SlideMagic Blog

I was invited to give a guest lecture on “sound” at my daughter’s (12 years old) school the other day. I created a small presentation to back up the main elements of the talk: an analogue synthesizer connected to an oscilloscope.

The interesting bit: 12 years old + Hebrew, a language I only master passively (I understand, I can speak a few words, I totally cannot write anything). So my daughter did some translating, and for the slides I relied heavily on icons.

Yes, icons. I made fun of icon slides many times in this blog, but I must say, when used the correct way they can make great slides. I think the key to icons is to pick really original and good ones, use them in very big sizes, use flat designs without colors/shadings/gradients, use icons in a consistent style, and use the same ones repeatedly as a memory shortcut to the same concept.

To find icons, I used the noun project, a much better source for icons than stock image sites.

If you are a layman designer, here is how your guide to an effective presentation:

1. Put your entire existing slide deck with all your backup slides and analysis in an appendix
2. Think what you want the audience to do, and write down a simple story of the points you want to make to get them to do it (no, don’t peek back into the appendix, it is all in your head already)
3. Create a very simple slide template with just one accent color, and put all your text in light grey boxes to line up in a grid. Add a drop of accent color here and there.
4. Create ridiculously simple charts using that grid that just, and I mean just, make the points you wrote down in 2. If you come up with a concept that requires more than a few text boxes, rethink the design and try again using your boxes.
5. Run your presentation for real (speak out loud) and fix the flow where it does not work.

Here is how this approach prevents the layman designer from creating ugly and boring charts:

• Separate the “analysis phase” from the “communication phase” of your project
• Design a flowing, natural dialogue rather than a structured book with the full fact set
• Cut your visual vocabulary down until you have an arsenal of basic visual elements (boxes in a grid) that you can morph into slides that pretty much always look good

Believe me, this will save you and the audience a lot of time. You can use my presentation app SlideMagic to do it, or in PowerPoint/Keynote. The latter option makes it a bit harder to align your boxes, but in the end will give the same result.

Most charts consists of 2 - 4 “boxes” with some text inside them. Text in boxes is different from text in sentences and/or paragraphs. When writing an article, you don’t have to worry about how long a line is, and/or whether it fits exactly in a certain amount of space.

Some guidelines about writing text in boxes:

• Make sure the point in each of the boxes has more or less equal weight in terms of content. You don’t want box 1 to cover the entire presentation message, and box 2 to be a footnote detail.
• Think of text on slides as headlines. Strip out all unnecessary filler words (i.e., make it as short as possible), but add enough words to keep it specific (i.e., no generic buzzwords).
• Make sure that each box has roughly the same amount of text, covers the same number of lines. Yes, that means being a bit more verbose if one box is particularly short.
• Adjust line breaks to avoid orphan words on the next line, or line breaks that cut the words of a key concept in two (cognitive [break] dissonance).

When “writing” a chart: the content should be clear but the text should be balanced as well.

Image from WikiPedia

The feedback on most presentations is usually that it could have been shorter, more to the point. So, if you can pretty much say anything in 10 minutes, why do people study for years to get an academic degree in something?

The answer: most business presentations are conducted in front of an audience which is pretty familiar with the subject. The venture capitalist has seen thousands of startup pitch presentations, the retired angel investor has interviewed and met thousands of candidates for specific positions, the strategic acquirer knows the limitations of a certain technology, the CEO has a pretty decent understanding of the market she is operating in.

So all these presentations can skip all the background and dive straight into the one thing that is new, that is different.

Image via WikiPedia

The presentation needs to “transplant” your idea in the head of your investors or customers. They need to understand what the idea, and then be excited enough about it to buy or invest.

Paying a professional presentation designer to do your slide deck is not a guarantee to succeed. I see many presentations that might not be top notch, but which look professional enough and are clear enough to convey the idea. In those cases I am honest and say that the startup’s funds might be better spent elsewhere.

Remember: investors might not like you, investors might not like the idea, investors might not like the market segment, investments might not believe that it will work, there are thousands of potential reasons for “no”, and misunderstanding the story and/or the visual quality of the slides is just one of them.

