SlideMagic Blog

There are endless ways to show financial ratios and benchmarks. Each industry has their own specific ones.

Beer brewers think of the manufacturing cost of beer in terms of cost per hecto liter (not liter, not kilo), but when they think about distribution cost, they think per 6 pack case (not liter, not kilo, not bottle). The cost of sending a letter is usually in weight, the cost of sending a package is usually expressed in terms of volume. Retailers think in terms of sales per square meter. Technology startups think often in terms of per user per month.

Find out what the norm is in your industry and adjust your financials.

The Internet is full with research reports on any subject you ever wanted to explore. In theory therefore, it should be easy to Google together a pile of slides on a certain subject, “Frankenstein” a deck together and go on stage as an expert in a particular field.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. The audience will figure out very quickly when your knowledge of a subject is exactly the amount of content that is written on the slides. It shows in the way you answer questions, it shows in the way you present your slides.

This can often happen when an executive in the technology industry gets invited for a conference to speak about “the latest in [fill in technology buzzword]”. People take too little time to prepare their talk, and the result is a stumbling performance that recycles some cliches about the subject.

The same is true in consulting firms, where a junior analyst gets charged with “pulling some slides together” on a subject and gets sent of to present to client at the last minute to stand in for a more senior consultant who could not make the slot.

What to do?

Option one is to adjust the topic you are speaking about, often conference owners will be open to this. Speak about something that is really close to what you do day to day. Even if you do not answer the big question on this huge issue everyone is thinking about, that very personal, very specific experience that you have will be very valuable.

Super high resolution images of small slide elements can inflate the size of your PowerPoint or Keynote file without you noticing. A common culprit is an innocent looking page with 30 customer logos. Compress your images often to keep file sizes in check.

Another common file size mistake is to include high resolution images in the slide master to make it easer for people to understand template slides that are meant for photos. As a result, even a simple text slide will create a huge file as the slide master gets saved as an integral part of the document. This can add up in a company with 10,000 employees.

Image compression in PowerPoint can sometimes produce unpredictable results, especially when you tick “apply to all” and you have a presentation with a lot of photographs. I often see cropped images going haywire, the only rescue is to compress images one by one. Always save a copy of your file before attempting to compress the file.

Handy link: how to reduce file sizes in Office

Image via WikiPedia

Slightly off topic today. I am into F1 racing and was watching the Italian Grand Prix at Monza yesterday on 2 screens: the regular TV program, and a mobile app that provided me with every statistic I possibly needed. They are 2 languages that cover the exact same event.

The TV program covers things the way people are used to: camera mainly on the leading car which was up to 30 seconds ahead. Reporters chatting casually in the background. Close ups of supporters. Audio of roaring engines.

The data screen gave a completely different picture. You could see which driver was gaining, losing, when they might come in to swap tires, how long they might last on their tires. It takes a bit of practice to be able to interpret everything, but the weird thing is that when you get there, you could pretty much imagine, actually “see”, a car race without actually seeing the camera feed.

Image via WikiPedia

Most of the presentations I design are to support a 30 minute discussion with an investor. The hardest part of the fund raising effort is often to get to that 30 minute meeting. Some thoughts on elevator pitches via email.

Most people understand that these emails should be short. But people make the mistake of making the email short by cramming in the entire pitch in as few words possible. The full story gets put on a boiler plate, but the fire is left on too long until there is nothing left: big market, great team, strong user traction, multiple business models.

You don’t need to put the entire pitch in 2 lines, your objective is not to land the investment, it is to be invited to a phone call. You want to intrigue enough that it is worth 15 minutes on the phone.

Start with a strong connection. “Your portfolio company CEO [x] thought you might be interested in this.” “We are in a complementary field to your other investment”

Bring a new insight, or a surprising fact, without going into the details. “In 2017, nobody pays for dating sites anymore, but 90% of our users do”. “Everyone knows that electrical cars will only sell if you can get 500 miles on a charge, our batteries could just enable that”. “Google just spent $400m on acquiring a company that we can beat easily”

Avoid empty buzzwords, generic statements, superlative adjectives (300% month-on-month user growth). Keep it human and surprising.

When you write text on a presentation slide, the way the text looks is almost as important as what the text actually says. All the time, consider the typography, the layout of your text when crafting titles and headlines.

• Orphan words that drop to the next line
• Filler words, passive verbs that fill space but don’t any meaning
• Uneven distribution of words across boxes with similar visual priority
• Etc.

Image via WikiPedia

Stock image sites were a great discovery when I started getting into the presentation design business in the early 2000s. In fact, they might have pushed me over the edge in becoming a designer. All of a sudden, I discovered that combining McKinsey-style professional slides with carefully chosen stock images you could make some powerful sales and investor decks.

All of this happened at the same time when very fundamental books by the likes of Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte were published, TED talks were taking of, presentations were changing!

