SlideMagic Blog

In the bottom of my office drawer I just found a small card with personalised suggestions for better presenting that I had to fill out after a communication training at McKinsey all the way back in 1996. All the usual things are there: stance, eye contact, etc.

But one things stands out and is so 1996/McKinsey: “Introduce the slide before putting it up” (remember we were still in the time of the overhead projector). McKinsey slides were incredibly busy and filled with data, so plopping that overhead sheet on the projector without warning would overwhelm the audience.

Instead, we had to introduce the message of the slide, show it, talk people through the various elements of the slide (what is on the axes, what the line means, etc. etc.), and maybe repeat the key point one more time.

Now 16 years later, my approach has completely changed. When you put up a slide, it should be completely self explanatory, cutting out unnecessary clutter and spreading out content of multiple slides if needed.

A frightening, dramatic, stressful image can greatly enhance your message. But I would not use it on the cover page of your presentation. That page usually sits on the projector for a long time while the audience is walking in and you do not want to destroy their mood before your talk started. Use the stressful slide at a key moment inside your deck instead, it could even be one page 2, just not on page 1.

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.

Watch out with the text effects in PowerPoint or Keynote. A drop shadow, stroke line, and worst of all: a glow and a gradient fill can reduce the contrast of your test and make your text look dirty, especially on low-resolution screens which are often old VGA projectors in conference rooms. I prefer to keep things clean and crisp.

If you are in the high tech sector you face the challenge of demonstrating your product in an investor or sales pitch meeting. If that meeting is short (an hour or less), my advice is not to show your product in a live demo, but use a series of carefully planned screen shots.

Murphy’s law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. And it seems to apply especially to high tech demos. There are just so many variables that can go wrong: Internet connection, screens, the application itself.

If you are in the middle of a short pitch, any interruption will pop the momentum of your story. Ideally you want your pitch to be one focused burst of energy that gets the audience craving for more at the end. A hiccup because of WiFi password will definitely not get you there.

There is another problem with demos, not all application functionality is Interesting. Logging in, creating profiles, entering some data, all things you have to do, but they are not the piece of technology that will wow your investors or customers. And finally, a live computer screen is most of the time not readable when put on an overhead projector, most fonts are probably smaller than 12 points.

So, what to do instead. Prepare an interesting story, set it up beforehand in your application, take lots of screenshots and paste them in the right order in your presentation. Zoom in to those aspects of the screen that are interesting, crop out those window bars, ads, anything that you do not need. Circle what people,should be looking at. Put big bold explanation text boxes on the slides.

I think that wireless video technology will transform home entertainment and the corporate conference room. In the latter, hopefully we might see the end of battles with laptops, cables, and projectors before we can get down to showing our presentation. It will take time before the last conference room is Airplay enabled, but I am keen to accelerate things.

It is already possible to Airplay iPhone and iPad screens on your Apple TV, but font issues still complicate the transfer of presentation files from computers to mobile devices. Currently, Airplay mirroring is not supported for Macs. The next version of Mac OSX will allow Airplay mirroring of Mac screens wirelessly to your Apple TV.

If you cannot wait, well, there is an app for that. Airparrot enables sending your Mac screen wirelessly to you Apple TV ($10). The app has many customization features, allowing you to adjust the performance/quality trade off and select which screens you want to transfer, or even which apps. You can switch off the cursor.

Still we are not yet living in the world of 1-click Airplaying of video. Television screens have a lower resolution than computer screens. So before using the app, you need to downgrade your Mac display to 1280x800, the closest to my Apple TV 1280x720 resolution. After that some fiddling with the screen remote to get the right aspect ratio. The resulting screen sharpness is OK, but not the pin-sharp feel you get from watching an HD movie. It is perfectly fine to play presentation slides (which are often 1024x768), but less than optimal for other applications.

I am switching my own introduction presentation to iPad/iPhone, leaving my laptop home as a I go to meetings and instead bringing a small iOS to VGA converter cable with me (Airplaying the presentation to a big screen only works in my own office for the moment). I would recommend this to anyone who constantly needs to have her pitch/sales presentation ready to go.

As a result, I am trying all possible ways to view slides on my iPad. Only Keynote users have a perfect solution (Keynote), if you use other formats it is still compromising. In my case for example, I need PowerPoint to show example presentations that I designed a while ago. And a second complication is that I use a few custom fonts…

So here are your options, I use Dropbox to sync my files, it is still a lot more convenient than iCloud.