I browsed through my recent client work and saw that the objective of most decks I design is to get interest as an email attachment. This is a significant change from a couple of years ago.

Remember, 90% of my client work is in the field of investor presentations (startups, VC funds who need to raise money themselves, and big corporates reporting to the analyst community).

The big hurdle for many in fund raising is getting through that initial noise and reach the stage of a quick phone call, or even a 30 minute one on one meeting. If this goes well, most clients are less concerned about the big stand up presentation in front of an investment committee.  (Well, after they have gone through my design process they are covered for that stage as well of course).

These send-ahead deck pretty much replace the dense 1-pagers that people used to email. What makes a good introduction presentation that you cannot explain in person?

• A professional look and feel. Comic sans, standard PowerPoint colors, and a list of bullet points with buzzwords on page one signals “oops, these guys are not ready yet”
• Clear explanation what you are actually doing, in what field, market do you operate (most people are surprisingly vague about this
• Some sense of stage of the company, traction (napkin, seed, series A, etc.)
• Then a condensed pitch of why what you are doing is a big deal.

Leave out super sensitive intellectual property information, confidential financials, partner discussions and/or some of the more “boring” slides with factual information about the company and its strategy. This deck is all about getting people excited about your company, it will not land you the investment.

Some funny cartoons here (click the link in the Tweet for more). Bullet point slides and data tables don’t communicate ideas and still take a lot of time to create. Happy and PowerPoint-free Thanksgiving for those who celebrate!

Image via Flickr, martha_chapa95, https://www.flickr.com/photos/56192190@N05/5203091533

Professions tend to have their own language. Academia, doctors, lawyers, politicians. You need to master the language in order to be part of the club. Once you are part of it, you filter the language and extract what it actually means.

Managers in corporations have such a language as well, it is called the presentation. The key messages are hidden in bullet points, consulting frameworks, and buzzwords. Junior managers learn the craft by spending hours creating the deck and iterating them, senior managers know how to read in between the lines and get to the issue that matters quickly (the 2nd part of the proposed budget on page 35).

We got rid of formal letters and replaced them with informal emails and messages. It is time make those presentations more to the point as well.

Part of the solution is more visual slides (imagers, less text). But the most important change is a cultural one: saying what we want to achieve in a short and to the point matter.

It is easy to create a pitch deck for a first-time investment fund that sounds and looks exactly like a pitch deck for a repeat fund. Introduction of the team, industry perspective on investment opportunities, unique deal flow, active involvement with portfolio companies, and the fund terms.

But, in the absence of a hard investment track record, it is very hard to raise that first fund. Seasoned investors are taking an educated risk when investing in you. They see instantly that they are dealing with a new fund. Here are some pointers in your pitch deck that can give them more confidence.

• A good, non-boring description of your experience, maybe mapped out across a timeline together with your partner showing that you have relevant experience, maybe not in the field of making investments, but still useful.
• Highlight the safety nets, partnerships you built, people that sit on your investment committee, and introduce their background as well
• Don’t relay on consulting industry frameworks to show that you know what’s going on in the industry. Instead, know the ins and outs of companies in the market, have a perspective on what fields are interesting to invest in, which not. Know competing / similar funds in the market
• Highlight other situations in your professional experience where you had to take an informed but risky decision, did it, and brought it to a good end

Yes, you admit that you are a first-time investor, but your institutional investor has figured this out already. Better be realistic and show why you deserve a chance to join the ranks of successful investors.

People roaming an exhibition floor spend 2 seconds looking at your small early-stage startup booth. Conference organizers usually create space for a huge logo and a tag line that is not very visible. It would be better to rebalance that.

People don’t yet know your brand or logo, so it won’t help to attract attention (“ooh, let’s check out the guys from [BRAND]”). Your objective is to turn the 2 seconds attention span into 10 seconds, which then hopefully is followed by a visit to the booth.

Below an example in a random Tweet I found. Not the fault of this startup, they just followed the format set by the conference.

Image via WikiPedia