SlideMagic Blog

I have been browsing through a number of books on contemporary graphics design recently and I must say: “more is better” seems to be the motto of many designs. Adobe Illustrator is powering complex gradients, elaborate ornaments and sophisticated hand-drawn effects. Maybe graphics design is ready for a “Zen revolution” similar to presentation design? (Or I simply have been reading the wrong books?).

Now and people comment that they would like to receive the original PPTX files of the slides I discuss here on the blog. I am hesitant to put them up on a regular basis, but will respond to a request by email or in the comments.

Here is a cute idea for a slide: negative lettering space. Computerarts.co.uk has a full tutorial how to create this effect here. It is easy to copy in PowerPoint: start with a word in a huge font on a page, set the font color light grey (or another color with a light contrast to your background), fill the page with the images you want, and as a final step delete the text or color it the same as your slide background.

Here is a search for earlier posts with a “can’t see the forest through the tress” type of concept.

Stock images are often staged, not natural, lacking spontaneity. Images with a creative commons license on Flickr are an excellent alternative, with one drawback: it is a bit harder to find the right image.

Here is what I do. Now and then I take a Flickr “deep dive” and just randomly browse/search images not using a functional key word such as “chair”, “pilot”, or “apple”. Rather use characteristics that a photographer would use to describe an image. As an example, see what a range of beautiful images comes up when searching for “focus”.

Browse through the images and bookmark them or save them to a tool such as Evernote for later use. An example, a very detailed image of the Manhattan Bridge by See-ming Lee.

Simple diagrams (link) is a nice little tool to create simple sketches in the spirit of Dan Roam’s book “The back of the napkin” (review). You can either use it as a sketch tool to develop ideas, or as slides in your presentation. The extreme scenario would be to create an entire presentation out of these types of diagrams.

The program uses aggressive pop up messages to get you to use the full version. There are more subtle ways that will get to the same effect.

An interesting post on TechCrunch today: Socialcast founder Tim Young explains how he raised $10m for 3 companies using a 5-slide PowerPoint presentation. Some of the points that stood out (please read the full post for the complete picture):

• In 1-on-1 meetings you can try to avoid the confrontational both sides of the table setting by sitting next to each other and sharing a laptop screen
• Remember what the objective of your 1st VC meeting is: get to the 2nd one, it is - not yet - about trying to tell the potential investor everything you know about your business in the hope that he will sign the check after 30 minutes. Getting to the 2nd meeting is all about avoiding “rat holes”.
• Focus your slides (in come the 5 slides he used), but have the 45-slide backup in your back pocket in case you need to lift out a slide.
• Use (real) images of faces wherever you can to introduce people that are involved with the business (instead of names). When he says faces, faces, faces, he obviously is not referring to anonymous models that are too often found in stock images.

I agree with this approach, I just would like to give a word of caution/some comments. Each startup has a different set of 5 slides. Don’t just copy the ones Tim used. Rather look through the slides and see what Tim is doing.

His 5 slides have no story in themselves, they are pact with facts. Tim is telling the story himself, without slides. Only when he needs facts he reverts to slides. “Look at the credible team and investors we have” [Very dense slide packed with names, photos, and logos]. “See that there at the bottom? 75,000 i.s.o. 5,000 users per server, let me explain” “We’re on a roll” [Very dense slide with performance metrics], etc. The exception is slide 3, an abstract graphic that you can almost draw on a napkin to explain the key idea behind the business.

A chart concept I used yesterday in a client’s presentation to demonstrate the progress of personal computing technology over the past decade (technical details taken from this post by AdamH).

There is no point to construct complicated bar charts to compare the values of the technical specifications, they are similar (the point of the chart). Rather what is important, is to shrink the image of the iPhone so that it’s more or less to scale with the much bigger iMac.

I often use paintings as an inspiration for slide design. Sometimes you can actually use the actual painting itself, but more often, I use a painting to borrow a color scheme (earlier post).

There is  a big problem with art books: it is hard to browse vast quantities of images quickly, slice and dice art works by artist, time, genre. A good painting requires time to appreciate, once you found it. However, the finding is the difficult bit.

The iPad is a wonderful device to navigate huge image data bases (earlier post). I am a bit late to discover Art Authority for iPad, an application that make this a reality for art. Over 1,000 (Western) artists, with each painting properly documented plus links to Wikipedia for more information.

Most art books show the same “greatest hits” paintings, not spending paper on less well-known works by artists, paper publications cut off the long tail. Not with Art Authority that shows works beyond the beaten path.

$10 well-spent.

Stock images libraries are full of pictures of models that look towards the lens, but are not really look at you. The man in these ads does better than the woman (maybe the squinting, or his age), but it is hard to beat a painter’s ability to get those penetrating eyes.

The ads were taken from Ads of the World. The painting is “Girl resting on her arms” by Eugene Vidal (1847-1907), Oil on canvas, 47 x 59 cm.

A meeting of 2 generations yesterday, when I sat down with a retired graphics designer who spent his professional live designing logos and visual corporate identities (some of which are highly visible icons in the Israeli high street). He has not used a computer ever to support his design work, and is now focussing on art.

I opened my lap top and showed him some of my work. Some of the points he made:

• “Each of your slides looks good and makes the point. The visual connection between them is weak though.” He suggested to put logos and/or other corporate graphics on each page. I do not agree with him, but he had a point that using images of paintings, “real photos” and stock images created a mixing of styles
• “Each point does not need a slide.” I agree with him for live presentations, and I am actually retreating more and more from the avalanche of slides approach for these types of presentations. For an online presentation though, one slide per point is the way to go though

He showed me his own slide deck that an assistant prepared for him, mainly filled with copies of his own work (logos, paintings, building exteriors). What struck me is the breathing space around each slide. I also use a lot of white space in my slides, but keep the margin around the slide very small. Maybe time to change that.

An interesting meeting.