SlideMagic Blog

McKinsey and other management consultants love 2x2 matrices (and obviously 3x3s). Personally, I think they are often overused (framework overload).

Not every categorization can be crammed into this framework.

• The axes need to be logical
• The groups needs to lead to 4 categories, i.e., leaving one or two boxes as “not applicable” does not make sense
• They work particularly well when you want to show things moving from one category to the other
• They are good to show that something stands out (from for example the competition) by popping up in the top-right corner

Here are some other techniques to group items on a PowerPoint slide using line and venn diagrams:

• Diagram 2 - “you cannot have it both ways”
• Diagram 3 - “the best of both worlds”

Creating PowerPoint presentations is all about design.

The COLORBURNED blog author shared the content of his RSS reader in this post with a list of 127 RSS feeds “that all designers should subscribe to” (the comments add a few more).

Not sure whether I will do that, but it does provide some good weekend reading.

Putting a summary slide as page 1 in your PowerPoint presentation is tricky.

• A diluted and boring summary might turn the audience off (“let’s check email on my phone”)
• A summary chart might “give away the point” of your presentation too early
• Some presenters might get stuck on page one and tell the whole story without using any other slides (sometimes this can be a good thing, a presentation with PowerPoint)

A good page one is a slide that gives the audience some clue about what’s going to happen and presents an interesting teaser about what is to come.

Now that I come to think of it - a good summary chart is like a good headline

The following image (purchased from iStockPhoto) adds another possibility to presentation opening concepts I discussed before (here, here, and here). “Let’s fast forward to the end before diving in”. Shrink the image to one side of the screen and add your teaser in big-font-text

There are many ways to spell monetary amounts. Pick one and use it consistently throughout your PowerPoint presentation:

• $, US$, USD, I actually like these 3-letter abbreviations, no searching on keyboards, no need to search and insert symbols, every currency has one that looks consistent
• Billion, bn
• Million, M, m
• 000, thousand, k
• Decimal point, decimal comma
• Thousand separator point, comma, or none
• Negative number with “-”, or in between brackets

Unfortunately, detail does matter in presentation design…

Going a bit (only a bit) against the “Zen” presentation philosophy, I have argued before that overwhelmingly complex PowerPoint charts could be used in a large keynote presentation, if (big if) they are positioned well.

One way to use it is as follows:

• Put up the overwhelmingly complex chart, message: “it’s complex, don’t even try to understand this now”
• In a subsequent chart, wash out the original object
• Start highlighting individual components for further explanation

You can use the “paste as PNG” function in PowerPoint to transfer any object (including complex groupings) into a picture and subject it to the regular picture manipulation tools available to you: resize (a pain for complex PowerPoint objects with text in them), crop, and of course re-color.

Recoloring the image with a very light overlay creates a wash out effect that you then can use as a background for subsequent highlights. I have tried to explain all this in the following SlideShare presentation (click on “screen” image at bottom right for full screen mode).

Weekend reading (1 day earlier than the rest of the world in Israel). I stumbled on this great ad for Adobe Photoshop CS4.

It shows what graphics and presentation design is all about, a creative process working with shapes and colors and a blank piece of paper. Computers make it easier to work, but in our mind we should go “back to basics” now and then. Go to this Flickr stream for more detailed/hi-res images. Agency Bates141. Via Zurb.

There is a lot of (white) space for self expression on Twitter in its background image. (Not implying that “cluttering it up” will make it look better though) The “The Closet Entrepreneur” posted a tutorial how to create a Twitter background in PowerPoint. It includes a template with the areas you should leave blank for Twitter’s own content.

P.S.: follow me on Twitter. Via Digital Inspiration

I have put the source file of the happily dancing equalizer in PowerPoint now online. I uploaded it to Slideshare, you can see the animations if you download the presentation (a PPS file), the regular SlideShare embed does not support it.

Reading through a web site with guidelines for designing web pages for dyslexic users, I realized how valuable these recommendations can be for any audience, not just people with this condition.

This is a PowerPoint presentation design guide 101:

• Choose a big, san-serif font
• Avoid capitalization
• Apply a calm background, no watermarks
• Don’t righ-justify text
• Minimize use of italics
• Keep things short, write in a simple style
• Use bullets (if you have to), don’t write proze
• Refer to the reader as “you”
• Stick to narrow columns, text lines
• Use pictures

No audience member […] has ever said, “it was exciting, useful and insightful but far too short.”

Read the full (short) post.