SlideMagic Blog

Some clients ask me. The answer: “no”. Each situation and story is different. I jump back and forth between high level story line design to graphics design details to numerical analysis.

Is this the best approach to presentation design? Probably not, but I can pull it off for a two reasons: many years of experience, being a 1-person operation, mostly having 1 contact person at a client, and having clients that self-select, i.e., if they uncomfortable with this approach they would not choose to work with me.

As soon as you deal with multiple people, at different levels of experience, and an agency that tries to scale up, there is no escaping to a formal process with specific end products at specific times.

I ask this question often in client briefing meetings. “Your approach seems obvious, why did it take humanity as 2017 to come up with this, why is it so hard to do?” It is a useful question to take the position of the outsider. For the expert/insider the answer is so obvious that it does not even have to be included in the slides. For the outsider, it might be the most important piece of information.

Image via WikiPedia

This is a complaint I often get from startups that deal with private equity investors. The analyst is asking for the number of customers, the number of sales people, the number of engineers in 2021. Who knows, right? Does this make sense?

Well, partially. Building a financial model for 2021 can be a valuable exercise in checking wither your business model makes sense. If you need to recruit 30 Fortune 500 customers in 4 years with 8 months sales cycles and head quarters which are based on a different continent, you cannot get away with 2 sales people and some search engine optimization in your marketing and sales budget. On the other hand, a consumer-focused company that needs to sign up 500,000 user does not need a huge enterprise sales operation.

It is this sanity check that investors want to do. Your “sales and marketing cost is 30% of our $100m 2021 sales” does not show - in most cases - that you have thought about what it would take to build such a company.

Everyone is constantly pushing you to make your investor pitch shorter, get rid of slides. And after a number of feedback rounds you are left with a very short deck: the summary bullets, an about page, team, IDC/Gartner market forecast, milestones, use of proceeds, for example.

These charts are all very generic, and you will find them in every investor pitch. The content is obviously important, but you have chopped out the charts that tell the story of your company. Why it was so hard until 2017 to tackle a particular issue, and why your company is so brilliant at doing it.

The tell tale sign of a deck that is too short is that you are not using it when presenting. You know your story inside out, so on page 1, you give the the presentation without using any slides, then you quickly click through the slides with the technical company information.

This works great when you are in the room, it does not work at all when you email the deck. Think about the MVP: minimal viable presentation.

Image via WikiPedia

If you have a few hours left to prepare for your presentation, they are better spent rehearsing than fine tuning the design of your slides.

How to practice? I prefer to run through a presentation as if it were the real thing. No stopping, no stepping back, no rephrasing. Present it once start to finish, think what went well and what went wrong, and do it all over again.

In this way, you get used to the feeling of being on the spot, and that extra mental challenge will help you prepare better for your presentation.

I just returned from a wonderful sailing holiday in Greece. I have been disconnected from social media streams most of the time, but the few times you check in, I was reminded of the stream of “verbal fillers + click bait headline” the content marketers of the world are writing. You don’t seem to care/notice that much when you are in the middle of it all day, but when in relative quiet, it really gets to you. I will continue to try to write things that do not fit in this category.

Work will slow down a little bit over the next few weeks, so expect posting here to be a little bit less frequent as well. I hope you are having a great summer as well!

I was always wondering why it is that whenever I look for images of the exact same person, in the same outfit in different positions, I always end up with a search screen full of Asian models. Via Petapixel.

In the 2 images below you can see how to create a “fusion chart” where lots of stuff flows into something central. In the second image, I changed the color of the white triangles to grey and drew strong border lines so you can see what shapes are involved.

UPDATE: You can now download this slide concept from the SlideMagic store

Making a grid of images in PowerPoint is tricky. Images never have a consistent aspect ratio, and when you place a lot of them on a page, the guide suggestions always snap in the wrong place somehow. Here is a survival guide.

• Copy all your images inside the page and select them all
• Right click and go in “format picture”
• Tick the “size” icon, and click “size”
• Hit “reset” to kill any aspect ratio distortion
• Hit “lock aspect ratio”
• Now select each image one by one, hit “crop”, hit “aspect ratio” and pick one
• After this, select all the images again, and give them the same width with a numerical value
• Position the images on your grid
• Take each image in turn, select “crop” and move/zoom the image mask for the right composition

The above was a major consideration when designing the image grid system in my presentation app SlideMagic.