SlideMagic Blog

When a screen projector projects the color black, it projects nothing. Think about this when designing slides. If you have an image with an aspect ratio that is different from a regular slide (4:3, 16:9) and it is not possible to crop it without damaging its visual impact, make the bits of the slide that are not covered black instead of the default slide background color you are using. Once on screen, the black border will blend in with the area outside of the projection screen.

A story from the early 90s. Back then I had recently joined McKinsey as a Business Analyst and got involved in recruiting presentations at Dutch universities to try to convince more engineers to apply for a  position. The slide deck covered it all: our offices, our expertise, our clients, our selection process.

Until one day we did a survey asking the audience to rank how useful this presentation was. The outcome: people already knew that we were probably very smart, worked with prestigious clients, were unlikely to starve because of lack of financial resources, and were very professional.

The questions the students had were: are you guys human or nerds, do you really have to work 80 hours a week, how on earth can a physics engineer be useful there? These questions you cannot really address on a slide, so we cut the introduction presentation to the minimum (to re-confirm what people already knew), and then switched off the projector and started talking about us as a person, and opening up the discussion for questions.

Preaching to the converted is a waste of time. Instead, use your presentation to address the issues the audience has.

The cover page of your presentation is important: it will be sitting on the projector for a long time as the audience comes into the room, and even more important: it determines how many people will open your deck on online presentation sharing platforms such as SlideShare.

Presentation designers (including me) still have lots to learn from book cover designers. I enjoyed browsing through this book: The Best of Cover Design: Books, Magazines, Catalogs, and More (affiliate link). It reminded me of all this design options I have in PowerPoint that I actually do not use at all for cover slide design.

There is some irony though. The introduction of the book states that the cover designs presented in the book are proof that print media is here to stay forever. I disagree, we digital designers are learning to bring the quality of digital design up to the same standard as print.

Many presentations end in some sort of Q&A session. During this discussion, the slide show usually comes to a standstill, and the last visual used stays on the projector for a long time. Make sure it is a useful one, since it might be the image that the audience will remember best. To be avoided:

• A completely random slide from the deck (the one that sparked the discussion for example)
• A “thank you” or “Q&A” slide
• A slide that addresses one of your weaker points (i.e., you got a touch question about the competition and did the best you could using the competitor comparison slide), move it after you used it.
• A dry list of bullet points recapping the content of your presentation using language full of abstract concepts (“ROI”) and buzz words (“key competencies”)

What could work: a visual that links back to a key point in your presentation. For example, if you spend 5 slides on describing how a teenager will use your mobile social network, just putting a picture of her back up will remind the audience of the story. (This time you can leave out the bullets arrows, boxes, just an image to refresh the memory).

OK, the comments on my post from 2 days ago showed that I should think a bit more before writing about the last slide in a presentation. Here we go:

1. A good story does not need a slide that says “that was it, please applaud”, the story flow in itself should let the audience feel that you have come to the conclusion of your talk. (And what if the audience does not applaud when you ask them to? Awkward.

2. It is good to recap what you discussed though. But recapping does not mean telling the entire story again. Rather think of it what you want people still to remember 4 hours after the presentation. Leave out the buzzwords and the fluff.:

• "Every teenager sends 3,339 text messages per month.
• No teenager would want to miss out on our new service"
• [re-display of stunning key graphic]
• “Please invest in our 3rd startup that we will bring from PowerPoint to IPO”.

Much better than:

• "The market is big,
• there is no competition,
• we have a solid business model,
• there are interesting exit opportunities in this ever-changing mobile communications landscape that will transform the way young people communicate with each other".

3. It is good to put the “killer graphic” back on the projector, since the brain can anchor an entire discussion/story to an image. People will remember. If you get a lot of questions, this slide will stay on the screen for a long time.

The term “slideument” was coined by Garr Reynolds (his post from 2006 here): a PowerPoint file that looks more like a densely written text document than a minimalist, visually powerful sequence of slides for a presentation.

Documents and slides serve a different purpose and should be designed differently. But here is what I have been observing: the document is on its way out, and the slideument will have a bright future. Not as a presentation tool, but meant for on-screen reading, mostly for an internal audience that is very close to a subject matter. Background materials for a strategy discussion for an important board meeting would be an example. Nobody has time to plough through a dense text document anymore.

