SlideMagic Blog

Arial is not as pretty as Helvetica. Arial Black in lower case looks really horrible. However, Arial Black in all-caps looks actually pretty good and is installed standard on most computers in the world. It only fits presentations with very few words on a slide.

Subtle reality distortion in Photoshop can give great results. One of my favorite uses is a black and white background with a small logo or item in color added into it. Here an image of another Idea Transplant truck on its way to a happy client with a little help of the Photoshop vanishing point filter.

I am reading up on the history of graphics design and typography and it struck me that non-professional PowerPoint presentation designers today have a similar tool set available to them as the analogue graphic design masters from the 30s to the 60s. Classic fonts, simple shapes, primitive/manual image manipulation tools.

Have a look at this poster by Joseph Muller-Brockmann(I cannot paste it here because of rights): basic fonts, basic shapes. The power of the design is solely created by proportions and shapes.

I stocked up on some more books for design inspiration.

More and more people understand the power of personal stories in presentation design. One of the easiest sources of stories are things you are passionate about. Many people are passionate about sports, and as a result, sport analogies often are used to give a more personal flavor to a presentation.

That is great, but only for a national audience. There are little cultural differences.

People in Europe have never seen the 2006 Super Bowl finale, and do not know who the coach of the New York Yankees is. And vice-versa, very few people in the U.S. will remember European sports stars.

If your presentation travels across borders, think of other ways to connect to your audience.

On the first day of my career at McKinsey we were told to put the sources of our analysis really prominently at the bottom of each chart. Even if the source of the data was yourself, simply put “Team analysis”.

Still, many presentation slides have very conspicous sources and foot notes at the bottom. It is a typographical eye sore. When you are standing up to present your slides, people are not interested in reading the small print.

I am not advocating to take the foot notes of all together. Readers who go through the deck afterwards might be interested in them. It is also very hard to keep a good book keeping of data sources, better to have them handy all the time (I do not have the discipline to keep on updating that page with all the sources in the back of the document). And finally, taking of the reference to a photographer in an image with a creative commons license is not good practice.

So instead, do the obvious. Make the font really small (you can overwrite the “8” as smallest font size in the PowerPoint drop-down menu and make it a 6). And give the font a color with low contrast with the background. In that way, you get the best of both worlds.

This might also be the way to handle your lawyer who insists to put “confidential” and other disclaimers on every slide of the deck. Page numbers can be treated the same way. Sometimes they need to be there, but only for people who stand with their nose against the screen.

The Zynga IPO presentation made a statement that they created nine out of ten of the world’s biggest social games. There are two issues with this statement.

First, this very powerful statistic is buried inside a series of bullets. For you the presenter, it is a totally obvious shortcut. For the audience that just gets to you know your story, it is simply too short to grasp in full. Instead, spend an entire chart on this one point. Show the ranking of the top 10 social games. It will take you almost exactly the same time to present, and this time, with the ranking visually in front of them, the audience will get it.

The second problem with nine out of ten is that you take up 90% of some category. It does not mean much to the audience. What makes it interesting and more understandable is to contrast the top 10 with the top 15 or top 20. Shows which very famous titles did not make it in the list. Often, a concept is defined by its opposite.

File sizes in PowerPoint can quickly mushroom. We discussed PDF-ing and/or image compressing before to get the size of your files down.

But here are 2 additional inflators of file sizes that these techniques might not catch. The first one is logos. In order to get the sharpest logo images, you need to search for large logo images. So a typical logo page with 20 or so logos can become a huge consumer of space. But the resulting logo images are actually not that big, you can compress them further (to 96 dpi) than the other, larger images in your presentation. Make sure you uncheck the apply-to-all-images-in-this-presentation box when doing this.

Another space waster is your template. If you were guilty of Frankensteining a deck together from multiple presentations, changes are that your slide master contains duplicate copies of slide masters. Especially title pages with big images can add up. Go through your slides and the slide master to clean things up.

Recently, I discovered the joys of playing music while working. I feared that it would distract me, but the opposite is true; I find that I am able to concentrate for longer stretches of time, with fewer temptations to check email or Twitter streams.

What sort of music works best for me? Jazz. Why? It is great as a background music that does not take over your mind. (I do not understand why they do not play more jazz in elevators). Pop music gets stuck in your head. Classical music has many repetitive patterns that do not work for me while designing.

I tend to switch on an Internet streaming music service to avoid listening to familiar music, and have the hassle of switching CDs every hour. (Poor store sales people who have to listen to the same track 15 times a day).

If you do not have the luxury of your own office, a good set of headphones might be a worthy investment.

What is your favorite music while working?

The Zynga IPO presentation is in the public domain, you can watch the video here. I watched the first 15 minutes of the presentation. Some comments.

Overall it is a pretty good presentation. The slides are organized, decently formated, the speakers are clear. And I guess this is what you have to do for a video-ed delivery about an investment opportunity that is aired for everyone to see on the Internet.

But what could be improved?

I think the presentation was taped with a tele-prompter as the only audience. The pace of speaking is constant. The result could have been better to put in a small live audience in the camera room, to make the delivery more real, more emotional.

Zynga must have many highly skilled graphics designers. I would shed the red border around the slides, get rid of the clouds in the title, but ad more game props and other graphics inside the slides to get the Zynga cartoon-like graphic style in the slides. The team slide with the cartoon characters and the logos of the previous employers is a good example.

The opening slide with the bullet points is an example how bullet do not stick. The slide gets put up. We look at the speaker, try to figure him out. We look at the background, the globe, the dog, start reading the points and note that the speaker is sticking exactly to the bullets. The content of the bullets does not sink in. The bullet slide could have been shortened and instead the opening shot could be focussed on just one message: we have Amazon in shopping, Google in search, Facebook in social, and now there will be Zynga in gaming for the next decade. If you want to invest in social gaming, there is no alternative but to invest in us.

Some PowerPoint documents are meant for reading, not for presenting. In many ways, PowerPoint is a more flexible tool to write text documents than a rigid word processor. It is easy to add graphs, shapes, text boxes.

If your document is a text document, treat it as such and do not try to turn it into an on-screen presentation. The resulting presentation will be something in between that is not good to present on screen, and not good to read on a monitor. It does definitely not look Zen, and the short bullet points in big fonts are too cryptic for someone to understand without explanation.

Instead have a look at what great document, brochure and newspaper designers do to make text readable. Smaller, lighter fonts for body text. Lots of white space around text blocks. Subtle use of colors. Subtle highlights of titles. Columns to avoid straining the eye across long lines.

Sometimes you can mix styles. A stunning image with a big headline that says that food shortage will be a major issue in 10 years from now. The next page is a restrained text page full of facts and information supporting your point.

There is nothing wrong with a text document in PowerPoint, as long as you admit that it is a text document.