SlideMagic Blog

I have now stopped dragging along a laptop to client meetings. The thing is (relatively) heavy, requires a bag, and being the guy with the lap top in a meeting always put you in an inferior social position somehow. The PowerPoint for iPad app has improved a lot. You no longer have to go through the tedious process of downloading a file from Dropbox, remembering your 365 password, uploading the file to the 365 cloud drive, and downloading the file again. Still potential font rendering issues (even with standard fonts that might drop to the next line), still makes me use the combination of PDF files and iBooks. It renders nicely and the iBooks folder/collection solution is good enough to keep things organised. A lighting-to-ancient-VGA-projector convertor enables you to present on a big screen.

The Business Week magazine asked presentation designer Emiland de Cubber to redesign the information-loaded slides of Mary Meeker’s annual State of the Internet deck. Here is the original:

KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins

You can see the result of the make-over here.

The Meeker presentation is a dense deck full of facts that can never be (and should never be) converted into a TED-style slide deck with a few words and some pretty pictures. And Emiland did a great job of making that information more visually powerful. Muted colours calm down the slides. The use of colours in the graphical language of KPCB eliminate the need to be reminded of KPCB by a huge logo on each page.

Here are some of my additional comments, the key point is that you can even be more radical in improving this presentation. These are all constructive ideas, Emiland did a great job!

I invite you to open the Business Week alongside this text, I am not sure whether I can copy all the slides into this post for copyright reasons.

The dark colour scheme does work better for large rooms and big projector screens. A huge wall of white light overpowers the stage presence of the presenter. However, I suspect the majority of the audience of this presentation will be sitting at a desk when watching the information, in that case sticking to the light background might keeps things more readable.

I disagree on the use of icons to simplify categories in slides. Icons simplify too much in these technical presentations. Instead, I would opt for dramatic text simplifications. Emiland did both, I would have taken the icons out, and put more emphasis on the shortened text. (The second make over example slide).

If your business has 15 sales channels, it makes sense to review their performance using the same framework: easy to compare, and you make sure that you are covering everything that needs to be covered.

If you work with management consultants, you will notice that they love this approach. You get presented with a framework, asked to fill it out and then - here is the mistake - the 15 analyses are put on the overhead projector for a nice morning-filling channel performance review session.

Analysis slides are not the same as presentation slides. Keep the boring, structured deck as reference material. But, when presenting: try to break the logical structure. Focus on what is different, remarkable, requires attention. And since each of the 15 channels are different, you will find that these stories do not fit into one framework.

Yesterday, Microsoft finally released a full version of Office for iPad, including PowerPoint. Unlike a previous release for iPhone, this version allows you to create and edit documents.

I blogged before about the strategic mistake of Microsoft restricting its Office products for its own operating systems, and I think the recent change in CEO might have something to do with the sudden release of the iPad app which was rumoured to have been ready for a long time.

So what do I think? First of all, the design looks great. It is a good blend of the iOS environment with Microsoft-specific UI elements (ribbon). The app works fast/snappy and is intuitive to use.

The best thing is that finally PowerPoint will look normal when opening them on an iPad. Fonts work, no need for PDF-ing, or using specific apps such as SlideShark. This takes an important uncertainty out of business meetings. I had many instances where I needed to pull out a deck quickly and unexpectedly, and if an iPad is the only devices you have on you, you keep on apologising for the horrible look of your slides.

And I think this will be the main use of PowerPoint for iPad: showing presentations plus the occasional last minute text edit, or slide show re-order. Serious slide design work is not possible, first of all due to the small screen that is not comfortable to work on for a long time, and secondly because critical functions are missing when compared to the desktop app.

Sometimes I work with really good presenters that already have a really good presentation. How to get from 90 to 100%?

My approach would be to sit in the audience of a real live presentation, or watch an entire presentation from start to finish on video. Then, create a series of slides that exactly mimic the story. Take out slides that do not really add anything and are just a prompt for the presenter to tell a story. Add black slides to switch off the projector all together. Use very simple graphics and words to support a story. Be a movie director and look at each frame of presenter and slide together.