Some suggestions for creating good slideuments:

• Create good data charts, using the exact same rules as you would for an on-screen presentation. Focus on the trend you want to show, ignore everything else. Round numbers up.
• Use overview maps, strategic landscapes, with trends/competitors plotted against 2 axes, or lists of options with qualitative evaluation bubbles or traffic lights. One page that has the entire logic in it. Far too dense to present to a big audience, but really useful to discuss options. See the map to get a vague idea about the logic, digest the subsequent information in the deck, come back to the map to understand the full nuances.
• Bullet points are an essential part of a slideument, but make them useful. Make sure they are short, and say something tangible/specific. Don’t just rattle down a list of 15 points on a page, but group the bullet points into meaningful categories. Put bullet points inside boxes, and use arrows to highlight the relationships between groups of bullet points.
• Write a clear page upfront with what you want from the group you are submitting the document to.

Finally the business plan is ready. You Googled and asked around to make sure everything is inside: the market pain, the technology solution, the team, the market size, the competitive differentiation, the financial forecast, the intellectual property and patents. The result: 150 pages of PowerPoint.

Do not use this business plan to present the business plan. OK, you used PowerPoint, but not to design a presentation. You used PowerPoint to write a document that is not suitable to put on a projector screen.

How can you figure out what presentation you do need? Invite a friend over without any knowledge about your business venture. Take an empty piece of paper or a white board. Start telling your story. Scribble things on the white board. If need, zoom deep into the business plan PowerPoint file and put one chart on the screen (i.e., an overview of the competitors). After 30 minutes take a step back and see:

• What issues did you discuss, which topics did you ignore?
• In what order did you discuss them?
• What were the hand drawings you needed to explain your idea?
• Which charts in the 150-page deck did you have to pull out?
• What questions did your friend ask that caught you by surprise?

Here is the outline of your investor pitch presentation.

Corporate PowerPoint templates are often (in fact, most of the time) too busy and too cluttered for presentation design. Lots of graphics that is repeated on each page, big logos with reflections, legal disclaimers, huge page numbers, all of this eats valuable screen real estate. Depending on how strongly the corporate communication department insists, here are some work-arounds:

1. The most radical option: go into the slide master and take all the unnecessary stuff out. [view, slide master]. But then do something extra: go into [design, create new theme colors] and enter the exact RGB colors of your company’s color scheme, a step that is often overlooked in corporate templates
2. Keep the front page, but design a presentation full of large images that you stretch across the page (including the cluttered graphical elements). “What, I did stick to the template, the images just did not fit in in any other way”.
3. If 1 and 2 do not work, create a window inside a window: design your slides inside the frame that is left, using the correct corporate colors and ignoring the bullet point default template. If the window is consistent, the audience will slowly loose the attention for the clutter around your chart, in pretty much the same way as is the case in big conference halls with distracting sponsor logos around the projector screen.

Thank you Gonzalo Álvarez Marañón for suggesting this topic.

Here is a new idea. Zen-style presentations with large images and a few words in a big font do not stand very well on their own. Maybe we should apply something from the movies: add subtitles to a PowerPoint slide.

• Crammed in a small black box that blends in with the black frame of the projector
• A small font that can be read when sitting in front of a screen, but blurs away when viewed from a distance (when a presenter is explaining the chart)
• Unlike notes pages, the text appears on the slide itself (in PDF, in SlideShare)

It’s like reading a newspaper page:

1. You read the small print under the images first
2. You read the headlines after that
3. You read the actual text last

An example below, click on an image to get a larger picture.

Interestingly, this concept is very similar to the “lead” in the ancient McKinsey exhibit format.

Another problem that would be solved by this is to make the information captured in a presentation searchable. In particular large knowledge firms (such as management consultants) struggle with archiving the knowledge that is hidden in PowerPoint presentations with little text.

Newspapers are in trouble. This TED video highlights how clever design can do miracles to the circulation of a newspaper. (For details about the presenter, see the original TED post).

Insights (for me) that reach beyond the world of newspapers:

• There is no reason why you cannot totally turn traditional visual design upside down. Many PowerPoint slides still resemble 1990s hand-written overhead projector transparencies
• Technology enables small firms/individual designers without big budgets to out-design big established brand names. It is all about ideas and creativity now, technical execution is not a differentiator anymore