SlideMagic Blog

In this blog post, a developer discusses his criteria to pick from an overwhelming menu of presentations at a conference. Some interesting insights for conference organisers and people invited to speak at a conference.

• One person is best. Moderated panels are often an excuse for people to fill time about a subject without preparing much. You get a generic questions, provide a fluffy answer. Everybody sits back, relaxes, nobody takes responsibility for the quality of the presentation. One person on the other hand, feels the responsibility to avoid boring the audience.
• Deep is better than broad. Very generic topics can only scratch the surface. Deep dives on specific issues/problems are much more interesting to watch/listen to.

When confronted with something new, our brains instantly compare what we see, hear, feel, taste with all the 500 million previous experiences we had in our lives. This is why our intuition can say that we do not like/trust the person in front of us, without being able to say why. Apparently, we had bad experiences with these type of characters before somewhere, sometime.

The same is trie for the look and feel of a presentation. If it reminds us of boring experiences we had before, we switch off and anticipate a replay.  A bullet point first slide, a stale clip art image, a cheesy stock photo, all tell-tale signs that what is about to follow is unlikely to be interesting.

There is a positive side to this as well: you can interest your audience, simply by being different. Even if different means that your slides are not very pretty.

Many people are asking me for beta invites for my PowerPoint killer presentation design app. Here is where things stand at the moment. A handful people have been testing the app so far which provided feedback on a few glitches to iron out. The core engine (the concept behind the app) works great (big sigh of relief), there are now some things about workflow flow that needs fixing, so that you can move around faster in the app. Rather than widening the user base who will give me the same feedback, I will fix the obvious issues first.

A self-funded side project, patience please…

Searching Product Hunt for keyword “presentation” gives a treasure full of presentation startup ideas.

The web is full of freelance presentation designers and full of sample portfolios. How to get a true feel for the style/skills of a designer: go beyond pages 1, 2, or 3, and look at a page somewhere in the middle of the deck. What does the designer do when no one is looking?

Here is a checklist of basic PowerPoint design skills. If you master these, you are all set to designing great business presentations:

• Program your company colours in the theme
• Set default shapes and lines to fit your company colours
• Delete all slides in a template master until you have just the title page and an empty page left
• Know how to add text to boxes
• Know how to make compositions of text boxes (including aligning and distributing them)
• Know how to crop images (instead of stretching them)
• Know how to make basic bar and column charts in your company colours

No need to learn anything more…

…when I put up this slide [that says something else…]

Solution: change that old slide to have it say what you want it to say!

Last week, I sat in the same seat many of my clients sit in: the one facing a VC. I had a couple of meetings in the valley to test initial appetite for my “PowerPoint killer” web app.

The body language in these meetings was very interesting. In all these meetings you could clearly see when people where excited, agree with you, do not agree with you, listen to you, are not listening to you because they are thinking about something else (probably the next question), already got what you want to say.

Read the signals and use them to steer the conversation in your meeting. But this might be hard to do in real time. The big use of this feedback will be your next VC meeting.

I really try to like the latest version (6, October 2013) of Apple Keynote, but a year later, I still cannot. The user interface in the latest release has been cleaned up (gone is the cramped inspector window), and initially I thought I would overcome the initial confusion where functions are. I did not.

Basic stuff like centring text, changing background colours, fonts, font colours, all require me to think, which submenu to pick: style, text, or arrange? A flowing, fast user interface is not always a logically laid out one. Functions do not always have be grouped together based on whether they are related or not. In software, features should (partially) be grouped based on frequency of use.

Then there is the “Sorry, iCloud Drive isn’t compatible with OS X Mavericks” error message I get everytime I open Keynote. After Googling I now understand that I need to wait for the release of OS X Yosemite and that I upgraded my iCloud too early, still…

Never change a winning team.

Many people who read this blog are considering a career in the world of presentation design themselves, I get many questions about how I got to be who I am today professionally.

The answer: it happened somehow over many years, there was no deliberate career planning. Once I was free from a big corporate structure, you can shape the projects you choose to work on. Finding the first projects was hard, and the work I did closely resembled my strategy consulting work at McKinsey.

When you build up your initial base of happy clients, words start spreading and you get increasing freedom to pick those project that interest you. There is a reinforcing loop here: you do your best work in the type of projects you like, which gives you more demand for more projects you like. In my case, I loved presentation design work, and the prize was: more pie.

But. This transformation took years. It required a certain skill base to start off with (10 years of work experience in consulting in my case). At first, you get highly unpredictable income. As a freelancer, you need to like working on your own. A super-specialised freelance business is hard to scale beyond increasing pricing. (See Seth Godin on dumbing down/scaling up, I smarted up and scaled down).