SlideMagic Blog

Many junior analysts are struggling to sell their minimal slides to a boss who is insisting on combing slides 2, 3, 4, and 5 into one “to save time”. Here is one line of thought you can try: convincing here that slides 2, 3, 4, and 5 are in fact already one and the same slide, it is just an elaborate animation that you spread out over a couple of pages to make editing easier. “The audience will perceive it as one slide”.

You can make your argument more credible by making sure that there are connecting elements on your slides that stay the same as you switch pages.

Image via WikiPedia

I am currently doing a bespoke presentation design project for a client in Apple Keynote rather than my usual PowerPoint. Overall, Keynote is a great piece of software, but as a power user I seem to be hitting its limitations. Not in terms of features, but in terms of workflow.

In PowerPoint, I have developed a pretty rapid process to turn scribbled chart concepts in decent looking slides. (Confirmed by the occasional client who can look over my shoulder while I do some last minute edits close to a deadline). It is the simple things that you need quick access to: changing colors, resizing objects, aligning things.

In Keynote I am “tearing my hear out” to do a few things. I know this blog is read by many presentation design gurus, so maybe one of you can point me out what I am doing wrong.

• Getting a shape color fill. I keep on clicking the rainbow circle, but it is not always clear whether it is active or not, and if it is, whether you are working on a font color, shape color, or outline color. The same with making things semitransparent: shape, text, line, or everything combined.
• I can’t distort the aspect ratio of grouped items when scaling up or down. This is great for images, but not handy when you want to scale up an object composition to fit an entire slide exactly
• When you select multiple items, you can’t scale up or down all of them together
• You select items by “touching” them, not by including them in the entire selection box. As a result, you always hit objects such as the slide title by accident in your selection
• I have not found a way to space out part of the columns or rows in a table evenly
• For some reason, I cannot change the color of the left marker in a gradient. My solution is to put another marker on top of it. Again, this leads to frustrated clicking on the “fill” box.
• In the full button, there is a nice arrow that activates a drop down menu with suggested colors, there is no way I can set these to some alternative color pattern.

Now and then I encounter a PowerPoint presentation at a client which is clearly the work of a designer who comes from the world of Adobe / brochures / infographics. Here are the differences with my style:

• Often, an incredibly spectacular opening slides (sometimes 2-3), lots of detailed artwork, lots of time invested. Serious designers with powerful graphics design tool out-design me easily.
• But after a few pages, the design quality drops of, and you can see that these slides are created rather last minute, in a back and forth between the executive and the designer. Maybe there is the occasional icon, but most of it is text bullet points, which are formatted by a professional.
• Usually PowerPoint’s template functions are ignored, guides, color schemes, defaults, making it very hard for anyone but the designer to add/change slides. “Insert new slide” gets you a blank standard PowerPoint page with nested bullets
• Heavy use of custom fonts, looking way better than the standard PowerPoint fonts, but they cause issues when displaying the file on other computers without them. Versions of old presentations usually continue to live through the organization without people even realizing that their headlines show in Arial rather than the intended font
• Massive file sizes as the images are kept in at their highest resolution

Business presentation design is a blend of practicing good design, and making compromises to deal with the practicality of working with lots of non-designers. Being able to deal with frequent changes, keeping design standards up (also on page 5 to 20), and making sure that everyone can make decent looking edits in the presentation.

I do both.

Story design. Contrary to good practice I usually start bottom up, designing one or two slides to get the look and feel of the presentation master right, then usually the “killer slide” that captures the most important message of the presentation. After that, I go top down and layout the entire presentation.

Slide design. Contrary to most people I go top down, loosely putting slide elements and scribbling text that is imprecise and not final yet, cleaning things up later.

Image via WikiPedia

Any creative software is full of distractions that give you excuses not to be creative. In presentation design this could be experimenting with fonts, colors, drop shadows, 3D rotations, or checking all those spectacular animation effects.

Creativity requires the opposite. A tool with few features, which you now inside-out, that enable you to jot down/capture your thought somewhere before it is gone. You have an idea how to tell your story, struggle with a PowerPoint feature, spend 15 minutes Googling tutorials, and fail to get back into the creative flow after.

Use a notebook (or my simple presentation design app SlideMagic) to capture your idea from start to finish before it evaporates.

Art: Fritz Stotz Mädchen beim Silberputzen 1919

It is tempting to describe your product in a completely new vocabulary to illustrate that you do things differently.

Still, the first thing that a potential customer or investor will do, is to translate that back to the old vocabulary in order to figure out what is different, and what is not.

Often it is better to do part of the work for them. This is especially true for impatient investors who are not always convinced that something that sounds completely different, is in fact, completely different.

Image: The Treachery of Images

Overheard in a meeting. “Don’t put in too much detail in the 5 year financial forecast. It can never be accurate anyway, and you run the risk to wake up that annoying junior analyst who has not said anything the entire meeting, and let her zap the entire momentum of the pitch”

Agree, super precise forecasts 5 years out can never be correct. But:

• A consistent 5 year P&L with realistic margins and marketing spend is a sign that the company knows what it is getting itself into. It is not a test of accuracy, it is a test of management competence.
• Analysts can look junior, but could actually be reasonably senior in an investment organization. Or, even if the analyst is junior, convincing rather than bypassing them is a required hurdle in the investment process. “Hey Sally, did their financial planning make sense? You looked at it right”
• Maybe it is actually good news that the analyst did not ask a lot of questions about the other content in the presentation.

Image: Promotional photo of the cast of the CBS television series Whiz Kids

My presentation app SlideMagic is all about the grid. We have made some improvements to make the workflow (even) faster. Now, when you insert rows and or columns, it copies its design and structure from its neighbors. This will save you a lot of time in more complicated table layout with different background colors.

1) Our starting point

2) Open the grid editor

3) Add a row and a column

4) The result

Image via WikiPedia

This is nicely done: pitchbot. It gives you a nice feel about what a discussion with different types of investors might look like.

Art is a subset of design, it wants to change you. The “Hope” poster from 2008 captured the feelings of many (not all expectations came true though 8 years later). The same artist is part of a broader group who has started a campaign to use design to remind us of humanity. I think it should appeal to everyone across the entire political spectrum who believes in human values, civilized debate, and pragmatic government.