SlideMagic Blog

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.

There is a component to visual design that cannot be learnt from studying books. On some presentations/slides I can spend a lot of time, because they simply do not look right, even if the content is pretty simple. And the worst thing, I cannot tell why.

After fiddling with a number of parameters, things can all of a sudden start to look acceptable:

• Changing the balance in the colour scheme, often focusing on grey with just one strong accent colour, instead of using all the colours that are available in the corporate colour scheme.
• Using lighter colour/shades in slide shapes
• Making all images black and white
• Endless repositioning of slide shapes to get the balance right
• Reducing the font size (yes, you read it right), and/or rebalancing the number of words in one line

Why? I do not know, it somehow works…

I realised that most presentation slides I create fall in two categories:

1. Data charts that have information in them that would be impossible to convey verbally (a graph, a table with financial information, a ranking of competitors)
2. Place holders with some powerful visual (picture, typography) and is merely a placeholder for the story told by the presenter

Things go wrong if you mix them: showing hard core data with a cute picture will not work, putting up a detailed consulting framework as your place holder will not work.

It is difficult for a startup to sell to a big company. Even if your solution is really innovative, large companies prefer to work with financially stable, large companies.

The look and feel of your sales presentation can add to that nervousness in the under belly of a big-corporate purchasing officer. Looks to avoid:

1. Amateurish layouts with childish colours and water cooler fonts such as Comic Sans.
2. Overly cute, touchy feely, retro look and feel, especially when selling in a male-dominated corporate culture (sorry).

Now we all know that the a slick visual deck full of stories and very little text will do great in these meetings (option 3), but, there is one surprising other option (4): the big corporate, lots of bullet points, serious, boring slide deck. Purely from a look and feel perspective, you will fit right in with all the other technology vendors, unlike option 1 or 2.

If you cannot pull off option 3, option 4 is still preferred over option 1 or 2.

Copying PowerPoint slides from one presentation to another can have disastrous format implications. Some survival advice.

• When saving/defining a new PowerPoint theme, stick to the suggested colour uses that PowerPoint suggests, i.e., text/background dark should be a dark colour for example. If you move slides across between templates in properly defined colour schemes, the damage will not be that big
• Make sure you copy slides into the file with the desired template and not the other way around. Sometimes this might require you to create a 1-slide presentation in your preferred template, and then copy the 35 other slides into it.
• There is a way to merge PowerPoint slides and keep their original formatting, see an old blog post on the subject.
• At the top left corner of the ribbon is a layout button that opens a drop down menu of slide formats that are present in the master. Use to to correct disasters.

Good luck!

Here is an almost sure recipe to get a good look and feel for a presentation template, even with an Arial font:

• One nice accent colour, but used sparsely for only that: provide an accent
• The other objects in shades of grey, using relatively more light ones than dark ones
• Text in dark grey, not black
• No lines around shapes, let the color (i.e., grey) do the work
• Everything flat: no shadows, no gradients, no reflections
• Black & white images only

There are many options to format a data chart: write million or m, put percentages in columns or not, a thin baseline or a fat baseline or no baseline at all, tick marks or not, grid lines or not grid lines, drop shadows or flat, you can go on and on.

Whatever you choose, choose the same preferences on every page so your presentation will look consistent.

Most PowerPoint template designers think that what you put on the empty template page sets the look and feel of the presentation. Gradients, watermarks, logos, color bands. I have long been arguing that the template can just be a blank white page, what sets the look and feel is your approach to how your design the slides: what shapes, what colors.

The new iOS7 is a good example. Icons that looked great in iOS6 now look dated instantly in iOS7. The design philosophy has changed, without new logos, or repeated graphical elements on the page. It is the combined power of the new iOS7-ready icons that together create that new fresh layout.

So in PowerPoint, pick your colors, your fonts, your approach to shadows and gradients and you can use a simple blank page as your PowerPoint template.

Over the past few years, more and more people started to understand that as a presentation designer, it is important to have a look at the style, brand, color guide of the organisation you are working for. Program the prescribed colours into your PowerPoint or Keynote template, and your slides are instantly recognisable with the right look and feel, without having to remind the audience by putting a big logo on every slide.

But these brand guidelines often contain more than just the RGB codes for the corporate color. Color hierarchy is as important. Which color should you be using more often than others? Which color is background, which color is accent?

Randomly applying (the allowed) colours to slide objects can create clutter, especially for large shapes on your slides. Think about color hierarchy when designing your next presentation.

Web design involves technical skills that a presentation or print designer does not have. At the same time, (if I may say so), presentation/print designers might have a better feeling for page layout (understatement). Yeah, yeah, I agree, on the interactive technology front the geeks still beat us.

I have blogged many times over the past few years about the similarities between web and presentation design.

Most automated web design tools are aimed at small business owners with zero design or software skills: Wix is an example, or look at Striking.ly. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover Webydo that offers a design environment similar to PowerPoint or InDesign and enables presentation/print designers to create some pretty decent web sites.

The company is still in beta, so there is always the risk that your web site might go down with it in case the company does not get traction (that is why I am giving it some publicity here). Also, the software still has some tiny bugs that I am sure will be ironed out in the near future.