SlideMagic Blog

We put in a number of improvements to the user interface of my presentation design app SlideMagic.

Templates, regular decks, duplicating, importing, etc. was all a bit confusing. We made a number of improvements to make the workflow more intuitive.

• The concept of “template” (as opposed to regular deck) was eliminated. Now every SlideMagic user will see a number of “featured decks” at the top of the regular decks menu which can form the inspiration of your own presentation.
• In the story view (the slide sorter), the 2 clipboards (one for individual slides, one for full decks) were integrated into one. All slides you import will now appear here, together with the ones you copied from your current presentation.

The account, support, and logout links that used to sit at the bottom left of the screen have been moved up. These buttons caused issues on smaller screens, especially tablets. As a result, SlideMagic is now running pretty well on iPad. I am not a big believer in designing slides on a small screen/tablet, because you need a decent canvas to focus and be creative. But, it can be handy to have the option to make smaller edits on a mobile device and that is now going pretty well with SlideMagic.

Let me know if you have any more feedback on SlideMagic here in the comments or by sending a message to jan at slidemagic dot com.

Another good video by VC Mark Suster about how to speak when invited on a panel:

• Entertain
• Be energetic
• Be short and to the point (people don’t remember who long you spoke, but what you said)
• Say something different than the person before you
• If the moderator asks the wrong question, answer a different one

I would also add that pitch competitions are a form of entertainment. A pitch for such an event is completely different from a pitch to the partner group of a VC.

And most of the time, pitch competitions are far more entertaining than panels. In a pitch competition, the presenter is on the line, sharp. People in panels usually do not prepare and can hide behind the others on stage, making them a lot less interesting to watch.

Some people naturally sound convincing. They have charisma, they find it easy to tell their story, they are confident, they can wing the presentation, they say that they consider themselves good presenters. They sound convincing, but do they convince?

Many of the people who fall in this category are not very good at reading body language. Maybe the buyer or investor on the other side of the table is (slightly) introvert and does not push back that much. Maybe if the same type of question comes back for the third time (after 2x the same sort of answer), the answer was not very clear. Maybe there is a difference between a great meeting with great energy, and a decision to buy/invest.

As a presentation designer, I have built up another type of self confidence: not being ashamed to ask again if something is not clear, even if it is the fifth time. If I don’t get it, the presentation I am going to design will also not get there. Investors and buyers won’t be as patient as presentation designers

Image from WikiPedia

It is hard to forecast the size of a market that exists today in a few years. It is impossible to predict the size of a market for a product that does not even exist. Startups working on new products deal with this issue in every investor presentation.

My suggested solution: come at it from different directions to give a potential investor confidence that there is something there.

• Big billion dollar point estimates from Gartner or IDC research reports, and pointing out that in the future part of that spend might be cannibalized.
• Looking at comparable markets. For example IT security spend is roughly 10% of every IT budget. If you are working on a new product category that you think will be as indispensable as IT security, you can provide a market size range by applying a % to a future IT spend forecast.
• Going down to company level, and point out that of the few pilot customers you have, they were willing to pay x$ per seat, x% of their IT budget, and then scale that up to the total market.
• Bottom up: customers x product per customer x price per product
• Etc.

In most cases your “made up” numbers which are backed up by a transparent and logical analysis will be more useful than point estimates lifted from out-of-date, out-of-context research reports.

Image from WikiPedia

Apple launched the new MacBooks a few days ago, and designers are not happy. Read all the comments here for example. The competition makes more powerful machines, Apple still does not make a 4K standalone display.

But there is also a psychological element to this. We designers used to use our Macs to show to everyone that we were different. We were free to buy cool equipment while most of the “other people” were stuck with crappy machines supplied by the corporate IT department.

Maybe reality has caught up with us designers. For most graphics design application, almost any computer will do. PowerPoint being at the bottom of performance-intensive applications, I have stopped looking at horse power as the main buying criterium for computers.

