SlideMagic Blog

Videos of presentations of the TED conference are released throughout the year. This one just got posted. Tim Brown is the CEO of the “innovation and design” firm Ideo (Prada store in New York). He talks about the (powerful) relationship between creativity and play. In the rush to the deadline, we very often forget that designing presentations is a creative process.

UPDATE: The McKinsey Quarterly has interviewed Tim Brown, read it here.

The University of Chigaco is now requiring applicants for its MBA programme to produce a PowerPoint presentation of a maximum of 4 pages with complete creative freedom. Any subject, any style, what you want. More details here in a post on Manhattan Review.

First of all, a very good initiative I think.

• 4 blank pages of PowerPoint leave a lot more room for creative self-expression than the classic short essay
• Visual communication skills are very important to become a succesful executive, there is not better way to test them than to ask for a real-life example

Now, how would I address this challenge (having completed a regular MBA application more than a decade ago…)?

THE CONSTRAINTS

First, let’s think about the constraints, and what it means for the sort of presentation you need to design:

4 pages maximum, it has to be short and to the point

The presentation will be printed and included in your file. This is a huge constraint.

• No video
• No animation (this a bad idea anyway)
• The color printer could be poor: avoid textured background (a bad idea anyway), avoid dark backgrounds (what if the black toner runs out), use pin sharp images, use contrasting colors
• Printed documents can carry more detail than projected slides (if they are printed out in full page), so you can insert more dense text on one of the slides if you want to
• You are not in the room. The slide needs to stand on its own

New “in the cloud” presentation development tools seem to be popping up all the time now. Today, I came across Zuiprezi which allows you create a “non-linear” presentation on a large virtual canvas in which you can navigate and zoom your way around. Read a review on CNET, and/or watch the video below.

While I see the advantages of a dynamic presentation flow, I still think that in most presentation situations a tightly controlled story line works best, especially when time is scarce, for example in VC startup pitch presentations (25 minutes, that’s it). When there is more time, non-linear presentations could work. Especially when a group of people needs to discuss, brainstorm and analyze a complex subject (for example a spaghetti-style workplan for a big engineering project). UPDATE: Another interesting application for this technology might be to visualize complex system dynamics analysis in business. At McKinsey I used to use it (it was called “Business Dynamics” there) to map complex interactions between multiple drivers. This analysis can be very insightful to spot recurring loops (and hence how to accelerate or stop them), but delivers very messy diagrams. See one here. Related postings on my blog: PPTplex, a Microsoft tool for zooming inside PowerPoint

I discovered that the subconscious mind really works, and it changed the way I design presentations. Partly driven by my experience as a strategy consultant at McKinsey where presentations are mostly associated with presenting recommendations at the project deadline, presentation design used to be a focused and exhausting sprint to the finish line. I changed my approach: dropping work on a presentation for a day, doing a few detailed charts, taking a break, sketching high-level stories, sleeping on it, working on the color scheme, working on a different project, finding a great closing image, etc. Maybe you should try it as well.

I added the book “The back of the napkin” to my Amazon wish list and hope to review it here soon. It reminds me how I always start the design of every PowerPoint chart I make: on a piece of paper. I guess the practice was hardwired in my brain when I started as an analyst at McKinsey that - in the early 90s - still employed graphics designers to create charts from paper.

• Step 1: think of the general concept you would like to show: a trend, that something is too complicated, the something is small, very big, that we want to change direction, that there is a tension we need to resolve, that we can stand up as David to Goliath, etc. etc.
• Step 2: Now think of a visual analogy that can make this single point. I often prefer using a page-filling picture to make a point (a hammer hitting a nail, cracks in a wall, a rope that is about to snap) , other symbols such arrows that show forces, a simple and clean column chart to show a series of numbers, a huge font number to show that something is indeed huge, etc.
• Step 3: Scribble the chart and put it in PPT. Lack of a good image, or graphical skill shortcomings (I am only human) often force me to go back to step 2 at this point.

This is process is also very important when thinking about data charts. There are always 15,000 ways to show quantitative data and picking the right representation makes all the difference.