SlideMagic Blog

If I sit down with a client, in almost all cases, the pitch of a company comes out fine verbally. People know how to tell their story. The order might not be perfect, there are some repetitions, here and there one of my questions needs to be clarified, but all in all, in 30 minutes we got a pretty good understanding of what is happening.

My work is to translate that story into visuals. And given the above, there are different types of slides.

Some slides are absolutely crucial to understanding the pitch. These are the ones that people are opening their laptops for, and pull up page 37:

• Screen shots and images of applications/products, in many cases it is actually unclear what the product does. This is specifically the case in internet applications, or medical devices where a picture of the actual product explains a lot.
• Data visualization that emphasizes how big something really is compared to something else, how fast things are growing or declining. Visuals do a much better job here than spoken word
• Complicated relationships, competitive positionings, IT architectures. These cases require a map on which both brains can sync to disentangle these complex structures.

Other slides are mere backup for the spoken word. They help to make the story more powerful, but are not essential: large photographs of metaphors (endless road, squeezed orange, confused customer) or simple text charts that support the flow of the story.

The purpose of the last group of charts is 1) to give your company a professional look & feel, and 2) make it possible for people to read/digest the story without you being present.

Engaging a freelance designer online can be a bit scary: someone in a different time zone, who you cannot meet in person… Here are some thoughts (in random order) that could be useful both for freelance designers, and their (potential) clients.

• Designers prefer a smaller group of clients who come back regularly over 1-off jobs. There is a lot of switching / friction cost involved when taking on a new client. So you are unlikely to find designers who will deliver an incredible sales pitch, do a crappy piece of work, then over charge and hope to get away with it.
• Good designers are busy, so if someone cannot meet tomorrow’s deadline, it might be a good sign.
• It is too time consuming and stressful for designers to stage a huge price negotiation dance for every project they do, so most will quote their rates, without padding in anticipation of haggling
• if the work load is highly unpredictable (you have never worked with this client, the scope of the project is not clear), then it is not helpful to insist on a fixed project price. A good designer will either refuse to do it, or add an extraordinary “unforeseen” charge in the budget.
• Squeezing out free work for a freelancer to prove herself probably upsets the designer, better is to risk a bit of money, and do a small test project. A few slides will  reveal instantly what the skills of the designer are. This is also an insurance policy against demo slides that might not have been developed by the designer in question. Also compare this small investment to what it would take to hire a permanent designer, and the risk you run when making a hiring mistake.
• When doing your test project, do not only watch out for the quality of the work, or how quick the turnaround time is. What is more important is that the material gets returned at the agreed time, that the dialogue is responsive. You want to test the way to work together, in preparation for very critical deadlines where you have to rely on this stranger.
• Finding a freelancer online is the first step in a longer cooperation, so the way she responds to feedback and learns is almost as important as the quality of the first work that she presented to you

People have different presentation styles, and their favorite stories. It is very hard to “force” a completely new visual story metaphor on a good presenter who does a great job selling to customers or investors.

For example, when the CEO “forces” her particular visual analogies in the sales decks that should be used the a 10 person sales force, the result is not always good. The slides will be put on the screen, but then the audio track usually deviates with "hmmm, another way to look at this is [FILL IN FAVORITE STORY].

I usually see how flexible people are with coming up with a completely new way to tell a story, especially with someone with strong presentation skills.

In technology, a new product often involves a complete new approach to a problem that did not exist before. Benefits impact on multiple fronts: it makes things cheaper, faster, or all of a sudden you can combine things, do things differently. The story is far more complicated than “this car now runs at y liters gasoline per 100 km versus x”.

The tendency of a company insider is to create a chart that explains everything. It is a bit like 5 people speaking at the same time, each expressing one nuance of the story.

1. Skill level one: write out the entire story in verbal bullet points
2. Skill level two: craft some sort of visual diagram that brings it all together

The diagram works for people who understand the story already, all the elements of the story are now in one concise page. Every element of the diagram is a visual reminder that unlocks a full story in the viewer’s head.

The fresh audience does not have this background. The only way to tell the story is isolate what is really important, and design charts specifically around that. Then, if you have to, you can construct a page that ties it all together, after the audience had a change to grasp the individual components.

