SlideMagic Blog

When Googling for examples of VC pitch decks, the on that Buffer used to raise $500k in 2013 ranks high. I decided to give it the SlideMagic treatment: how would the deck have looked when the slides would have been created in SlideMagic.

• I changed the slide design to fit SlideMagic
• I did not change the slide content
• I did not change the story flow

I have a few comments on the slides that I have put in the SlideMagic explanation boxes.

Here is the original:

Here is the same deck in SlideMagic. You can clone this presentation to your own SlideMagic account by clicking this linkand use some of the slide concepts in your own presentations. I have also added this presentation as a template in SlideMagic’s template library.

Art: Johann Zoffany paints a group of Englishmen in Rome for the Grand Tour, united only by their wealth and love of art; unlike most conversation pieces, this was not a commissioned work

Ramzi Mrad is entrepreneur in residence at INSEAD and used SlideMagic prepare his presentation of business case: how Roche Pharmaceuticals set the price for its Avastin cancer drug in Europe. This type of presentation is exactly how I envisioned SlideMagic being used. Without any professional support, a layman designer can come up with something pretty decent. You can see his presentation here.

Art: Pierre-Denis Martin (1663–1742), Vue du Château de Fontainebleau (1718-1723)

I get this feedback from early SlideMagic beta testers. SlideMagic supports one accent colour, one font, and encourages you to work in a strict slide layout grid. For certain presentations, this feedback is valid. I think we will not see any Apple product launch presentations designed in SlideMagic (yet).

For 99% of presentations though, it is actually precisely what I tried to achieve:

• When the software tool you use for presentations is incredibly simple, you spend most of your time worrying about the content rather than searching support web sites how to align the second line of a bullet point paragraph. I want 90% of SlideMagic users to master 100% of its features.
• If all presentations use more or less the same visual concepts to show trade offs, contrasts, sales over time, etc. then people will be able to read and understand them quicker

Today, I would argue that PowerPoint presentations look more similar to each other than the SlideMagic decks: lists of bullet points on a white background using the standard Microsoft Office (olive, blue, red, green) colour scheme.

Below are examples how the same SlideMagic chart would look when used in different companies. You see the impact of consistent use of colours. All SlideMagic charts will be updated instantly after a colour and logo change.

If you want to try SlideMagic for yourself, you can sign up here as a beta user.

Art: Salomon de Bray, The Twins Clara and Aelbert de Bray, 1646

Repeating the whole story of your presentation on the last slide is boring. You want to end with a “boom” and quickly remind people of the most important message in the presentation. I usually do that with repeating a key visual (just one). Using (the cliche) that a picture says more than a 1,000 words, the repeated image brings back the full richness of the discussion you had in one millisecond. Much more efficient than writing a bullet point.

If you have to repeat multiple messages, here is another trick: use small screen shots of slides. At the end, the audience does not need to be able to read the entire slide anymore. The thumbnail is a quick visual reminder of the content. Below an example that I created in SlideMagic.

I have added this slide design to the template file of all slides I created for the blog. You can open it in the SlideMagic app here and use it for your own designs. Just change the images.

Art: The Flute Concert of Sanssouci by Adolph Menzel, 1852, depicts Frederick playing the flute in his music room at Sanssouci. C. P. E. Bach accompanies him on the harpsichord.

This memo that was sent to the team behind Slack before its preview release resonated with me.

We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works fine).

I love the “be less busy” tag line of Slack. I love the stress relief that search provides in Slack (you can always find things if you have to).

The more I think about it, SlideMagic might actually not an alternative to PowerPoint, it is a broader concept of change in how people in enterprises should communicate, and how they spend their time preparing for this communication. My tool enables this, but it is not the main thing of what it is all about.

SlideMagic enables you:

• To be less busy with meetings: you can have short, to the point meetings where ideas can be communicated clearly, and decisions can be taken quickly. Documents are simple and clear, and more or less standardised. It becomes a very efficient corporate language.
• To be less busy with preparing for meetings, Most of the time will go into forming your idea. Once you have your idea, it only should take an hour or so to jot it down in beautiful slides. And a powerful keyword search function across all your slides ensures that you will never have to do double work, rework slides.
• To lift the spirits of a company by eliminating poor design. Employees work better in a beautiful office. Seeing depressing dense bullet point presentations on every screen, on every printer, on every fax machine, on every projector, in every email inbox, does not add to employee morale.

