SlideMagic Blog

Icons can work really well if they can be kept very simple, and refer to very simple things like a cog wheel for settings and a 1980s floppy disk for save.

When you try to summarise very complicated concepts into very complicated icons, things get lost. In those cases, a box with a few words will do a better job explaining what you mean.

Maps in stock photo sites are not designed for use in presentations. I hope designers are reading below to find out what is wrong with them:

• Crops are focussed on the target country. But why crop so many of the surrounding areas out? Israel for example has a vertical shape. I would prefer to put in a map of the entire Middle East, and put text boxes over those part of the map I do not need. It will look much better than a narrowly cropped map
• People use blunt colours and/or gradients. As a designer, I want to set the colour tone of the presentation myself. Much better options are muted greys, or better, vector files I can recolour myself.
• Map designers add city names hardwired in ugly typography. Also, they add roads and other useless geographical information. I will not be using these maps to find my way, if I need to add cities, I would like to do it myself, in the font of the presentation deck.

So how do I pick maps in stock photo sites? Usually, I go for vector images for a far wider area than I need. I zoom in and strip out all the information I do not need.

In tables, I prefer to right-align numbers with the same amount of decimals after the dot. A footnote reference can break that line. Two ways to solve it: One: add the ** as a separate text box on top of the table. Two: if you have to use many footnotes use numbers [i.e. 7) instead of ******] to keep your footnote references short.

This is a great question to ask yourself after you finished designing the presentation.

“Well, what I really want is raising a bit of extra equity to de-leverage the company (slide 12, yellow bars). I think it is a really good deal for investors, since it looks like the stock is undervalued (slide 24, bottom right). Management has delivered on all its promises over the past 5 years (slide 15) and no one in the industry has a scale that is even closely to ours (slide 37 on the left), so it looks like our advantage will hold out for the foreseeable future.”

 Your presentation can be shorter: focussed slides upfront, with extra info in the appendix.

White letters on a white background enable you to make a nice slow-reveal slide. I used it for a client in BI (business intelligence) that creates insight by overlapping multiple analyses.

Custom fonts (fonts that are not installed as standard on most computers) give your presentation a nice distinctive look from the rest of the world that uses Calibri and Arial. It comes at a price: viewers who do not have your font installed on their machines get a poor experience.

For these practical reasons, I leaned towards sticking with standard fonts in business presentations. Things are changing though:

• PDF is now my preferred format for sending presentations to people: it can easily be viewed on mobile devices and has a nicer, more permanent feel to it than an editable file. Once a PDF is created, fonts will display correctly on any device
• There are more and more free fonts available that make it technically easy to download and install a font quickly, without having to count the number of seats that use the font in order to get in trouble with the license I paid for.

So, when do I consider using a custom font?

1. Smaller organisations that are relatively tech-savvy. The big traditional Fortune 500 company is still locked into Calibri for the time being I am afraid.
2. When I can use an open source font, not so much to save money, but to save the hassle of having to deal with license seat counts

For people bored with PowerPoint, Prezi can be an alternative presentation design platform. It is web-based, has powerful zoom effects and enables non-linear presentations. I would suggest to keep the following in mind when using Prezi for a business presentation:

1. Stick to a linear story line, especially for larger audiences. If you have 20 minutes in front of 500 people, it has hard to get your message across using a random and unpredictable flow.
2. Use the Prezi zooming and moving effects where you really need it, and not just for spectacular slide transitions. The audience will get motion sickness, or worse, will start giggling when you discuss your very serious business topic.
3. Try to bring the look and feel of your Prezi in line with your regular PowerPoint colours. You will not have time to design Prezis for every presentation you do.

In the beginning of a presentation design project, things are fluid. You are open to different approaches to tell the story, the look and feel of slides. But once you created a good first draft, you become hesitant to change it, even when smart people give good advice. I have seen many decks that started with an apology: this was the slide deck that they used since last year, but now we tell the story a bit different. Have the courage to change your presentation as your story evolves.

I get this question a lot. My logo is set in Futura Condensed Extra Bold. Other major brands have followed me…

Pages with headshots of people are always a pain to design: the names and titles of people can vary greatly in length.

I spotted this neat trick in a promotion email for this book. People with long titles have been moved to the bottom where a 2 line job title does not break the grid. Also, the right column looks a bit wider than the first 2 to me, again creating a bit more breathing space for long names and/or titles.

Now, hopefully your CEO has a short name (she always wants to go first).