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Wide-screen televisions are great for watching movies, but not for reading text. A line that spans across the screen is hard to read and does not look very pretty. There is a reason that print newspapers use columns to limit the number of words on one line.
Think about this when designing slides, switch to a multi-column grid, or simple leave space unused left and right of your text (something that many web pages do), see the examples below.
It can take months to get the results of your strategy project, or your business plan. And along with it, your pitch deck has evolved as well. You take it out for every meeting.
A refreshing approach: rewrite the pitch deck (not the business plan of course) from scratch for your next meeting. My guess is that it should only take you 3 hours, since you did all the work over the previous months. A fresh story line, and only charts to support your messages, rather than provide backup data. No risk, if it didn’t work you will always have your old one, but my predication is that that one will start to collect dust.
Tel Aviv is trying to improve the clarity of their parking signs, who can park when. The sign below is the new format. (If you do not read Hebrew, you will get tickets…)
I would have gone for a much simpler shape that would make the table easier to read. Here is a sketch (obviously not a final design)
Put all the details (hours of day and night, etc.) in a dense footnote at the bottom. Once you have read the footnote once, you can just glance at the shape anywhere in the city and now what you are up to.
My guess is that the detailed table with explicit instructions was selected to make it easer to deal with law suits of people disputing their tickets.
Every communications books and marketing strategists says it. Who is your audience? And many presenters would answer I know: the “C-level executive who is eager to get efficiency and transparency benefits for a better price than the current offerings in the market segment in between premium and super premium”.
That does not sound like a real person to me. Maybe it is someone new on the job who wants to impress her boss. Maybe it is someone buried under so many projects that she does not see how she has time to take on another one. Maybe it is someone who does not like that you get back to emails only after 5 days. Maybe it is someone who ia upset that you still keep talking about things she said she was not interested in. Maybe it is someone who needs to convince a colleague to use your product.
If you cannot visualize your target audience as a person, you might not have found it yet.
Some people use ALL CAPS TO MAKE A TEXT STAND OUT. That’s not a good use of all caps. It looks busy/messy, especially when used frequently on the same page. A subtle use of bold is better, and if you find yourself bolding every other word, maybe it is a signal to reconsider the design of the slide.
I like using all caps for labels or tags, especially if the text in these tags has similar length. The consistent height of the characters creates nice and stable elements on the page.
Consider reducing the font size of your all caps tags though, from the font your are using for the rest of the page. All caps look bigger (by design).
Advice from a music teacher to amateur musicians: “You think the song is too short, the audience (almost always) will perceive the song as too long”. When you are an amateur musician, who sticks her out by performing on stage, you get instant sympathy, even without having heard a single note. If you play decently, people will enjoy your performance as well. But, because you are not (playing like a) famous rock star, patience / novelty might run out after a while. “Ah, she is going for another verse”.
Have the courage to keep it short.
The protests against the attempt to weaken the Israeli democracy are continuing. Every weekend there is a 100,000+ demonstration in central Tel Aviv (14 weeks and counting). As a result, I have heard my fair share of speeches made by politicians and activists.
The bar for a good speech gets higher. A politician who tries a very long sequence of cliche sound bites (we will win, it unfair, we won’t let them), is unlikely to excite the audience anymore. What can work?
This chart in the WSJ shows how you can focus on data points that matter to your story, while literally ignoring other data points that are less relevant.
This slide is obviously super complex, but you can also apply this style with more mondaine, everyday slides.
Instead of complex animations, it is easer to copy a version of your chart in consecutive slides, and adjust the coloring and messaging to highlight the points.
This approach also makes sure that your story is visible in environments without animations (PDF, mobile devices)
SlideMagic offers free Pro subscriptions to students (sign up here). For many countries there is automated, instant approval if you log in with your university/school credentials. For some countries, reviews are still manual. Make it easy to get approved by filling out the form correctly if you are in the latter box. Use your university email address, and provide a link to a profile (LinkedIn, school/university) so we can verify your status. We see many anonymous gmail addresses, and empty profile links in the applications, and we won’t switch these account on to the student plan.
There is a reason why many presentation templates and data dashboards look so bad: they have been designed without actual data.
Most corporate presentation templates are the result of the work of a designer who has been given a white page to add some stuff to. The resulting white template page might still look OK, but when it is filled up with typical slide content…
Information dashboards looked great in the mock up screens: dials, tables, buttons, graphs, until they are populated with typical data: text blocks are longer shorter than in the mockup, important data is actually not there, non-important data is, all graphs look flat, and all dials have more or less the same color because the values don’t change that much.
Presentation template designers, ask for an actual deck to start working on. Dashboard UI designers, ask for a real data set.