SlideMagic Blog

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

PowerPoint templates in big companies are a mess. When thousands of people start sharing PowerPoint files it will take less than 3 months for a corporate template to be vanished due to the many personal modifications and mistakes people make. Here is a survival guide.

• Create a simple template
  • Use a PowerPoint expert to create it, not an Adobe Illustrator master, because you need to know how to set default colors, shapes, text boxes, page numbers, left-to-right orientation, etc.
  • Create some sort of a box of drawing guides to limit the canvas and leave white space around the edges. Many people might ignore it, but they will have a mental urge to put things inside that box. Put the drawing guides on the master slide so they can’t be moved by accident.
  • Keep it super simple, I would go for one title slide and one regular slide maybe a separator
• Teach hygiene (this is the hard part). Ask employees every time they create a new presentation to start with this template. Every time. Even if they want to reuse 90% of an existing deck, have them open the clean template, copy paste the charts from the old file into it and save the file.

I wonder whether it is possible to do the hygiene thing with a macro button in PowerPoint automatically, it must be.

Given the above mess, you will understand why it is not possible to modify the slide template in my presentation app SlideMagic.

As a presentation designer, I get to sift through a lot of corporate introduction videos, most of the time, I am looking for some decent still images that I can use as a background for an introduction slide about a customer or strategic partners.

A lot of money is going into these videos. Sophisticated motion graphics, upbeat music, soothing voice overs.

Most of these are hosted on YouTube, so you get a sense of how many people actually watched them. In most cases: a few thousand at best, but many have far, far fewer views. The majority of which is probably the creative team and the people reviewing drafts at the client.

Why? I do not have scientific evidence, but here are some possible causes:

• There is actually not that much information in these videos, except for the usual buzzwords about helping improve the environment and making the world a better place. An analyst who wants to know what the group is all about, can spend the 3 minutes it takes to watch the video better in other places on the web site.
• (Related) These videos are full of stock video cliches: pretty board rooms against a view over the park, happy families running in that park, a drone going up the corporate sky scraper.
• In the case of conglomerates, a large part of the video is spent on justifying the existence of the group, what ties them together? This is a hugely important issue for the conglomerate management, but for the student, investor, journalist, customer, potential employee, it does not merit 50% of the 3 minutes.

Sometimes, an industry sector is used to specific diagrams to describe their environment. The same mental and visual mindset frame shows up over and and over. In some cases, it might be worth chucking that all way and start fresh.

Write down on a piece of paper what are the 3, 4, 5 elements that should pop out in your presentation. No go back and think of a framework, diagram, composition that can fit all these elements (and nothing else/more). You might be surprised what you can come up.

If stale frameworks complicate your ability to explain, it might be time to let go.

One exception, competitive market positioning diagrams. Investors, clients, might be used to a certain representation of reality, it is useful to have a backup slide that shows your position in a conventional industry map.

Internet / mobile consumer propositions can be constantly changing, and ambiguity can be a great driver of the creative product development process. In investor pitches though, you need to freeze the brain storming and present one consistent, stable product.

Investors need to make 2 leaps: understand what your product is about, and get a sense for the product you want to offer. In 20 minutes, you can’t introduce 3 variants, discuss 10 other cool ideas, leave that for the follow on meetings.

These type of app ideas are very hard to describe in bullets or even pictures. The best way to get things across is to create a very specific user case example and describe a sequence of events, interactions between users. You can alternate between images, mock ups, etc.

The priority of all of this is to explain and show things, “pretty” comes in second. Sometimes investing a lot of energy in making screen mockups with buttons and sliders actually makes the app idea harder to understand. To show that you have design skills in house, you could take one app screen and turn it into a pretty mock up.

A side effect of this effort in an investor presentation might be that you get more clarity inside your senior team what your product should look like.

Image by Nicolas Henderson on Flickr

In a recent update of Microsoft Word (Mac version 2016), a new option has been snuck in when saving DOCX document as PDFs: “best for electronic distribution”. and it is the default choice. This will probably produce documents that are smaller, but it comes at a price: custom fonts are not embedded correctly. Pay attention which option you pick and do check the PDF document before sending it to see if all font renderings worked out correctly

Investors need to pitch themselves as well to raise money for their own fund. I get to see many of these decks from clients. And in them, investors make the same mistakes that they advice potential and actual portfolio companies not to make.

To be honest, they might even be worse. Unlike a normal company, there are very few things that differentiate the operations of one PE, VC, hedge fund, from another. And secondly, the presentation culture in finance is very conservative, most institutional investors (the ones investing in PE funds), want a sit down meeting with a paper document in front of them.

Here are some of the bullet points that will show up in any investor presentation:

• We are a highly experienced team
• We delivered great returns
• We do really thorough due diligence
• We do extraordinary risk management
• We have a very sophisticated modeling capability
• We are hands on with our portfolio companies
• We have proprietary deal flow
• We are being loved by our portfolio companies
• We have a unique network of partners

Think about an institutional investor who receives hundreds of these decks, all making the same points, written in the same style, using the same (blue and grey) colors.

As a fund wanting to raise money, you need to decide which of the above are hygiene factors for which you can tick the box, and which are truly special in your case and build a story around that is consistent.