SlideMagic Blog

I attended a concert by Alanis Morissette the other day in Tel Aviv. A critic of the local Israeli newspaper Haaretz found she did not sing well, but despite that everyone in the audience loved her performance.

This presentation design blog is not the right place to go into technical artist reviews. What is interesting however, is to see how Alanis managed to win the crowd over simple by being her natural self. No professional crowd pleasing techniques, no real eye contact into the audience, just pacing back and forth staring in the distance left and right of the stage. She actually came across as shy.

The audience wants you to succeed, and preferably using your own natural style.

I have Microsoft Office software open on a Mac for 10 hours a day and while the program is very stable, there are a few occasions where it can crash. I have my theories why some of these happen, but even if they are just superstition, I would recommend anyone to set a very aggressive autosave window (5 minutes or less) and hit save before going into specific actions.

• If Dropbox (and probably Box as well) start syncing a file that you have open in PowerPoint you are at risk. Especially when they are large and saving takes more than a second. You can see the Dropbox icon moving when it is syncing, to be save cancel sync for the time that you are editing
• The same problem (and in a much bigger way) is Apple Time Machine backup. If Time Machine backs up a big PowerPoint file while you have it open you go down. Stop Time Machine backup, or install a utility that enables you to control when backups are happening. (There are many of them here, I have not tried these, so at your own risk)
• Rapid clicking and editing of data charts, open one, edit one, close one, change one. Excel might get confused, is waiting for some input from PowerPoint, who is waiting for input for Excel. Always hit save before and after major data chart manipulations.

Please do not use that sentence in a presentation.

If you want to make a dramatic difference to the look of a presentation, do it early in the design process. After a number of iterations a senior executive gets used to the look and feel of a slide, even if it is not a pretty one. The CEO sees a placeholder (no longer a slide with content) as the back drop of which to tell the story. Changing the design of a placeholder her makes her feel she has to redesign her story from scratch.

Here are 2 movies I recently watched that talk about the revolution in the creative industry and how individuals can now deliver the work that a few years ago only could be done by big firms. This is also true for my own firm, where I often work alongside big PR or Investor Relations consultancies.

Indie Game: The Movie is about independent game developers realising their dream and incorporating some very personal stories in their work

PressPausePlay is a more general film covering a lot of creative disciplines

It depends:

• To make an emotional point, or show a human connection to whatever you want to say, show the face (pick a stock image that is not fake, but shows a real person)
• To show a gesture or an object, it is better to crop the face out and zoom in on what you want to show

Frameworks are great to structure information but incredibly boring to present, especially if you have to repeat them many times over.

“Over the next 30 minutes I will describe each of the 15 business units using this framework: challenges, opportunities, profit potential, next steps. Here is business unit 1. ”

Oh no! 14 more to go…

It is better to tell a specific story about each business unit, actually on purpose using a different approach to tell it. The 15 data tables can go to the appendix for bed time reading.

I am glad to speak live about startup investor pitches in a Google Hangout organised by the Google Developer community in Israel. The event is this Wednesday 14:00-14:30 Israel time. I think up to 9 people can join the interactive conversation, but Google will live stream the event so other people can follow it “on mute”

Details of the event can be found here.

When someone emails you a PowerPoint presentation, PowerPoint remembers the screen size that was last used. If that version was created on a small laptop, the slides will show up as tiny rectangles on a big desktop monitor.

All the time I see people making edits to presentations in tiny tiles. Why not give your eyes a break and scale up the slide to fit the page? Getting rid of toolbars, the speaker notes field, and reducing the outline on the left will deliver some more screen real estate.

Some slides require a more dramatic introduction than just plopping it on the screen. I often use a blank slide wit a teaser sentence (not “the solution”) for this purpose. It breaks the flow and brings the audience attention back to the presenter.