Image via WikiPedia

When people write a presentation outline, they usually write questions: “why there is a market opportunity, why we are best to capture it, why it is great to invest in us”.

The questions are mental shortcuts for the expert presenter, the answers is crystal clear in her head. The presentation looks incredibly logic on paper, yes, this is exactly what we should be talking about, answer these questions.

Missing though is the actual bridge between the questions and the answers in the head of the expert. Difficult for the audience to understand, or for the junior analyst to work on.

A better way to make a story line as actually write down in super short sentences the answer to these questions. You will bump into issues like repetition, order of arguments, where to go in detail, where not, where buzzwords pop up etc. etc.

Image by Scott Swigart on Flickr

Some projects involve getting a lot of similar presentations from different business units or people. Examples: the annual investor day, or the annual budgeting round. At the start of the project, the same question comes up? What presentation template to send everyone in order to ensure that things look consistent.

My take:

The most important thing to get right is the programming of the template, not the slide layouts: fonts, colors, default shapes, everything should be hardwired in correctly.

It is very hard to prepare a complete presentation in the absence of specific facts, or a specific story. No business unit is exactly the same. And if they were the same, these uniform presentations combined would make a visually boring story!

One thing you can do is separate data collection from the the summary presentation. Be strict on format for collecting data (boring tables that are well designed), but give freedom for telling the story.

You could do things in 2 steps: send out the broadcast master template, let people work with it a bit, then schedule follow-up calls to make adjustments.

Or: you can have one business unit push a presentation completely to the end, come up with a finished product, and use that as a visual example for the other units. To see slides filled with data is much clearer than empty theoretical layouts.

Typically data charts have confusing axis labels. Some sort of title horizontally across, some sort of subtitle below it, and then a upright, flipped axis label on the y-axis, and a label on the x-axis. Too many labels, and also, I don’t like to have to tilt my head to read the y-axis label.

Here is what I usually do:

• Put a slide title that tells the message that the data is supposed to show (“facebook users are getting older”)
• A subtitle that describes the unit: average age of a facebook user
• Omit the y-axis label, and leave the x-axis label out all together, if the columns’ base says 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, people will figure out that it is by year

There were a lot of posts this weekend about harassment in the tech industry (here is one). I get to see a lot of entrepreneurs and investors in my work as a presentation designer. I think that it is good that women bring out the stories in the open, and people are confronted with the consequences of their behavior.

Here are some random observations of a service provider sitting on the sidelines of the VC funding pitch process, nothing of this relates to a specific individual, nor am I taking sides.

VCs come in different forms. Some of them are career executives who worked their way up in the ranks of an organization, and/or managed to raise a fund themselves. Others inherited money, others had a big exit themselves, others were early investors in a tech giant. It is that second group that is different I notice. They are incredibly confident of themselves, make highly intuitive decisions, work mostly solo rather than having a big investment committee to convince. I think that after 10 years in a world when you do make/break decision making, and people constantly come “begging” for your cash, your perception of reality can change a bit.

Related to this is the mixing of personal and professional communication. Twitter DMs, facebook messages, late night networking parties with a healthy supply of alcohol, blur the boundary between work and play. In more traditional industries there is far less of this. Even in finance. A 25 year old pitching her internet startup to VCs at a conference is in a different setting than a 25 year old heiress trying to sell her family business to private equity funds.

When searching for an image, there are 2 steps:

1. What sort of image works best?
2. What actual image is the best (and can I use without copyright issues)?

Recently, I needed a panorama overview of a retail store. Most stores do not have 20 meter high ceilings (a waste of space, a waste of energy), and stock image sites only provide images of actual stores under an editorial license (news papers can use them, marketing presentations not).

A broad Google search brought me to the Galeries Lafayette in Paris (step 1), after which it was easy to find a nice, high-res, creative commons image (step 2).

Everyday I see clients squinting at tiny slide images on their screens. No, you can’t do anything about the physical size of your screen, but you can fix the window arrangement.

The most obvious adjustment is to make the PowerPoint or Keynote application as large as possible. But the aspect ratio of slides and its implications is often overlooked.

If you design 16:9 slides the width of your screen is the bottleneck, minimize menu bars on the left and right of your slide (format panels, slide icons). If you design 4:3 slides the height of your screen is often the bottleneck, minimize slide notes boxes.

Image via WikiPedia