SlideMagic Blog

I have never been a fan of stock image photographers making pre-fab slide compositions, but in one area they can add value: digitally replicating items to infinity. See the attached image by higyou on Shutterstock. It is worthwhile visiting multiple stock image sites for these type of renderings, since they often can only be found exclusively on one site. Have a look at Filter Forge if you want to try to create these types of effects.

Here is a simple concept to visualize a problem that the cable television industry has: replacement cycles of hardware sitting in the people’s homes is really loooooong, especially compared to how often we upgrade our mobile devices. In this slide I used repetition plus cropped the years on both sides of the page to create that sense of continuity.

One of the most important criteria for an investor to invest in your business is you, the entrepreneur, and the in-person presentation is an excellent way to figure you out as a person. Information about all the other elements of your company is covered in the slides, your business plan and/or your website. Investors can read about your CV, but the only way to figure you out is attending that 45 minute presentation. What you present is important, but the other 50%, how you are as a person is also vital. How is to work with you as a Board member with you, the CEO, at the helm of the company?

Can you be trusted? Trust and integrity are one of the most important things a potential investor is looking for. And it does not really work to put a slide on the projector that says “I never lie”. The investor needs other clues that come out in between the lines of your slides. Maybe an investor knows the answer to a question, but asks it any way. If you do not know the answer it is better to say so than make something up. Do you start to gossip, leak information, to people you have just met 20 minutes ago? If you do it to the potential investor, you are likely to do it to others as well.

There is no upside in bending the truth. So maybe you were successful in getting away with some form of reality distortion in the pitch meeting, the investor will eventually find out during the extended due diligence in the weeks (or sometimes) months to come. You enter an exclusivity period, you continue to burn money, and at the end the investors finds out and withdraws from the deal (integrity issues are a huge red flag). Then you are left without an investor, without funds, and a tarnished reputation as you have to explain to other potential investors why this one pulled out. Your entire company is at risk.

The best way to make a slide with a smartphone screenshot:

• Get a stock image of a smartphone without the device maker brand (using Google Image search might get you into copy right issues)
• Take the actual screenshot on your smartphone, in my case I use my iPhone browser to go to the web page and press the home and on/off button at the same time. Email yourself the image
• And here comes the trick: apply a subtle inner shadow to the image. You see the difference in the image below, the left side one looks a little bit bland, the right side looks much more natural

When you have invested in a great animated promotion video to put on your website, why not use it in your presentation? A good video can tell a relatively complex story in under 2 minutes. Most of these videos contain high quality art work that is great for use in a presentation.

Embed the video in your presentation (I prefer putting in the actual file rather than linking to an YouTube video) and create visual connections later on in the deck using screen shots of the video (either page-filling or small thumbnails).

Do not feel embarrassed that that video just cut your bullet point product explanation from 15 minutes to just 2, your audience will appreciate it.

The 2 photos from a birthday party below show what an impact cropping a good composition can have on the quality of your images. I used the iPad app Snapseed (affiliate link) to do the following:

1. Cut out the eating man, cut out the light/bright parts of the image at the top to focus on the boy in the foreground and the girl reaching fro the bubble in the back
2. Take out the color since the composition of the greens and the clothing of the kids does not really look interesting. The B&W image enhances the texture of the bubbles, leaves, and grass
3. Selective up the brightness around the faces of the boy, the girl, and the boy back to the left
4. Up the sharpness and structure of the image

The result is a transformation from a bland image to one that looks like a Matrix-style freezing in time. I am constrained here by the 455 pixel limitations of Blogger, the final image looks better at its proper resolution.

What a brilliant presentation concept by Bob Dylan in this video of his song Subterranean Homesick Blues.

Everyone would agree that Steve Jobs was a pretty good presenter. But he is said to have practiced two to three full time days before a major product launch speech. Two to three full time days! I bet if you put in that effort before your next presentation, you would be pretty close.

Practice means real practice: standing up, going through the slides first to last without interruption or a quick skip back when you make a mistake, you cannot do this on stage either. Make a video of yourself if you can. Put your screen where your monitor laptop will be (so you do not have to look back at your screen to see what slide is on).

It may sound counter–intuitive, but you actually need to know your story inside out to be really spontaneous. There is no such thing as “winging it”. Your audience will notice, you will use “uh” and “oh” all the time, the key lines will not come out the way they should, you will repeat yourself all the time.

And memorizing the talk line by line is not enough. If an actor has to go back to her memory for every line in the play, she will not have the mental energy to focus on the mood of her character. You need live and breathe your story. Then it will come out naturally, and you can improvise around your story line depending on the reaction of your audience.

The exception here might be webinars. Here, the audience cannot see you and you can probably get away with reading through a presentation line by line.

Sometimes, you do not need a data chart at all, and nicely formatted table with rounded numbers might just be the best option to visualize your data. This is especially true for financial statements with lots of information, or in situations where one chart contains a lot of numbers with completely different orders of magnitude. Some quick improvements you can make to make a table look good:

• Space out rows and columns, the more of them are the same size, the calmer the table will look
• Round up numbers to a reasonably precision, use a “,” to separate thousands Right-align numbers, make sure the decimal dot lines up
• Right-align the first column with descriptive text, so it is as close as possible to the first column with numbers.
• Use highly muted background colors, I usually pick the lightest grey that I can get, and draw the cell borders with a white line
• If necessary reduce the font size, very big fonts with unnatural line breaks do not look very good in a table.
• Enter data manually: yes typing in every single number by hand is often the only way to get the table to look exactly the way you want it to. Fifteen minutes that are well-spent

UPDATE: on request an example of a table layout I often use.

Seth Godin wrote an excellent blog post about pitching to a large corporate: the lowest possible price is not always the most important selling point. If you are a startup, it might result in the exact opposite effect: you just reinforced the image of the small, unprofessional, desperate, unreliable, financially instable company that is too high-risk to do business with.

If all the above are in fact true for your company, there are still some easy ways to camouflage it, and become a credible business partner to a large organization:

• Show up on time, reply to questions promptly, confirm Outlook calendar invitations
• Fill out forms, purchasing orders, even if you already provided the data in a previous email
• List your real street address, list your real non-mobile phone number (can be a Skype redirect)
• Have an email address with your company domain (can be forwarded back to gmail)
• Use a decent web site template that contains more than an “under construction” place holder
• Use high res stock images in your presentation, as opposed to solen low-res Google image search results
• Get a professional photographer to make decent head shots of the team
• Do not use ad-supported free, or worse: pirated software
• Invest in business card paper
• Create a professional email signature
• Avoid Comic Sans
• Clean up your computer desktop and hid embarrassing family pictures
• Be careful with humor hardwired, written-down, in your slides, the company might not think it is funny
• Understand hierarchies, going behind someones back to her boss does not mean you made a successful move up the ladder