1. Keynote to Keynote.  Straightforward and simple. Download in Dropbox, tick open in Keynote and you are all set. When you are in presenter mode, you get a preview of the next slide on your iPad, while the audience just sees the current slide on the projector. Only works with standard fonts that are installed on the iPad.
2. PowerPoint to Keynote. This works surprisingly well (if you use standard fonts). Download the PowerPoint file in Dropbox, tap open in Keynote and you have a file which is 95% OK. However, I am a perfectionist, and the 5% needs to be right as well.
3. SlideShark is iPad app specifically designed for presenting slides. You can upload PowerPoint files to their server, or tap a dropbox or email link and tell the iPad to open the file in SlideShark. The interface is nice, with the option to move randomly between slide tiles (which the audience cannot see) to break the lineair flow of a deck. SlideShark preserves animations in your slide. Using a special font requires a request to SlideShark technical support to install it in the data center. Unlike Keynote, SlideShark does not support the standard Apple fonts (such as Helvetica) SlideShark is not yet retina-optimized I think, the image looks slightly hazy on my screen, but I am sure an update will follow soon. The app has still some childhood diseases at the moment but it could be a clear winner in the future as the team there seems to working hard to make it work among larger competitors who are less focussed iPad presenting (i.e., Microsoft).
4. PDF to Adobe Reader for iPad. Convert your PowerPoint file to PDF on your desktop, download it via Dropbox and select to open it in Adobe’s Reader app(free). Fonts come out perfectly. The display is crystal clear, and the Adobe Reader app for iPad has a good full screen mode (unlike other document readers). Obviously PDF does not support animations
5. PowerPoint to Adobe CreatePDF for iPad. The Adobe CreatePDF app works reasonably well for me (I do not understand all the 1-star ratings on iTunes), but (and it is a big but), only if you use standard fonts (and are willing to invest $10) and your deck does not have animations.

Clients that run conservative IT infrastructures (usually the larger enterprises) still have a cap of around 10MB on the size of an email attachment. As presentations contain more images, file sizes are getting increasingly larger. Over the past years I have been cropping and compressing to keep file sizes in check, but I think we have finally reached the time to get rid of the email attachment as the preferred way to send files across.

Solutions such as Dropbox provide a very convenient alternative to the email attachment, send a download link to a file, or sync a file both on your hard drive and the hard drive of your colleague.

Now that 10MB is no longer an issue, we can go to 100MB and beyond and this introduces incredible design freedom.

1. Put images in at full HD resolution, keep the areas that you cropped out to change a slide design in the future, and have the option to produce very high-grade print material from your working document. There is no need anymore to do destructive compression to your source file. With new devices such as the new iPad with retina screen resolutions going to more than 2000 pixels this becomes essential. A 700 pixel image will look OK on a crappy VGA overhead projector, but will look fuzzy and unprofessional on a tablet
2. Embed HD videos right into the presentation file. No more linking, saving files in the same directory and worrying about whether things work. Over the past months I have become convinced of the power of short 30 second videos in presentations. You could even start replacing background stills of a landscape with a looping video that show a gentle breeze going through the tree tops with some birds flying by.

The presentation canvas is no longer limited to the overhead projector. Laptops, TV screens are often used to display PowerPoint presentations with a wide screen or 16:9 aspect ratio.

For movies, 16:9 is great. The wider screen is more natural for our eyes. For slide design though, I find it less useful. We can read best when titles are short, or text is set in a narrow column. As a result, with 16:9 my slide design almost always changes to a horizontal story: element or title line on the left, and 1 or 2 other elements to the right. It always takes me a bit longer to comprehend the slide.

So, when I am designing a presentation specifically for a plasma screen (a trade show booth for example), I will stick with 16:9, but for other output devices I revert back to the good old 4:3.

It is always good to contradict yourself, see my earlier post from August 2008.

Passing a device with your demo app around the audience is not enough, even for a small group of people:

1. Screens are small and do not make a big impression
2. People do not know what to do in order to see the best of the app

So the point of passing the device around is mainly to prove that your app exists. It should be supported by very large screen shots on the projector screen that tell the story behind the app, with the right sequence of features. Preferably with different levels of zoom: a user holding the device, the opening screen with the device around it, and then zooming even further to parts of the screen.