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Here is an interesting article about voice pacing on the BBC web site. Researches analyzed voice patterns of 1,400 attempts to get people to do a phone service. Here they are:
You could re-write these findings as follows:
In short, have a human conversation.
I do not agree with the design approach of the majority of free template databases on the web. Many of these sites are built to attract Google traffic and host cluttered templates that seem nothing more than a more colorful extension of Microsoft’s standard bullet point opening screen.
Presentationmagazine.com fits somewhere in the middle. Managed by Jonty Pearce, It hosts some standard PowerPoint templates that I would not use in a design, but also has a number of useful articles.
The really useful content of this web site however is its library of free editable PowerPoint maps. You can download them and color states, countries and continents with your own colors. An excellent resource.
My wish list of features to be included in PowerPoint. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
PowerPoint 2011 for Mac
PowerPoint 2010 for Windows
I have experimenting with various input devices over the past month.
After a month, I end up working with the Magic Mouse most of the time. I still need to find a solution for that unpredictable scrolling somehow.
I finally managed to get my hands on the movie Helvetica (affiliate link). It is a wonderful documentary about this famous type face, and how it has managed to infiltrate our daily lives on almost anything we see written in the street. Beautiful movie shots, nice music, and interviews with some well-known typographers.
Somewhere hidden inside the movie is an interview with typographer Erik Spiekermann where he gives his opinion about the typeface helvetica. He speaks very quickly but in a few seconds he makes a great number of points that I have started to notice as well: Helvetica works great with lots of white space around it and Helvetica needs careful attention with weights. (In fact I think one of the reasons that Arial looks so poor is that people usually only use the regular and bold variants. Helvetica comes in an endless range of weights.)
The presentations I design for conferences are in the public domain (these are the ones you will find as examples on my web site). Almost all other ones are confidential. Fund raising pitches for startups (although I think most startups could actually be better off sharing these stories with the world), sales presentations (same here), and last but not least, quarterly results presentations to the stock market (incredibly sensitive a week before the announcement, completely public 5 minutes after).
I have started to beef up the security of my IT infrastructure, especially for these earnings announcement. The biggest risk is not so much becoming the victim of a crime, it is human error. Forgetting your laptop somewhere, typing in the wrong email address and sending a highly confidential document to the wrong person.
Here are some basic steps you can do to beef up your security.
Yesterday I spent hours trying to find the perfect analogy for a company that sell a complex storage technology. After a while I realized that while an analogy would be really good to describe one aspect of the story, it would be impossible to find one that covers all issues involved. The analogies become more complex than the technology itself.
Plan B: back to the drawing board and start explaining the technology itself with simple visuals, without analogies.
Consulting firms, market research companies, universities produce an endless amount of complex and sophisticated-looking frameworks. Often, I see people borrowing one, re-drawing it, or overwriting the labels with their own text. It is better than you don’t.
Instead, sketch your own simple, specific, and relevant diagram on a piece of paper and replicate that in PowerPoint.
I always preach that the look and feel of an investor presentation should match the brand identity of the company.
Abercombie & Fitch sticks to this principle. See the investor presentation here. The Footnote website comments:
We counted no fewer than 13 slides that featured shirtless dudes baring their pecs. That’s nearly 20% of the slides in the 67-slide deck. The PowerPoint was part of the company’s Investors Day earlier this week. The presentation seems to have gone well, judging by this brief WSJ article that notes that Abercrombie stock climbed over 8% on Tuesday, in part, it seems, based on the bullish projections made during the presentation. So there was some substance in between the eye-candy slides.
On a more serious note, this investor presentation has some good and bad practices. The good:
Things that could have been done better:
Thank you Robert Lakin. Image by Abercombie & Fitch.
Daniel Higginbotham has set a little web site with a useful recap of some important design principles. He called it www.visualmess.com. Worth skimming through. Now that I get to think of it, I am actually in the cleaning business…