SlideMagic Blog

Some presentations stay in use for years. The designer has made small updates to slides, but overall the document has not changed. While the slides are more or less the same, the story probably has moved on.

Signs that this is the case:

• The presenter puts the first slide on, and then runs the entire presentation without clicking to the next slide
• The presenter discounts every slide, “what this slide really should say is [this] and [that]”
• The presenter skips through the presentation

If this is happening, it is time to let go of the presentation and create a new one from scratch. A fresh presentation that follows the narrative of your latest story.

I tried doing this the other day, but when asked for feedback, I got the old presentation back with bullet point added here and there, because “it was more familiar to edit” than the new one. I am going to push back.

After 3 months of hard work, your project is finished and you have been invited by the CEO to present the results. What to do?

• Wrong: present the project process. This is the team, this is when we kicked off, then we did this, then we did that, then we involved this, then we did that.
• Wrong: put the entire document in PowerPoint and present the full detail of all the analysis, wait with the conclusion until the very last slide
• Wrong: give a very high level fluffy summary full of buzzwords

So what is right?

• A very short background of the project and who was involved
• A clear articulation of the decisions you want approved
• Detailed backup/rationales for decisions that are not “no brainers” (a complicated trade off of multiple factors, an analysis with surprising/counter-intuitive results)

Not presenting all the work does not mean it was a waste of time. It was necessary work to get you to suggest the decisions.

Art: 1965/1 - ∞: Detail 2.289.862 - 2.307.403, Roman Opalka, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, image by Esther Westerveld

Here are the basic 3 steps to come to a good presentation slide. And for 2, you do not have to be a stellar designer to get them right. For step 3, you can use my presentation design app SlideMagic)

1. Decide on one message, one message only. Here is where most people go wrong: they try to put more than one idea on a slide. Too many things to grasp at once, too much content/clutter on the slide. Only if your message is: “There are 15 reasons why you should stop smoking”) might you consider a list of 15 small bullet points.
2. Decide on a basic slide structure. The only structure most people use is the list. But there are other (simple) ones that you should consider. A contrast (box on the left, box on the right), a ranking (bar chart), an overlap (Venn diagram), pros and cons (table), cause effect. They are not that hard to put on a slide.
3. Get the design right. Now, here it might be trickier for the layman. Fixing alignment, proportions, grids, colours, white space, etc. etc. SlideMagic users won’t have to worry much about this, for everyone else, here are some of the guidelines I have implemented in SlideMagic:
   1. Everything lines up
   2. Everything lines up according to a grid
   3. Calm colours: one accent, lots of shades of grey
   4. Safe (sans serif) font
   5. Slides look similar in one presentation (positioning of titles, margins, etc.)

There is no reason to get 1. or 2. wrong, and you can learn 3. over time.

In business, legal documents are edited in great detail. Exceptions here, clauses there, footnotes. It goes back and forth between parties. In this process that can take weeks, both sides get to know the text inside out. The dense text is actually a pretty useful format to communicate and avoid ambiguities.

Presentations are different. Most of the time, the audience sees the slides for the first time. Most of the time, they will see/internalise only part of the visual. Most of the time, the slide is a not a final legal document that will be signed right there and then.

So editing/designing slides can be a bit different. Distracting tangents, bubbles with exceptions, tiny footnotes. These details will not really register, and worse: confuse the audience. Editing a presentation is different from editing a contract.

Art: Pieter Brueghel the Younger, The Village Lawyer or The Tax Collector’s Office, 1626

Here in Israel everyone puts a “Thank you” slide as the last page of the presenting. Almost to thank the audience as it is impossible for the voice to be heard during the roaring applause. People ask me, should you use it?

It depends how.

The huge “thank you” with a big cheesy stock image of applause is definitely not the way to go. A dense page the repeats/summarises the entire presentation in detail also won’t work.

You want to end any presentation with a strong upbeat message. The worst ending is, “well, this is it, we are running out of time, and I just managed to stay in my slot”. It is better to put up a slide that puts in some call to action: “Sign up now to change the world!” or something.

For investor presentations, this is a bit harder. “Wire to this bank account” is pushing it too much. In these cases I actually put up a slide with a small/subtle “Thank you” (for your attention) title and the contact details of the person in charge of fund raising at the bottom.

As a visual I tend to use the a memorable photo, graph, concept from the presentation that works as a memory shortcut to my entire story.

In many investor presentations, startups want to educate the audience first on a big trend that is happening. But, especially in consumer/internet, people catch up really quickly and you will loose the audience attention and your credibility of you spend time and slides on explaining things that everyone understands.

Some examples I can remember (some of them from my time at McKinsey):

• Home pages
• Sticky eye balls
• Portals
• Market places
• Social networks
• Social media
• Viral videos
• Location-based services
• Online video and the growth of bandwidth
• Sharing economy

Smart VCs read the same blogs as you.

Art: Student at his desk, Pieter Codde, 1630

Your company changes rapidly, your pitch stays the same. I meet many company CEOs that started their company years ago, often at some startup pitch event. The story opening then was about them, in the absence of a real company. Years later, that same intro can often still be found in the presentation, just with an update of the sales and employee numbers.

Your pitch presentation should be one step ahead of your company, not one step behind.

Art: Lautrec, Woman at her toilette, 1889

The 14 bullet points with they key messages you want to give in a presentation is not a summary slide, it is the entire presentation.

• Those 14 points are not messages, they are pieces of content, story elements. A presentation usually has 2-3 big points that qualify as messages
• Nobody can remember 14 things
• If you cram 14 points on a summary page, you have to write them down in a way that is too short, too generic, too vague (= not interesting)
• If you discuss 14 points on a summary page, you have to spend too much time on each of them to explain things

What to do? Use the summary page to set the stage of your presentation, give a hint at an interesting, counter-intuitive, surprising conclusion, and say what it is you actually want. Then dive into the 14 story elements one by one, slide for slide, without summarising them beforehand.

So, the mistake of the 14 bullet point slide, is not the slide design. (The correct summary slide might actually consist of 3 bullet points), The mistake is the way you structured the presentation.

Art: Flaming June is a painting by Sir Frederic Leighton, produced in 1895

This is the hardest thing in presentation design. Many people fill up a slide with far too much detail. But others write such high level, abstract concepts, that the slide says nothing at all. What is the best middle ground?

Let’s declutter a busy slide. This is a mental exercise I usually go through

1. Cut out/cut through buzzwords and filler words
2. Cut out side tangents
3. See how many points the slide wants to make. If it is just a sequential listing of independent story elements (i.e., the slide does not want to convey a relationship between them), we can them spread them out: each slide gets one point.
4. If the elements have some sort of relationship in them, it is usually one of 2 kinds: a contrast, or a ranking of pro/cons of different options, or a cause/effect story of multiple factors influencing each other leading to a conclusion
5. I try to draw the pro/con table or process flow diagram on a piece of paper so I understand what is actually going on. I draw multiple versions where I simplify things (combine rows/columns, swap rows/columns, boxes, arrows) until I get to a clean version of the message
6. Now I go in slide design mode:
   1. First slide is a generic one: “our solution is better because we managed to paint the object blue instead of yellow. Yes it might not sound like it, but this is a big deal, let me explain why”
   2. This is followed by a number of slides where I explain key sub points in more detail
   3. Now that I have warmed up the audience, I can show a stylised version of my paper napkin that brings the whole thing together.

The logical flow for the presenter:

1. These are my principles
2. This is what I made based on them

The logical flow for the audience:

1. What did she make?
2. Why did she make it that way?

Don’t sound like a professor who never gets to the point, even if you are a professor.

Art: A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, is a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby