SlideMagic Blog

Product marketers can get bogged down in identifying endless lists of product benefits, each slightly different for different customer segments.

There is a problem with this for potential buyers of a product. The long list of benefits waters down what is truly unique about your product. All benefits sound exactly the same as the benefits that are being claimed by about every company in the world.

There is also a problem with potential investors in your company. Investors are interested in buying your company, not your product, so the scope is broader than product benefits. Also, they are buying into someone who is hopefully able to sell. “If I were a potential client, would I buy this product pitch?”

When you are hooked into an exiting novel, your brain savors every word, construct a complex mental image of the story and cannot wait to turn the next page.

Things are different with that business plan, strategy document. Face it, ploughing through them is something our boss told us to do (we better be able to answer those key questions this afternoon), or it is a necessary evil to cut through an endless flow of investment options and get to - finally - meet the exiting ones next week in person.

The bored brain is lazy. Think about that when designing your next presentation. You are creating charts for the wandering eye which is desperate to speed-read over less important passages. You are spoon feeding the visual images ready-made so the lazy brain does not have to construct them by itself. The lazy brain is desperate to make the go/no-go decision as early as possible, and the good thing about a “no” decision: you can move on to the next document, so make sure you postpone that “no” for another page, another page, and then one more.

Most business or scientific concepts come in a lot of flavors and variations. The objectively correct way to explain the concept to someone is to sketch the overall framework of possible permutations, then start filling them out one by one. This is what academic literature does, or a manual with a comprehensive index section.

To a cold audience with no understanding what so ever on the subject, starting with a layout of all the options is either frightening or confusing (probably both). Instead pick one model/option (don’t let the audience choose), and take here through the whole thing. Then - and only if necessary - add more variations and options.

In most cases, the audience is not interested in a comprehensive representation of whatever field you are working in, she is pondering whether to buy your product or invest in your company. University-style lectures will not get you there.

In order to design a good presentation, you need to understand things one level deeper than what you are actually going to share in your slides. If you are the inventor of the product, or the university teacher of the subject, that is no issue. When you are a junior executive, management consultant or a professional presentation designer, it is not obvious.

The most obvious issue of knowing your slides but nothing more are questions. They will be difficult to answer. In management consulting firms, knowledge documents are shared internally and used freely across the entire firm. Modified versions of slides end up in all kinds of decks and are often presented outside of their original context. A few questions from the audience can undermine the credibility of the entire deck.

As a presentation designer, going one level deeper allows you to think about the story you want to tell from scratch. Often the expert has left out bits of the story that are obvious to her, but crucial for a cold audience to understand the full picture. Or, the expert goes on and on about facts and details which are not important. If your knowledge is not broader than the 20 minutes of content covered in your deck, you cannot choose what to include or not.

Clients are often surprised that I insist on trying the product demo, understanding the mechanism of action of a new drug, or dig into the financial model line by line. It is also the reason that I think presentation designers cannot charge by the slide, since there is a big fixed cost component to understanding a new story, independent of the slide count of your presentation.

Some tips on creativity from a book on music production that I recently read: Music Habits, The Mental Game, by Jason Timothy. Most of them are applicable to any creative activity, and that includes presentation design. Here are some that stuck with me (in random order):

• Have a note book / recording device at hand at any time to write down good ideas you will for sure forget 5 seconds later
• Kill social media distractions
• Learn what times of the day you are most creative, and don’t do your monthly accounting during that time
• Productive and creative are not the same thing
• When your brain wants to be distracted it could very well be that you are on to something difficult that nobody has ever done before, keep on pushing
• The genius just tried harder and for more years than you did
• Be yourself, find your own style, you can never catch up by imitating someone else’s
• Don’t blatantly steal, but instead, write down what inspired you in a piece of art, put it away for 2 weeks, then look back at it again and build on the attributes of the work, rather than the exact same thing
• Finnish your projects all the way to the end, and do lots of projects
• Watching more tutorials, reading more books, buying more tools will not really help if you are not applying what you learned/bought instantly. Get good at using the tools you have
• If you want to build a habit, you have to do it every day, no excuses, even if it is just 15 minutes

This is a totally obvious trick, but it took me a few years to get it. Flipping a big background image around its vertical axis to change the slide composition.

I like images with a subject off the center, creating a more interesting asymmetric composition and free white space for some text. The overall balance of the slide is set by a big headline, often at the top left. Certain images make the slide look tilted with all the weight on the left side of the slide. Mirroring your image will solve this.

Obviously you can only do this when there is no visible text in the image. In that case you might have to zoom in/crop the image to change its composition, or a bit more advanced, extend the background somehow either in Photoshop, or copying the image, cropping out the background on one site of the copied image and place it to the left of number one. This only works with very even backgrounds (a clear sky for example). See an example of this technique in the images chapter of my book.

Back in the 1990s, “Executive Summary” pages were summaries that you put in front of a strategy consulting document. They were meant for senior management / decision makers. There was almost something offensive about them, reminding you of your junior position in the hierarchy. Senior managers can skip the detail that you have been sweating on for months and get straight to the point.

The good thing about these summaries was that you actually had to think what it is you wanted the senior management to do, and you had to frame your argument in the best possible way. Writing these summaries often caused major shifts in the recommendations of the project.

Clients ask me frequently about an Executive Summary of a presentation. This time, it is about a summary document that they can email to someone ahead of a presentation, or in most cases, a document that should convince the recipient to agree to a presentation.

I think the classic Executive Summary memo is not the most engaging way to get people excited about your project. There are a number of differences between your need for a summary, and the Executive Summary of the strategy review that is addressed to the CEO of your company.

The CEO is probably very interested in the recommendations (what price should I pay for the acquisition target), and is fully aware of the broad context of the project. She just needs the underlying logic to complete her own understanding of the situation. And, she probably knows you, and can pick up the phone quickly to clarify something that is not clear.

I started to experiment with Medium as a now host for my blog. What do you people think, should I move? It is easer to write posts and get people to discover them, integration with my overall side is less strong. And Squarespace has become a bit buggy for some reason when formatting text and inserting links. Check it out here: www.medium.com/slidemagic.

Below a repost from 3 years ago, an blog post I put out on a Medium publication that I am taking down. Putting it out here to preserve it.

You can design better presentation slides by getting rid of engrained habits that can go back decades.

Sometimes I work with teenagers to teach them about presentation design. To my surprise, they often are much better students than “grown ups” who are supposed to benefit from decades of business experience. Here is a theory why.

Transparencies for overhead projectors encouraged you to copy pages out of a book and uncovering paragraphs or key points bullet by bullet. Moving to PowerPoint, people just kept writing these bullets.

The first visuals that you felt compelled to project to an audience were data charts: lines, bars, columns. These type of graphs needed to have a title in the top left and a source at the bottom. Most slide designs today use a big title at the top left, other typography on the page is almost never bigger than the title. Very rarely, people leave the title out all together.

Pictures are low resolution and take a lot of memory, hence you can only put in small images in a presentation document that you need to email someone.

PowerPoint was created as a mouse-based drawing software, rising alongside Microsoft Windows. Everything could be dragged, and resized easily to fit. Cropping an image was tricky. The first plasma TV screens confirmed to us that it was OK to stretch an image out of proportion, as long as it fitted whatever you needed to fill easily.

This is probably one of these images that has been going around on LinkedIn for the past 5 years, somehow I did not pick it up:

Yes, the right column is better English. But:

• Some of these words actually take more copy space
• Some of these words are long, and hard to break to the next line
• Some of these words might not be understood by non-native English speakers (“destitute”?)

At school, you are writing to learn the most beautiful English possible, in real life you might be pitching a Chinese investor with a complicated startup idea.