SlideMagic Blog

Nature or artists usually do not stick to color theory to create an interesting color scheme. Jazz bands really start to swing when the drummer goes slightly off beat. If you restrict yourself to complementary colors, your choices are limited and the look of your presentation resembles those of many others who use the same approach.

Instead, get inspired by art (try Art Authority) or a or a colorful sea creature, or a photograph (check out Steve McCurry’s blog) and upload the image to a color extraction tool such as Adobe Kuler. It will make you work more original, plus it adds a little personal secret to your presentation, your favorite painter or that memorable place that is hidden in the slides somewhere.

The other day I put a large picture of member of a management team in an investor presentation. “Hey, that one is much too large!” was the reaction of the client.

College year books and newspapers have programmed us to look for passport-sized images of people. Usually they have an inconsistent color and/or background, and people have an awkward starte into the lens of the photo booth.

You do not see images like this in well-designed magazines. Why not give your presentation that same look and feel. This is especially important if you email a presentation ahead of the actual live performance. The person opening the document might not know you and a big image might help establish a better connection.

So bigger images of management team members is one step. The next step up is to hire a good photographer and actually take a shot of the team working together. Preferably in a different pose than the ones we see in wedding family photos or football team shots.

I do not use many Excel keyboard shortcuts. But my switch from Windows to Mac OSX showed that I really was dependent on a few that were hard to find in my new software. Maybe you have the same issue.

• In Windows, I constantly used the Office 2010 (Windows) CTRL-MINUS and CTRL-PLUS to add/remove columns and rows. For some reason CTRL-PLUS does not work in Office 2011. To insert a row or column on the Mac, select it and hit CMD-I instead.
• I use the soft line break in an Excel cell a lot, on the PC it is ALT-ENTER, on the Mac it is ALT-CMD-ENTER.

“Look, we have proof! Excel says that we will be a $50m company in year 5, the hockey stick revenue forecast shows it all!”

No investor will buy this story. She knows the forecast is ridiculously optimistic, but she can check 2 things:

1. Is there more logic to the $50m than a conservative 5% of a $1bn IDC market forecast? Have you thought about how your business works, and how to think about its revenue potential? If not, the investor should invest in a company that claims the other 95% of the $1bn.
2. Are you driven, motivated, determined enough to go after the $50m against all the odds?

In other words, do you believe it yourself (really)? That might be the sign an investor is looking for.

In the first second you meet an investor, you want her to stop guessing what you are doing. Describe in a short sentence what you are about, then move on with the more detailed pitch. An investor who is guessing what you are about is not listening to you.

I pulled up the trending startups of last month on AngelList.

1. These slogans are targeted at investors, not (potential) customers
2. They do not contain buzzwords or fluff (at least 99% of them) and describe what you are doing (not one of these is enhancing the social browsing experience with sticky semantic and relevant content dissemination)
3. They can be very descriptive about what a company is about. Often direct comparisons to existing companies are used as a short cut.
4. Startups are not afraid to put these type of descriptions in the public domain. The benefit of interesting a large potential investor base far outweighs the thread of someone copying the idea (based on the slogan) overnight

Here are the first ones that come up:

• A high-quality, low-cost 3D printer that works out of the box
• Safe driver score
• Everyone’s second job
• Spy on competitor’s display ads
• Detailed social analytics for marketers, brands and agencies
• Meetup for mealtimes
• The Internet, peer-reviewed
• Video advertising platform for mobile apps
• Check in your daily accomplishments
• Evolving the user experience for web interaction
• An augmented reality gamification platform
• Simple social business CRM
• Mobile customer service ratings
• Daily deals matched with industry leading publishers through editorials
• Market place for artisan food
• Flipboard for documents
• Pinterest for places - spots you love from people you trust
• Yelp for health
• Beautifully simple dashboards
• Building the neighbor graph
• Cloud-based platform for visual and statistical text analysis

Automated charting is great if you want to analyze data quickly; grab an excel table and turn it into a chart with one click.

It is different in presentation design though. When you generate a chart in PowerPoint, the colors are off, there are ugly tick marks, the labels do not look right. In most cases, I create the chart almost entirely by hand. The only thing that PowerPoint does is generate the actual bars or columns, the rest is put on by me as text labels in the right place.

Usually a presentation only contains a few very important data charts, and they deserve the time to get them absolutely right.

I will be in Paris around the LeWeb’11 conference early December. Feel free to contact me if you would like to hook up in person.

Here is a shape that I recently constructed to highlight that a company was doing lots and lots of things and all of it got focussed on just one area of expertise. The chart was not designed to read out the individual bits, but rather show that there are many, many, many aspects. Later, the presentation elaborates them one by one. You can see that I created the shape through a number of aligned triangles, alternating between the foreground color and white. Make sure that the biggest one is in the back, the smallest one at the front.

Slightly off topic topday. Here is a holiday gift idea for small children: a very cheap, simple digital camera with a huge memory card. The key is that the buttons are easy to use. The camera app on a discarded iPhone or iPod is still to fiddly for a small child to use.

The result is an amazing stream of pictures of the life of a child through her own eyes. Camera positions are low and subjects are interesting. Art work that she created. A castel that was built. Daddy checking email on his phone again and not paying attention to you. A nanny preparing the bath water. Mammy fixing car seats.

If you upload the camera images together with the ones you are taking, you get an amazing recording of family life organized with time stamps. Lower the resolution and the file size on the camera so she does not fill 4GB in 2 days though.

It is interesting to see that preserving visual memories does not really require pin sharp images with millions of pixels, it just needs someone to be there at the right moment, snapping the right image. Adults usually lose the moment. Your kid photographer will not.

Sometimes, you need to fill a PowerPoint slide with text. These slides are obviously not meant to be presented on a big screen. Still, I make them now and then; a legal disclaimer on page 1 of an investor presentation, detailed bios of the management team in the back, or a page of text in a PowerPoint document that is meant for reading rather than supporting a live presentation.

It is difficult for the eye to follow very long lines of text, because when the eye has reached the far right end of the sentence it has to move all the way back and find the start of the line below it. This gets hard with long lines. Also, long lines of text look ugly. Print designers discovered all this centuries ago, and invented the text column.

If you right click a text box in PowerPoint and select format text, you see that one of the options you can choose is columns (Mac). Play around with the number of columns and the white space in between them to get the desired effect. As an example, below are the opening paragraphs of Alice in Wonderland.