SlideMagic Blog

Creative jobs are different from managerial jobs. I started noticing the difference when transitioning from being a management consultant to a presentation designer. It especially obvious with being sick. As a consultant, I could usually function pretty much normal with the help of some coffee until drastic body feedback such as fever or a splitting headache prevented you from going any further.

With design work it is different. You notice that something is “not right” in your head 1-2 days before the onset of other symptoms. You can’t come up with any good ideas, or you can’t focus on your creative work and decide to do the monthly accounting. So, sometimes after these 1-2 days, I do actually develop symptoms, or things disappear while others in close proximity do get sick.

Image from WikiPedia

I am crunching the stats in the SlideMagic user database and singling out individuals with whom I would like to have a short call to talk about their experience with SlideMagic. At this stage, qualitative input is what I value most, quantitative surveys are being ignored and hide what is really going on. I have many options and ideas to take the app further, but I realize that dazzling technology is probably not what it takes to change the presentation culture in corporates. Input welcome!

If I did not approach you and have a clear opinion, feel free to reach out via contact at slidemagic dot com.

I participated in the survey for the 2017 Design in Tech Report by John Maeda. It is full of interesting facts and figures about the state of design.

One insight that resonated with my is the design education gap. Aspiring designers get zero education in business or engineering when studying for their degree. My presentation design business is the direct result of this.

As I blogged, earlier, the design itself of the document is also interesting. It is a consulting-style deck with lots of information and facts, meant more for reading than a stand up presentation. This is a document format that is probably the most common in business today.

• Some elements are similar to the ones you can use in my presentation app SlideMagic. Grey colors with only one strong accent color. The use of 16:9 to extend slides with a full-text “explanation box”
• Good use of typography: titles, subtitles, text, quotes (the latter surrounded with lots of white space)
• The font is nice and elegant, but will make the document not very readable on old VGA projects and/or monitors. You see in the SlideShare rendering that things start to go wrong. This is the reason I went for a heavier font in SlideMagic.

Anyway, this document is a good reminder to look at when you look at your own PowerPoint doc. Why does yours look bad, and John’s look good?

My presentation app SlideMagic will make life easier for every amateur designer. Still a few common mistakes sneak in that are hard to prevent with software. Most of them are related to the balance of typography on a page. Making sure that boxes contain roughly the same amount of text, and that signs are nicely balanced. See the examples below.

You have probably seen the video of the interrupted BBC expert interview. More and more meetings, interviews, and even regular calls now involve video. It can be a planned webinar, or a Skype call whether the other side all of a sudden, hey, let’s switch on the video.

First of all the handling of the situation. If your toddler marches in there is basically no point in keeping a straight face, trying to push the distraction away like it is an annoying insect. Apologize, pick the child up, and close the door. But it is best to prevent getting into these situations beforehand…

You see how distracting backgrounds can be. The way you positioned your work desk is almost never the best position for a camera. The best background for video calls are completely blank ones (a white wall), or completely cluttered ones a full book shelf for example. As soon as there are individual items (loose books, a gadget, other objects, the mind of the audience starts to wander of.

Adjust your attire to the environment you are in. Being fully suited up in a home office at night does not look natural. No, pajamas or sweat pants does not work either, but something in between would work better.

In short, be prepared for everything. In my case, it is my canine office friend who always comes up with a surprise…

This is unusual, a politician doing a PowerPoint in front of the press. You can see his full presentation here.

Here are a few observations:

• The slide design is actually OK: consistent, good use of color, balanced, not a spectacular TED talk, but still a lot better than your average corporate bullet point deck
• The screen is too small
• He is a pretty good and confident presenter
• Het gets the start wrong. A super technical summary slide with what they are going to do, without having presented the logic of why they want to do it. I think most people switch of in the first minute (See some reactions here).
• Later on, things get better. But it is almost as if the slides are holding him back. First he presents a statistic or a quote, turning towards the slide, then he steps away from the screen and explains what it actually means. And it is here where he does a pretty good job.

I watched about 10 minutes of the presentation. The key change I would have made, is to change the framing of the presentation. Leaving my own political views aside, if I were trying to make the case for a script, it would: "Hey, from the outside Obamacare looks pretty good, because of 1, 2, 3. BUT, people are missing a few problems 1, 2, 3,. Our plan offers the best alternative. And here is all the technical, legal stuff we are going to do to make it happen.

We just deployed a new, more minimalist user interface for presentation app SlideMagic. Have a look!. Some of the things that have changed over the past weeks:

• Simpler menus: a very short set of tabs on the left side to help you switch between the application modes
• A more intuitive approach to the slide clipboard where you can import single slides or entire decks
• Smart insertion of rows and columns in the grid: new rows/columns will now copy color/layout settings from their neighbors

Let me know what you think.

This tweet by a highly competent designer flashed by:

It is work in progress on a presentation. You see what direction he is taking: the big headline on the left, rather than across the slide, and a paragraph of very small text.

I think this might be a format that many presentations will use:

• More and more display devices are now wide screen (which is a great format for movies)
• Headlines that stretch all across very wide screens are unreadable.
• The best visual compositions / layouts are not very wide ones
• Increasingly, we use presentations to send beforehand, without actual presenting/verbal explanation, hence the need for explanatory text

In my presentation app SlideMagic, I stuck to the 4:3 aspect ratio for slides, enabling you to put the headline across the slide, and added an optional slide out panel for plain text that turns the 4:3 composition into a 16:9 one.

I know this blog has a big audience of fellow freelance designers. Here is my attitude towards NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, that many clients want me to sign.

NDAs especially come up in conversations with long-distance clients. In the absence of face to face meetings, people are looking for reassurance that the other person is OK. As the project gets underway, trust starts to build and NDAs are usually not brought up anymore.

VCs typically do not sign NDAs, and they see a lot of competing companies, share documents freely internally among partners, and probably forget in coffee chats where they heard what exactly, and whether it is confidential or not. But, they have a position of power: meeting with NDA, or no meeting, you pick.

Sometimes there are actually valid reasons for having an NDA in place. If you file for a provisional patent and your “art” was out there without NDA protection, you cannot claim your status as inventor anymore. Startups might want to prove to their investors that their IP is really theirs, and some obscure subcontractor cannot claim it later. Big corporations might have very strict policies for sensitive financial information.

I am not sure how many NDAs actually ended up in court. It is a big hassle, expensive, and usually there is not much to collect from an independent freelancer. The biggest cost to a freelancer is actually reputation. So maybe the threat in an NDA should not be confiscation of all your assets, but a 20 second television ad with your name being shamed on prime TV: that is pretty much the end of your freelance career.

These food packaging make overs illustrate what is wrong with many of today’s presentation templates: they make you look like you are “that kind of company”. But remember, the hipster customer segment is likely to be a lot smaller than the mass market. Think about your audience, and whom you want to look like.