SlideMagic Blog

You have been thinking about your app for 2 years, before this moment when you are ready to talk to investors. You have grand visions of the bigger picture, and how your app could become a major platform in your industry.

Investors have not gone through this process, and see many pitches that claim to be a platform in your industry. You can’t skip the part where you actually explain what your app does, now, today, in very practical terms.

This serves 2 purposes:

1. The investor actually understands what it is you do, after which she is ready to try to understand your broader vision for the future
2. The investor can develop a gut feel about whether a user today actually would like to use and keep using the product. Inside an investor pitch, there is always a mini (customer) sales pitch

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Here is a chart that visualises the merging of different flows. See in the second image what components I used to build it. Play around with the gradient stops to get the colours right.

Feel free to copy this design, or download it ready-made from the SlideMagic template bank.

It was bound to happen soon, a startup active in the field of virtual reality made an investor in pitch in well, virtual reality. (The background of Pixvana’s pitch)

For the company, it was definitely the right thing to do. The introduction of the team in a 360 setting is nice touch, and makes you feel right inside the company. The graphics show of the platform’s capability, which is probably the most important objective of the presentation.

Still, when it comes to transferring specific concepts, VR suffers from a similar problem that we already saw with the spectacular animations in Prezi. Sophisticated visual effects are not always helpful to communicate complex issues. I watched the 2D, non-confidential video, in a casual way, similar as an investor would do a first time around. In the video, the company shows why current video production tools fall short, I understand things more or less (“more data is required”), but somehow I feel that it could have been communicated more clearly.

As I discussed earlier re. Prezi, there are specific situations where animations could be really useful in an investor presentation (beyond spectacular page switches): zooming in and out of complex technical diagrams, showing transformations. The same is true for VR: guided tours of facilities, demos of buildings, etc. etc.

Exciting times for visual communication! If you are in the business of video production, the Pixvana SPIN Studio solution might be worth checking out.

People in the HR business complain about this: a headhunter makes a connection between a candidate and a recruiting officer without asking them both first (the double opt-in introduction), and, when the introduction ends up in a match, sends an invoice for a referral fee.

The same starts happening to me for custom design projects: an introduction, an anticipating client, and the request by the introducer to get paid in a separate email. Two things are wrong here.

One, not going for a double opt-in introduction. Ask both sides first whether they want to be introduced, and if you want to get paid for an introduction, ask me before you introduce, without mentioning the name of the potential client.

Two, I don’t work with referral fees. I don’t like padding clients invoices with costs that do not benefit from them. And more importantly, and refer lots of other work to other designers when I don’t have time to do it myself, without asking anything in return for it.

I felt like I had to make a public statement about this: I am always interested to be connected to new potential clients, but I don’t pay referral fees.

Sankey diagrams are tricky to make in PowerPoint, in the absence of a standard tool, you have to DIY the diagram from individual components. See below the approach I took to recreate a Sankey diagram that is used as an example on WikiPedia.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Make it easy to make size adjustments by setting the height of the first block to 10cm
2. Create all the square blocks
3. Create the quarter circle shape (shape subtract) and put at the appropriate corners
4. Create the inverse circle shape (take a square and subtract the quarter circle) and place it on the other side of the corners
5. At triangles where necessary, note that I also used a white triangle at the entrance of the system.

The solution is not perfect, but it works. Feel free to copy this design, or you can download this chart from the SlideMagic template bank.

I am experimenting with pricing on the SlideMagic template store, and trying to understand what sort of slide templates are most useful for you. So you can participate in another experiment: tomorrow you can download any template you want from the store by using discount code “Magic” (link). It is valid for 24 hours on November 17 Tel Aviv time (Black Friday came early).

UPDATE: this offer is now expired

Unlike many designers, I actually like framing my slides, leaving white space around the edges. Stretching your picture all the way to the slide boundary looks nice on one page, but creates inconsistencies with more traditional data slides, and reduces the readability of slide titles.

One advantage of the frame is that you can make things pop out, a trick that is often used in magazine design. See below an example I made using that approach.

Feel free to copy the design above, or buy it ready for you to use from the SlideMagic template store.

The best slide to talk about competition of your product or company depends on your specific market.

Most people first try to squeeze all competitors on to some sort of 2x2 matrix. This is a great option if there are 2 distinct axes, or 4 market segments.

You can add nuance by using a 3x3, creating 9 market segments. I prefer to put the competitors locked to the grid, and don’t get into debates about where they exactly sit on the spectrum.

But, if you have a hard time finding the definition of these 2 axes, the matrix is probably the wrong format to use. In many cases, the bottom left quadrant stays empty, and/or is meaningless. In these cases, try using a Venn diagram, which is basically a 2x2 matrix with that bottom left box chopped of.

In other cases, a simple bar chart my be sufficient. Rank you versus the competitors with one simple variable.

In most situations, I have to use some sort of feature table that can handle more than 2 dimensions on which to compare the competitors. Choose the comparison criteria wisely, avoid duplication, and give them the same level of abstraction/detail. Re-order columns and rows until you get homogenous blocks if “yes” and “no” cells.

Feel free to be inspired by the example layouts in this post. You can also click on the images, which brings you to the template store where I did the work for you. I frequently update the template store and try to tag slides with relevant keywords. A search for “competition” should bring up all the charts that I think are useful for visualising a competitive differentiation.

Every couple of years I am installing a Windows machine on my Mac, either to check how SlideMagic looks on corporate computers, and now, because I need access to Microsoft Office development features that are not available on a Mac. I went through Windows 8, then Windows 7, and now Windows 10. This time, I am not using the Parallels virtual machine, which allows you to run Mac and Windows applications side-by-side. I always found it slow, cumbersome, and oh boy, if you double clicked the wrong file your virtual machine would boot up, start the Microsoft update process, etc.

I must say, the whole Windows experience is fantastic (I mainly use Chrome, and Microsoft Office). If you need to work a lot with the file manager, you still see some left overs from past designs, but speaking of design, the overall look & feel might actually be better than Mac OS X.

Most hardware for Windows are still low cost / ugly corporate laptops or machines for home use. But, the combination of Apple hardware and Windows is a pretty nice one. I think there is a market opportunity for a super beautiful, super powerful, Windows machine aimed at creatives / designers, priced above Apple.

Doing a live app demo in a 20 minute pitch meeting is risky, the technology might go wrong, and probably more than half the time you spent in a 2 minute app demo could be things that are not really interesting: logging in etc.

Instead, I usually prepare a series of screen shots with big explanation bubbles in my presentations. No technology risk, no loggin in, setups, and I can set the exact flow I want. The added benefit is that I can zoom into parts of the screen that are hard to do when showcasing the app live in an actual device.

Most of the time, I use page filling images to demo an app, to get as much screen real estate as possible. If I want to introduce the app in a general way, I use a background of a mobile phone or desktop to give the slide a more interesting context. As a result, the the screen itself will hardly be readable by the audience, and becomes a background image.

I added a few examples of app demo slide layouts to my template store.