SlideMagic Blog

Apple made changes to the screen typography in yesterday’s release of iOS10. It now faces the same challenges as I have in presentation design.

Apple broke the look of elegant, thin fonts and added a narrower bold font. These fonts have good readability, and you can fit a lot of information on one line (or better: increase the font size without needing another line). It comes at a price though, as things look more cluttered.

In my presentation app SlideMagic, I still went for the narrow bold fonts (Roboto Condensed). When applied in a strict grid, and in the right sizes it works.

In the screen shot below for example, something is just not right. Not a lot of white space. Unclear grid. And the logo type of the newspapers interfere with the narrow bold headlines.

Copy-pasting full paragraphs from authoritative sources (academics, Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly) to support your point do poorly in presentations:

• A presentation is not a legal court battle where every word of an expert is examined in detail to see who is right. People don’t bother to read a big paragraph of text on a slide
• Quotes have been overused, Google is filled with quotes from random people claiming almost any point you are looking for
• Text is often a secondary interpretation of some graph or statistics. That graph or statistic, the primary source, is much better visual material to make your point
• Quotes are always almost years old, out of context. “A Harvard Professor said this in 1995 in a study for an airplane manufacturer” is not very relevant for an Internet startup in 2016.

Image from WikiPedia

Many people have vivid memories of what they were doing when dramatic events unfolded (9/11 for example). Quartz published an interesting article on these “flashbulb” memories, named after their photographic qualities.

Emotions are a powerful anchor for memories. Obviously we don’t want to invoke traumatic events to help the audience remember your pitch. But some element of emotion (an image, a story) is important to make your presentation more memorable.

Have a read through this chapter in my book to learn more.

I have noticed that my purchase of stock images has gone down dramatically:

• I stopped forcing myself to find an image for every slide (what I tended to do 10 years ago)
• Stock image sites are now overloaded with cheesy compositions
• There are many excellent free image sites around

Here is a nice collection of early-stage startup pitch decks that managed to raise money successfully.

There are some common concepts in all of them:

• Most importantly, they are actually great ideas. LinkedIn, YouTube, AirBNB now look like totally obvious concepts, but back when they started out they were not.
• They explain clearly what the company/product actually does, often via a demo of screen shots. Many startups omit this important part of your pitch (surprisingly).
• Often, there is a very powerful traction slide inside. If you have grown your business from nothing to millions of dollars in 6 months, investors will pay attention, and forgive you if the rest of the slides in the pitch deck are not that good.
• All these decks are email friendly, you get the idea without the need for a presenter to explain it to you. (That is now actually the main type of presentation I design for my clients)

Every pitch starts with an informal, but often very good, story/conversation. Then we start to complicate things with slides, templates, storylines, structures until we get to some slide deck. Then, it is often useful to step back to the very fundamental investor questions:

1. What is it they are trying to do? (Often not clear in a presentation)
2. Will anyone want to use it? (Rational logic, emotional gut feel)
3. Can you make money from it? (There are many good ideas that do not deliver a profit)
4. Can this team pull it of? (Probably most important question)
5. (Can I construct a good deal given valuation, cap tables, Board seats, etc.)

Years of experience with client presentation templates have confirmed that there is basically only one way to lay out a corporate template.

• Title at the top left. Some templates have a huge corporate logo getting in the way there
• If you want to put a logo, put it at the bottom right to compensate for the “weight” of the title in the top left. Logo on the top right eats space for the headline, logo at the bottom left makes it harder to put footnotes
• Page number in the top right (bottom right is taken up by the logo)
• Which leaves space for footnotes at the bottom left.

You might notice that my presentation app SlideMagic uses this layout.

Most of my client work involves a presentation with a hard/difficult business or scientific issue to explain. All science is complex, and it requires someone to study for years to understand it. But in some scientific disciplines I can get away with things.

Take medicine for example. Here is what you can do to make things understandable to the layman:

• Micro focus on one very specific condition/disease, and omit all other 35,000 medical issues a student usually has to go through
• Simplify, eliminate complex / long / Latin names
• Abandon commonly used diagrams, and instead make your own, completely non-standard drawings that are solely aimed at explaining a phenomenon.
• Shrink all the statistical proof into a footnote. It is important for peer-reviewed research, it is not needed to understand the basic mechanism of a drug

This can work in other disciplines as well: economics for example. But it does not work everywhere. Mathematics for examples requires a broad understanding of concepts that are all stacked on top of each other, depend on each other. And there is no easy to simplify formulas.

Image from WikiPedia

Some of my client work is for managers of business units in a large organisation who need to convince the corporate centre to make a politically charged decision. Some mistakes I encounter in the briefing document:

• Most decks start with backgrounds, market trends, history of the unit, all information that is not directly related to the issue on the table. Only in the back (or on the last page), buried in a bullet point comes the central point of the meeting.
• The overall pro/con arguments are not well laid out, you need to distill them from the pages, or sometimes it requires verbal explanation
• Critical arguments that could be backed up by facts are not.

In these type of meetings with a busy senior executive I like to get to the point early. Lay out the options, and summarise why you think your preferred one is the best. Then dive with charts to support the points, where ever you can backed up by facts.

When you add text to your presentation, you are writing headlines. And headline writing is completely different from writing prose. Take the mind set of a headline writer when designing presentations.

• Space is limited, so keep it short:
  • Avoid filler words
  • Active, not passive verbs
  • Find synonyms for long words
• But… keep them meaningful. Abstract, vague, generic text is a waste of space
• Take typography and layout into account. If things don’t fit, re-write the headline
  • Watch weird line breaks
  • Keep things balanced: 2 super short category descriptions followed by a long one means either making the first 2 headlines longer (yes), or - more likely - cut the 3rd one
  • Watch out for orphans

Typography is a valid reason to re-write a headline! Try explaining that to your colleagues when the entire meeting room has settled for a slide title after an hour debate, and you say “sorry, does not fit in 2 lines”

Image from WikiPedia