common knowledge. Everyone assumes that online video will be a huge market. (Of course, we could be collectively wrong). Don’t spend your valuable presentation time on this.

On the contrary, focus on your obvious weaknesses. Highlighting weaknesses does not mean shooting yourself in the foot by bringing up details that harm your investment case. Instead, think what questions any intelligent human being would have when listening to your story. There is no avoiding. If you don’t address them, the questions will remain.

“So, you are trying to build a page rank-based search engine?” “Yes, exactly, you picked that up fast. Let me show you our cool technology and some pretty impressive first search results” Wrong answer.

Most of the slides in my presentation about VC pitch lessons do not stand on their own. In a series of blog posts I will take some of them and add the full long-hand description of what they express.

Tell what you are about in the very first slide of the presentation. VCs like to put in you a box. If you don’t do it for them, they will spend the time guessing while you deliver your carefully crafted buildup of the story. People who are busy guessing, do not register other content.

Telling what you are about is not the same as running the entire presentation on the first slide, and repeat the same story on the other 20 slides in the deck. “We are an online book store”. “Aah, now I know”. No more explanation needed.

One of the last pages in every venture capitalist funding presentation is the “hockey stick” of revenues and profits shooting through the roof. VCs expect a bit of optimism from a startup, but at the same time want to do a reality check on these numbers.

I often use a company snapshot, a tree of the key factors that add up/multiply to the projected revenue figure. Make sure the factors are real things you can touch: people, visits, etc.  CORRECTION: Also make sure the tree adds up and calculates through, something that cannot be said about the example below.