SlideMagic Blog

The preview of the new Microsoft Office 2016 is out (finally) and I have installed it on my production machine letting it do all my presentation design work for clients. (You can download the Office 2016 preview here)

• It looks beautiful. PowerPoint 2016 for Mac looks exactly the same as PowerPoint 2013 for Windows. A calm flat user interface. Working in a beautiful software environment always encourages you to create beautiful presentations.
• The whole interface feels faster, snappier, and smoother, somehow. This is especially true for Excel. The current version of Excel for Mac has a highly annoying latency when entering data in cells.
• Subtle changes to the default colours and fonts. Gone are the boring olive greens of the old PowerPoint colour scheme. Calibri light looks great on Retina displays. Gone are the default gradients and drop shadows. Gone are the tick marks in data charts.
• The commenting infrastructure is nice for collaboration with other people
• Full integration with OneDrive cloud storage (if Microsoft has guts they should add Dropbox as well, and maybe even Google Drive).
• Now PowerPoint gives suggested snap lines to place objects, automatically distributing and aligning things on your screen.
• The grid behaves more normal with a centimeter ruler. If you accidentally move a grid line (yes, this still happens) it is easy to move it back to the right position.
• Now text and shape backgrounds have the exact same colour rendering, an annoying bug in PowerPoint 2011, where despite selecting the same RGB value, colours on text and shapes would render differently.

Strategy consulting emerged in the 1930s by blending techniques from mathematics, engineering, and economics and apply them to improve company performance. The profession also pioneered new ways of business communications.

1. Tables, frameworks, and drawings were used to visualise strategic trade offs. A departure from the long-winded corporate memo.
2. Line, column, and bar charts were simplified and focused on a specific message. A departure with data-loaded scientific graphs

In my management consulting charts, tables and data charts are blended. Often the most important statistic in a table is visualised using some sort of bar chart. See the example below.

Many consultants push this technique too far. I have seen many charts were many, many columns were represented by bar charts. These bar charts had become so small that it is more clear to just stick in the value. If there is very little variation among your data, then using a bar chart does not make the chart much clearer: you get a bunch of bars of roughly the same size (I do not believe in breaking axes). And the worst consulting mistake is the famous bar chart with just one data item.

Getting data charts to line up with text in PowerPoint and Keynote is very tricky. SlideMagic is built around a very strict grid and this data chart grid alignment was one of the hardest things to get right in the design. I think we cracked it and the SlideMagic templates contain a number of slide compositions where data charts and tables are blended.

As professional presentation designer, I hardly use animations, and my presentation software SlideMagic does not have animation functionality.

• Animations do not show well on mobile devices and/or in PDF files
• Most animations are used for slide transitions or spectacular intros and exits of slide objects. These just distract the audience and reduce the level “seriousness” of your pitch. Flying text boxes work in MBA class, but giggling venture capitalists are less likely to invest in you.
• Layered animations are a pain to edit

If I need to build up the content on a slide slowly, I duplicate a slide multiple times and add a bit more on each page. To the audience, it looks like an animation, it shows on mobile devices/PDF, and it is easy to edit/change.

Art: Georges Seurat, The Circus, 1891. Sign up for SlideMagic. Subscribe to this blog. Follow me on Twitter.

Two years after having the first idea about creating a PowerPoint alternative from scratch, I now have taken the invite wall down on presentation software SlideMagic. Anyone can now sign up for the beta version.

Here is how to get hooked:

1. Go to the “templates” tab and clone one of the template presentations to start
2. Customise your own accent colour and logo
3. Go all the way to the end (beyond playing around) and create one real presentation for your next meeting. It can be a short presentation. It can be low-risk presentation.

Step 3 is the important one. You will see how incredibly easy it is to create a presentation, especially when you think you should go back to PowerPoint for your next presentation.

Let me know your thoughts and share SlideMagic with like minded people who you think might enjoy it as well.

Art: Claude Monet, La rue Montorgueil à Paris. Fête du 30 juin 1878. Subscribe to this blog. Follow me on Twitter. Sign up for SlideMagic

I created a quick presentation (hey, in SlideMagic) that highlights some of the features I have put inside that you will not get in other presentation design apps. Some of them you will never find there (even if people try to copy them) because of the fundamentally different way SlideMagic works. Less designer freedom and more uniformity allows you to do great things!