The ideal cover image of your presentation (the slide that sits on the projector while the audience walks in) would be one that tells your whole story so perfectly that the presentation itself can be skipped. Many people try to reach this level of perfection by putting up a messy collage of different images, a very tricky visual concept or a highly tacky and cliche stock image that represents the values of the brand: young, healthy, lively, dynamic, and social.

I am less ambitious and usually pick an image that fits the corporate colour scheme of the client and is a preview of an image that I use on a very important slide somewhere inside the presentation. It looks nice and calm when the audience enters, and it will generate that instant recall of that important slide when I show it for the 3rd time on the closing slide.

In the spirit of flat design, I am not a big user of gradients in my presentations. It is one of those features: the fact that PowerPoint/Keynote supports them, does not mean you have to use them. Some observations.

Not all gradients work. A background gradient that goes from white to a touch of grey as your PowerPoint canvas often looks “dirty” on the presentation screen. Especially on antique VGA meeting room projectors. The inverse (pitch black to a dark grey) can actually look good. There is another challenge though with a gradient slide background: it is harder to work with shapes and images that have a non-gradient background that is close to the canvas color.

Watch out with gradients that run between clashing colours. If the colours do not go well together (for example green and red) then the resulting gradient is probably not going to be good either. Complex gradients can work though, have a look at the book cover of “Pitch it!” on the blog cover page. You could construct a nice gradient with reds, oranges, blues, and purples.

There is one area where I often use gradients: visualising transitions from one state to another. Even if the colour clash, I would still add that colour transition on a big horizontal arrow.

But still, we have to admit modern display technology falls short in places where ancient artists thrived…

Yesterday evening I attended a dinner in honor of a famous scientist who received a honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv university. The setting was a beautiful coast-side villa of a successful businessmen, the audience: scientists and healthcare technology investors (corporate and venture capital). On the menu: some good food and 6 presentations. Here are some suggestions for scientists who get put “on the menu” for these types of events.

Investors. You have 6 minutes, you have 2 audiences: scientists and investors. This is probably not the right time to get insightful feedback from your science colleagues, however, you might hook the attention from a potential investor in your research you would not have met otherwise. So take the investor as your target audience and shape your content for her. Out with the detailed methodology, the detailed statistics, the history of your research, but in with the need (why is this such a horrible disease and how many people suffer from it), why is what you did so clever (other technologies fail, yours takes a fundamentally different approach), and why the early trial data shows that it works. And oh, if you are raising money for your project, say so.

Only charts when you need them. Six minutes: no bullet points, just pictures you need (statistical data, pictures of team members). Put black slides if you do not need the projector. A huge white screen in a dark garden completely overpowers the presenter.

Simplified statistics. Putting up the full scientifically responsible data chart over dinner is not effective. Laymen do not know how to read it. First explain what benchmark matters (survival rate for example). Then, make an incredibly simple char that compares the 2 benchmarks without the footnotes, n values, p values, standard deviation. All that can be discussed over coffee, not a glass of wine.

The majority of my presentations have either a pitch black or bright white background. But now that monitors are getting Retina-like resolutions, it becomes possible to add a tiny, tiny texture to the background. Here is a site that has a few candidates: subtlepatterns.com. (Update 7 April 2017: new link https://www.toptal.com/designers/subtlepatterns/

On the average crappy VGA office overhead projector this effect will not come out though.

Most people design their slides for a the 4:3 aspect ratio of older TV screens and computer monitors (I still think it is actually better than 16:9).

Increasingly conference rooms are using large 16:9 LCD screens that are much brighter than the traditional on screen projectors. And most of these 16:9 screens are set to stretch 4:3 input signals. As a result your slides will look bloated.

Grab that monitor remote (you cannot control this from your computer) and set the aspect ratio to 4:3 before you start presenting. The tech person present usually will say “What, you want those black bars?”. You can answer affirmative. Your slides will look much better, and if you use a black slide background, no one will even notice the black vertical bars.

P.S. Ancient post that touches on slide backgrounds.