Looking back, and looking forward, I see that my presentation style has changed. The biggest change: far, far fewer (premium) stock images. How come? Post-rationalizing:

• I got much better and assessing the setting in which the presentation would be delivered. And very rarely do I design presentations for a massive keynote or TED Talk. Most of the time, these are decks that will be presented in a small conference room, to a small audience. And more importantly, the first “punch” that these decks need to deliver is in the email inbox, when an investor or potential customer decides to keep on clicking (or not). More and more, I am starting to design these presentations for the impatient attachment clicker, and less for the live audience. This means: fewer images, and yes denser content. It is cumbersome to maintain 2 versions of a document (one for sending, one for presenting), so in practice the live audience is suffering a little bit at the expensive of the email attachment reader.
• Investor and sales audiences have evolved. Pitches have a high degree of similarity, they all follow a similar pattern, companies are addressing similar types of problems, pitching similar types of technologies (investors are increasingly specializing), so I see less need to “wow” the audience with dramatic new concepts (self-driving cars) but rather focus more on the nuts and bolts of an innovation. Investors are clued up, and look for the substance, quickly clicking through the pretty pictures.
• The premium stock image sites are collapsing under their own success. Image banks are diluted with designs that are somewhere between an actual clean photo and a finished design concept. Quality is technically good, but artistically “cheesy” and staged. Opening these sites as a designer makes you instantly feel that you are “in the wrong part of the Internet” And I am sure that even the layman designers gets totally confused when browsing these image sites.
• Free alternatives to paid stock image sites are popping up everywhere. If you need an image of the tip of an iceberg, you can find pretty decent ones on Google Image search (use the labeled for re-use option), WikiPedia or one of the many free stock image sites (that try to lure you into buying premium images that are often not better).
• And finally, I think it is a matter confidence and experience, where I somehow found a personal design style that involves fewer images.

Recently, a client insisted on using Google Slides for our presentation design project, especially because of its good collaboration features. Instead of starting a presentation in PowerPoint, then converting it to Google Slides, I took the native approach, and created a presentation from the ground up in this application.

The design of Google’s office user interface has improved a lot over the years. Things look beautiful and work fast and snappy. Still, the Slides product is full of little issues that 1) slows down a pro-user like me, and 2) makes it harder for the layman designer to make good looking documents.

Because I invested my own hard-earned money in my presentation app SlideMagic, I feel a bit hesitant here to spoon feed a ready made upgrade suggestion list to a multi-billion dollar software developer with the world’s smartest programmers ready to implement them…

In 2017 - leaving minimalist SlideMagic aside - I think PowerPoint is again/still the best slide design software out there (also on Mac), better than Google, better than Apple Keynote. The main criterium here is not feature set, but workflow.

There have been many of these types of posts on my blog over the past 9 years, and I am sure there are many more to come as products continue to evolve.

There is one particular customer segment that often requests a quote for a pitch deck: productivity apps (my own app SlideMagic falls in this category).

• A reasonably complex user interface
• Taking on long established solutions (Microsoft Office, etc.)
• Does not require a huge development investment (relatively to other startups)

In most cases, I advice these clients not to invest in a professionally designed pitch deck: the story is usually pretty clear (“PowerPoint is a pain, and we are going to end it”) and investors could spot easily whether this is a VC-type investment (something where they can deploy a significant amount of capital and generate a big exit), by looking at the early customer traction numbers.

What can you do without a professional presentation designer:

• Make a careful budget and see what sort of investor you need, when. If you have not found product market fit with stellar user engagement numbers, it might be too early to splash on customer acquisition, and it is better to continue to boots strap product improvements.
• Rather than investing in the design of the presentation, invest in the design of the app, and make a killer demo: lots of nice screen shots with commentary, in an intuitive flow that show the magic of your creation.
• Present a well-thought through budget and release pipeline, showing the stages of development work.
• Invest a lot of time in understanding your early user base, which segment of your users get hooked, which not.

“What, it is 2017 and you design a deck in 4:3 format?”, I got these questions a few times. Here are the pros and cons of both formats.

A 16:9 or widescreen aspect ratio will give you a nice image on an LCD conference room monitor or desktop/laptop screen with the black bars on the left and right

A 4:3 aspect ratio will look better on projectors, which are still used in many larger presentation rooms. Also: 4:3 looks better when decks are printed, a habit that is still very common in the financial services industry where people like to take notes, look in detail at data tables, (and probably want to take an opportunity to quickly flick ahead if the presenter is slow/boring).

And personally, I like the design freedom of a more even design canvas (4:3) better than the wide screen version, which forces me to make horizontally stretched slide designs. (A cheat: put the headline across a number of lines to the left of the slide and use the imaginary 4:3 canvas to the right of it for your slide content.

So, here you have it. I don’t think 4:3 is old fashioned for presentations (it is for movies), it just depends on the most likely presentation context you expect.

In my presentation app SlideMagic, I used a 4:3 canvas, but use the extra horizontal space of a 16:9 screen to add your “explanation boxes” that you can slide in and out. When set to “out”, the presentation becomes 16:9 with a more detailed description of the slide in case you send the document ahead of a meeting and the recipient will open/read it without you being there to explain it.