Still Apple is dropping the ball here and there. No innovation in productivity software (I am trying to add my bit of innovation with presentation app SlideMagic), and a proliferation of adaptors to connect devices, even those that are within the Apple ecosystem.

All of this leaves the door open to a new super premium computer brand. If I were Microsoft, I would create a “Lexus” in computing and court those style-conscious designer elitists again.

The advantage of being a small operation is that decisions can be executed quickly. My branding has moved from “Axiom One”, “Slides that Stick”, “Sticky Slides”, “Idea Transplant” to “Slide Magic”.

SlideMagic is the name of my app, and Idea Transplant stayed the name of my professional presentation design business. I am now retiring Idea Transplant. The name is fantastic, and says exactly what I do, but it is not very catchy “can you spell that email address one more time please?”, and is confusing to clients. My presentation design app does not get any “brand aura” (buzz word alert), and most importantly, the blog name SlideMagic does not add value to my professional presentation design business.

So to keep things clean and simple, Idea Transplant will be come “Slidemagic Bespoke” with the same look and feel as the app. In practice, people will call it “SlideMagic” with the bespoke bit mainly used as a small tag line on the web site.

I am now also going through the clean up of all my social media accounts. Bare with me as I cleaning up all the correct URL redirects etc.

This Tweet caught my attention:

Yes “status reports” are a distinct category of presentations. Some sort of weekly, monthly, quarterly updates, that follow more or less the same template. A lot of time is spent (wasted) on creating these. In the short run, you can do a lot with workflow automation. For example create the entire presentation in Excel, which has the same drawing and charting capabilities that PowerPoint has. And yes in the end, SAAS dashboards might replace them all together, if, and that is a big if, the dashboard is designed well.

The “other” type of presentation, the one in which you pitch an idea, a budget, an investment, is here to stay. Each story is different, each pitch is different. Still, people spend too much time on PowerPoint to create them (hopefully my presentation design app SlideMagic will change that), but the creative process will not be automated anytime soon.

Image from Wikipedia

Both Microsoft and Google launched new screen-based devices over the past few days.

The Microsoft Surface Studio is a desktop computer with a very large touch display. It can be used in regular upright mode, or folded down, which turns it into a giant, almost-horizontal tablet. There is a new interface gadget, a cylinder that you put right on the screen.

I think this might be the future of desk-based design interfaces. Portable tablets are too small. Upright touch screens are to cumbersome. This hybrid looks great.

Google introduced the Jamboard, a big touch screen that is meant for white boarding in meetings. The main feature is the collaboration supported by Google software. You can upload, edit, move things, and people not in the room can join the conversation remotely.

The features look impressive, the size of the screen might still be a bit small though to enable really productive group collaboration. Time will tell.

“I just need an hour of your time to sit together to improve my slides. I know exactly what I want to say in tomorrow’s presentation and all the slides are ready, they just need to be more visual”

I get this type of request often, and I usually turn it down. In one hour, 24 hours before the presentation, you can fix the layout of the slides a bit, but this is where it ends…

A proper presentation design process needs to go through a number of stages:

• The first briefing, what is the idea you are actually pitching
• Maybe in the same meeting, the more in depth questioning of the issues. The designer needs to ask the naive/ignorant questions
• Then putting the whole thing to rest, and scribble some ideas for potential slides over the next few days to come
• The creation of a basic graphical look and feel, usually I pick a “no brainer” slide for that, the content is crystal clear, it is just about style, fonts, colors layout.
• Then the drafting of the full deck, going back and forth between “no brainer” slides and the tricky ones.
• This draft gets then iterated back and forth
• Finally: rehearsing

It takes more than 1 hour, it needs more than 24 hours, it is not a polish of the existing presentation, which will have vanished totally in the process.

Image from Wikipedia

Here is a picture of a bill board snapped by a friend on Facebook. Venn diagrams are very useful in presentations. But there can be a catch.

There are 2 possible interpretations:

1. Intended: we are just so much bigger than these good things
2. Version b: our values do not really include all these good things

Have you key slides checked by a few different people, especially if they go in front of many eyes.