There are a number of problems with stock images:

• Most of them are staged, cheesy, unrealistic images
• Stock image search algorithms no push up results for photos that include some design elements (some words for example), stuff that is better being taken care of by the presentation designer
• Many people are over doing the images, trying to use a photograph to visualise a concept that does not really need visualising. The result: an endless string of “stunning” images that distracts the audience rather than support your story
• Stock images are so over-used that a presentation who uses them now almost look as bad as one that consist of list of bullets. It is an instant recognition: you see the first page of a bullet point presentation, you see the first page of a stock image presentation and you think “uh oh, the next 30 minutes it is going to be one like these”

Here are the steps I go through when trying to find an appropriate visual concept for a slide:

1. Do I need an image at all? Or can a simple box composition with some text do the job?
2. If I need images, is there some consistent set of photographs I can use throughout the presentation? Art? People using mobile phones? Retro? Paris?
3. Do a quick Google Image search with search tools set to “labeled for re-use” to see whether there are any good free/real images out there (always check the actual image for re-use rights, Google might have it wrong)
4. Try some other free image sources (see my list of free image sources here).
5. Dive into stock image sites

Recently, I have focussed most of the development work for SlideMagic on improving the workflow. It is the small differences that can make a big difference. Here are two features that you might not have discovered yet:

You can select multiple boxes and edit their design (colours, font size, etc.) at the same time. Great for creating tables quickly or clean up inconsistent font sizes.

In the shape change menu you can tackle multiple shapes in one go. Click another shape and you can adjust its perimeter as well without leaving and re-entering the menu.

You can give SlideMagic a try yourself, the beta version is free to use. Sign up here.

Art: Rabbits by Johann Georg Seitz, subscribe to this blog, follow on Twitter

Guy Kawasaki (the person behind the 10/20/30 rule) listed these 10 slides as the only ones you need in a startup pitch to investors. I agree and disagree with him.

I agree that these are more or less the 10 points you need to hit. But in order to hit these points, you might need more (visual) slides. Especially number 2: the problem/opportunity. A one slide explanation might not make the point emotionally. Or number 4: the magic, might take more than one slide.

The biggest problem is not which slides you need, the challenge is how to design them. Design is easy for the straightforward slides: title, business model, go-to-market, management team, projections. The other ones are a bit more tricky.

Art: Rothko number 10, sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow on Twitter

Most of the time, numbers in graphs look better than numbers in a table. There are exceptions though: when there is just one number, and when there is very little variation among the numbers. During my time at McKinsey, I have seen many examples of “lone columns”, column charts with just one number in them, or tables full of tiny column charts with hardly any variations among them.

These charts are not only difficult to read, but they are also very hard to create in PowerPoint or Keynote SlideMagic’s grid structure does it in a snap though, but hopefully users won’t abuse the app for these type of consulting charts. Sign up for SlideMagic here.

Art: Painting of Trafalgar Square (c. 1865) by Henry Pether. Sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow on Twitter

I have been designing presentation slides for over 20 years now (scary) and over time stopped using more and more types of data charts.

• Pie charts: I don’t like the way they look, it has to place data labels, it is hard to compare two of them side by side
• Line charts have ver little presence (duh, a thin line) and I use column charts where possible to visualise time series. Yes, for correlations and hard core scientific data I might have to resort to them
• Clustered column charts, I find them confusing, it works better to just put 2 column charts next to each other
• Hybrid charts with 2 axes, very confusing. Again, I split them up into 2.

So, as a presentation designer you can get away with a very limited arsenal of data charts. Here is a quick run down of the ones I use: columns, stacked columns, and bar charts. (You can can guess which ones ship with SlideMagic)

The key to designing good data charts is careful, manual design (the opposite of copy pasting from a spreadsheet). What is the one single message that you want to pop out. What are the 10 to 20 data points that support this. Where to drop the accent colour, to what number of decimals should you round up the numbers. What breakdown categories should you group consolidate. Do I need a graph, or is it clearer to put the numbers in a single table? Data charts take time to prepare, but once you figured out what you want to show, can be produced in 5 minutes.