SlideMagic Blog

TED presentations take a bit less than 20 minutes. If you have watched a few of these presentations, you will have noticed that this time is more than enough to get a complex idea across in your presentation.

Apparently, 20 minutes is also the average time a grown up can really focus his attention (source).

Add these two observations up and you realize that you need to design your presentation in such a way that the full pitch comes across in roughly this time. Anything more can be added as additional case studies examples, other plot variations. Possibly again in blocks of 10-20 minutes.

A few people with a lot more knowledge than I have about attention span and the brain are reading this blog, feel free to add your perspective.

Ira Glass, an American radio personality, makes an excellent point in this video: (aspiring) designers have great taste, but it will take a long time to get to a quality of work that matches it.

This resonates with me personally, as I find it hard to believe that it was me who designed some of these presentations sitting on my hard drive a few years ago. And I know that I will have the same reaction when I look back at today’s work in a few years from now.

Ira says that most people do not make it past the dip, they quit. His message: hang in there and you will get there and good things will happen.

It is worth it to watch the entire 5 minute movie. Ira gives a case example where he shows how a rambling radio report he created 8 years ago (he was not even a beginner then) and how it can be replaced by one sentence that is natural, specific, and to the point. I am not a frequent radio listener, but I find that newspapers often apply this technique of an elaborate, dramatic article opening, taking forever to explain an issue in normal, human language.

Via Jason Kottke.

VMware acquired in-the-cloud PowerPoint alternative SlideRocket. Up until now, VMware focused on virtualization infrastructure, it’s software can be used to create multiple virtual computers on one hardware platform. Many of you might be running a Windows PC inside a Mac using this technology (VMware Fusion).

It is not completely clear what the strategic intent of VMware is. Will it try to go up one level from basic infrastructure and start offering cloud applications competing directly with Microsoft? Or does it want to use it for something else?

The big issue with alternatives to PowerPoint is the installed base of corporate users that over the years has learned how to work with it. But maybe the extra financial power of VMware enables SlideRocket to get a shot at doing to PowerPoint what Microsoft Word did to WordPerfect?

When pitching VCs it is better to say “I don’t know” if you do not know the answer to a question than making something up that turns out to be wrong later. Management integrity is a more important investment criterion than having all facts readily accessible in your head.

When I have not prepared a presentation well enough, and/or made last minute changes to the  deck, I find myself skipping a slide during a live presentation. Click-click, when you see a difficult slide coming up in presenter view (more about PowerPoint presenter view here).

Where do you need to practice most?

The opening of the presentation, and not only because here you are likely to be a bit nervous at this stage of your talk. It is here, where you usually talk about yourself as an introduction. You know the content of this section very well (hey, it is about you) and you do not bother rehearsing. So you are on stage, you go blah, blah, blah, and a feeling starts creeping in. This section takes a long time. Is all this detail about me really interesting to the audience. How should I have told the story about myself in such a way that it sets up the rest of the presentation correctly? It is hard to talk about yourself, better practice it…

Visual mental placeholders. These are slides that are great to talk around in a one-on-one meeting. You probably have used them a lot. You know them inside out, and hence do not bother to practice them. But when you are on stage, you realize that you do not have a good sequential story in your mind to talk a larger audience through this slide.

Bad slides. You will discover them when you practice. DELETE.

Think about how a movie director cuts down a movie.

• She does not just chop a few scenes randomly
• She does not double the speed at which the movie runs.
• She does not use picture-in-picture to cram two scenes in one screen shot in parallel.

Instead:

• She thinks in terms of time, not number of scenes. What can I do in 90 minutes?
• She thinks about plot lines, not scenes. Can we lose that flashback without impacting the story?
• She thinks about the overall story. Now that we cut a few plot lines, do we need to overhaul the whole story line?

You are your own presentation director.

A presentation designed for a large audience with big images and few words cannot stand on its own without verbal explanation. Ideally, you would design two separate decks; one for the big audience, and one for emailing. But, constantly updating two presentations in parallel is time consuming and prone to errors. Here is a work-around.

Design your presentation for a 16:9 screen and add a text column on the left side. Put the full narrative of the slide in a tiny font. The email reader gets the full explanation of the chart. The big audience will see a blurry bar on the left of the slide, clearly distinct from the larger visual. You could go further and quickly delete the text bars a few seconds before you go on stage.

Not perfect, but good enough.

I have been designing an enormous amount of startup venture capital pitches over the years. The stakes are high, the story is often not clear, the founders are open to new forms of communication and so they are willing to invest in a good pitch deck. I enjoy these projects immensely, there is nothing more fun than taking an idea from 0 to a beautiful visualization.

It is a relatively small presentation design market though. The big change will be in the 1,000s of boring sales presentations that are used every day. Corporates burn millions of dollars on advertising, billboards, fluffy white papers, and conference booths, while sending the salesforce on the road with a low budget PowerPoint deck that is embarrassing to use. It is time to re-allocate some of that marketing budget and stop killing these great stories with bullet points.

The other day I was doing the first sales presentation design interview with a startup that soon will start selling storage systems for large data centers that will eclipse the performance of the big names in the industry. Two presentation options

1. Flaky chart: 2 columns, our performance, their performance.
2. Substance chart: a series of charts that explains how a totally new type of storage architecture can deliver these performance figures

The first approach does not stick, the second one does, even in the absence of a large number of customer examples.

How do you make up your mind? Think of this, consider that, go back, look at this. A slightly random process in which you jump from one aspect to the other. Once we are done with this process, we go through a more orderly check list to see we’ve covered everything.

Here are the implications for many of my presentations:

• Upfront, tease the audience something great is coming, but do not try to summarize or explain the whole pitch in a structured (=boring) way
• Tell the story using the structure a movie director would take, not the author of a business school text book
• Come back with an organized summary, the check list, to show the audience that we have covered all.