SlideMagic Blog

I am brainstorming names for my upcoming presentation app and am currently using the working title “Pitchera”. You can start signing up for the mailing list to stay updated on progress here. In that same form you can indicate what sort of presentation designer you are, I am still pondering to what type of audience the app should be targeted at launch.

That is what many experienced executives say. It is true that not every point your want to make in a presentation needs to be spelled out in a slide. But sometimes the crucial message of a presentation gets omitted.

Some slide that has been used for a thousand times (often a bad one) is the trigger for the experienced presenter to tell her story that has been told a thousand times before. It looks like a slide presentation, but in practice the presenter is telling the story without slides.

In a focussed one-on-one meeting, the message gets across. It might get lost in a presentation for a big audience, and it will for sure not be communicated when sending the deck by email without verbal explanation.

A really fundamental point in your presentation deserves a slide. It often takes an outsider to point out to you what that point is. “Hey, that is sort of obvious, I can talk to that!” Not really.

Web design involves technical skills that a presentation or print designer does not have. At the same time, (if I may say so), presentation/print designers might have a better feeling for page layout (understatement). Yeah, yeah, I agree, on the interactive technology front the geeks still beat us.

I have blogged many times over the past few years about the similarities between web and presentation design.

Most automated web design tools are aimed at small business owners with zero design or software skills: Wix is an example, or look at Striking.ly. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover Webydo that offers a design environment similar to PowerPoint or InDesign and enables presentation/print designers to create some pretty decent web sites.

The company is still in beta, so there is always the risk that your web site might go down with it in case the company does not get traction (that is why I am giving it some publicity here). Also, the software still has some tiny bugs that I am sure will be ironed out in the near future.

As I am making slow but steady progress with my presentation app I have had a chance to sit on the other side of the table: being the one who pitches an idea, rather than my usual role as a presentation designer who gets pitched with business plans. Observations:

• Yes, not everybody loves your idea like you do (but all designers do)
• Most people form an opinion about your business without actually understanding/getting to what the truly great thing about it is
• Spending dollars on designers becomes a whole different thing when it is your own money
• When you live and breathe your own story, you actually do a lousy job pitching it to an outsider who has never heard of it. Having a pitch deck at hand (guess what, I do not have one) might actually be handy to slow myself down and take someone to the story that I assume to be common knowledge.
• People point out - rightfully - that it is not only about product, I need a market strategy

When listening to these people I hear myself speak when discussing client presentations. Funny. In any case, the process is making me a better presentation designer.

Most business presentations address the financials of an idea at some stage. Resist the temptation of using a cartoonesk clip art image to introduce the topic. Financials are serious stuff and you are not asking for your weekly candy allowance from investors or corporate decision makers.

I just gave a client some feedback on new PowerPoint template options, I might as well share my thoughts with all of you:

• Flat: no drop shadows behind fints, no gradients, no reflections. These look dirty in a world of razor sharp retina displays
• Out with the subtle waves and watermarks, they 1) make slides hard to read and interfere with the slide design and 2) make your presentation look like 2003
• Lighter fonts: there is no need to scream to get your point across. Keep a lot of white space around the slide title.
• If you have to put a logo on each slide, put it at the bottom right, not top right (or even left), you want to leave the maximum space for the slide title.
• The client spent a lot of time on the cover page, but my suggestion is to worry about it last.
• Design your template around a real presentation rather than empty pages.

Last night I attended a startup pitch event in New York where contestants had 60 seconds to pitch their idea, followed by 2 minutes of questioning by a panel of judges. Some observations on elevator pitches:

• No slides (everyone got that right)
• Get right to it, no uh oh, my background is, a small joke
• Most important thing in 60 seconds: get people to understand what you actually do. When rehearsing the 60 second pitch (easy to do) test not only whether people like your idea, but more importantly, do they understand what your idea is. I struggled to understand about one third of the ideas, and I am used to deciphering startup pitches, so it must have been worse for other members of the audience. Luckily the panel of experts was helpful and dragging it out of people in the Q and A. Example: an in-restaurant ordering system actually turned out to be a $3,000 table where guest could order food using an integrated touch screen.
• Avoid going down a feature list, a user can do this, a user can do that, instead stick to the overall concept
• Do end your pitch with something more uplifting than “That’ it!”, even if you feel embarrassed that there are still 25 seconds left on your clock. This is actually a good thing.
• Tell people why the thing you do is so tricky. Example: nobody really got excited about a group video chat app until we learned that they solved a very complex technical issue in establishing a 1-to-many live video connection in 2 seconds
• Breathe, pause, speak calmly. It is better to skip a few points than speaking to rapidly, nervously.
• In this case, the audience had a say in selecting the winner. They use different criteria than the professional VCs in the panel. For an audience entertainment value, or actually even the ability to remember what you were about after 20 pitches might be more important than the credentials of the founding team of your company. Pick the right battle, at the right time.

Often when I visit a client and we do some on-site slide edits together, I am surprised to see how people suffer from working in PowerPoint because of things that can easily be prevented:

• Make sure you actually see what you do. Make your work area as big as possible, reduce the size of the slide note box to the minimum. If you have a docking station for your laptop, use it to hook up to the big monitor. Ask IT to help sort out a 2-screen configuration, where you can have presentation inputs (an older version with comments) can be on the small screen while you do your edits on the big screen (I went further and work on two 27" monitors, plus the 3rd  small screen of my laptop, one of the best investments I have ever made).
• Write down actions that you use all the time (aligning objects, [un]grouping items, switch to slide sorter view and back, etc.) and spend 20 minutes Googling how to do them using short cuts. Read this old post about how to create the essential PowerPoint toolbar.
• Use a proper mouse and not the IBM/Lenovo red dot
• If your computer is slow, close down windows, applications, de-clutter your machine until you have only the files open that you actually need
• Ask someone in IT to sort out the default settings in your PowerPoint template so that you do not have to look for fonts, colours, etc.

Flat design is the big trend in graphic design at the moment, and it is great news for the layman designer. You can stop worrying about what you thought were “sophisticated” graphics: 3D, drop shadows, gradients, reflections.

Take the Microsoft approach for example: blacks and greys, one bright accent color, tiles spaced out in a grid, thin font, sharp edges. Perfect for a presentation look and very easy to replicate. Resist the temptation to make it “sophisticated” again…

If you are interested in the Microsoft design revamp, here is a 45 minute video that provides a look in the kitchen:

I am working with architects to help them pitch a building concept. The client requirement: no PowerPoint presentation, so we are designing the meeting around an informal discussion of sketches (some of them made on the spot).

PowerPoint will be reduced to a picture database from which we can pull up a building image quickly if (and only if) needed in the meeting.