• Keyword search across all your slides, no more opening and closing files
• Image-based search: “get me all the slides that contain this image”
• Explanation slide-out drawer to turn an abstract visual presentation that needs verbal explanation into a document that you can email.
• A strictly enforced grid that makes sure everything is always lined up and distributed properly. And the most tricky part: that includes the columns and bars of data charts as well.
• Instant conversion from a light to a dark background and back (switch between a conference room and a keynote hall setting)
• And, a template bank that is constantly updated by a McKinsey/Idea Transplant designer!

Give SlideMagic a try yourself, you can request an invite here.

Art: Albert Gleizes, 1912, Les Baigneuses, oil on canvas, 105 x 171 cm, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Published in Du “Cubisme” Subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter

There are two popular web site template providers: squarespace and wix. I like to think of presentation design software SlideMagic as “squarespace for presentations”. Many other PowerPoint alternatives (such as prezi) are “wix for presentations”. What is the difference?

• Wix offers a lot of features, colours, fonts, pre-programmed templates for specific sectors (vets and pets for example)
• Squarespace is muted, has far fewer choices, fewer colours, bells & whistles.

The great thing is that the design restrictions of squarespace actually result in better web designs. People have to think how (whether) to put that content on the page. A professional designer will pick a style and restrict herself to stay in that framework. That is why it looks so good. The layman designer cannot resist to add more stuff. Squarespace and SlideMagic protect the non-designer from herself.

P.S. Squarespace powers the SlideMagic landing pages and blog.

Art: The Stadhuis under construction, by Johannes Lingelbach, 1656 Subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter

Here is a concept that you can use in many investor and/or sales pitches for technology:

While [a] and [b] have moved on, [c] is still pretty much stuck in the 1950s despite a lot of technological development. Our company is going to fix that.

I have added a slide to the SlideMagic startup pitch template library that reflects this idea, Two “arrows” moving to the right, and a third one which is catching up. Look at the simplicity of the graphics which exactly fits the philosophy of SlideMagic. It looks pretty, it gets the message across, is easy to design. A new business language that does not need arrows, drop shadows, and gradients. It is almost a Lego-like abstractification (is that a word?) of a complex visual.

Art: Le derby d’Epsom, painting by Théodore Géricault, 1821 Subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter

Data charts in SlideMagic work a bit different than in other presentation software:

• Charts come in a beautiful, simple, formatting without the clutter of value (y) axes, tick marks. Charts are automatically adjusted to your own branding (the right colours, the right font).
• SlideMagic only supports those data charts that I regularly use in my own presentation design project. No pie charts for example (sorry)
• Best of all: SlideMagic data charts line up with the grid of the slide. In most business presentations, data charts are part of a broader slide design. There is an extra column on growth percentage bubbles next to the bar chart. There is more than 1 bar chart on a page. In PowerPoint it is very tricky to get these things to line up properly. In SlideMagic, it is not possible, not to line them up

Click through the slide sequence below to get an idea of how you can work with data charts in SlideMagic. Feedback and comments are welcome (comment below, or email me at support @ slidemagic dot com).

Art: Melencolia I. Print by Albrecht Dürer, 1514 Subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter

Many beta testers ask me how to use templates in presentation software SlideMagic. The series of screen shots below explain how you can access and use them. You can:

• Clone an entire template presentation into a new presentation
• Import selected template slides into your presentation

SlideMagic stores all presentations in one big database which created the opportunity for a really cool feature: the ability to search through ALL your slides like a Google web search. And not only with keywords, you can also ask SlideMagic to return all slides that use a specific image.

Art: William Powell Frith, The Sleeping Model, 1893

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I tend to look at it as a new business communication design language. When you give people simple building blocks they end up doing great things with it. Look at Lego. Look at Twitter. Constraints actually drive creativity.

I can see the confirmation that it works in the behaviour beta users. Advanced designers who are looking for the most advanced features miss certain functionality (but hey, check out that automatic light to dark background conversion). Some people are confused by the user interface which is radically different (read much more simple) than PowerPoint. But the user who makes a first effort to go through the dip and actually makes a presentation for real is hooked.

I could have written a book, created a training program, but I thought I would never get the reach that a web based tool could give. Hence the presentation design app SlideMagic.

So the ambition is not to remove PowerPoint from corporate desktops, it is bigger than that. The ambition is to change the way people talk to each other in business.

Art: Rene Magritte, La trahison des images, 1928–29, Image credit: Nad Renrel on Flickr.

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