SlideMagic Blog

During a TED talk, most presenters have the luxury of bringing a totally new, surprising, inspiring story to an audience who cannot wait to hear it.

When you pitch a business initiative it is unlikely that it will come as a total shock or surprise to the audience, Investors have seen similar ideas before, potential customers have heard your competitor sales pitches, senior management heard you talk about this plan in last quarter’s strategic planning presentation, market sizes look roughly the same as in yesterday’s pitch, payback time is again around 6 months.

Why is your idea different than all the other ones out there?

Here is what a first time viewer needs to go through when looking at a data chart:

• What’s the unit on the y-axis
• What’s on the x-axis
• What do the legend colours stand for
• What is “good” or “bad”, are things supposed to go up or down?
• What is actually happening
• Is the y-axis broken or does it start on zero?
• Why is this unexpected, interesting, counter-intuitive, amazing, terrifying?

If you did the analysis then you live and breathe the data in the chart, the only thing you watch out for is how the line/column/bar looks different from the previous version of the chart you saw. For a completely new audience it is a different story.

There are 2 types of data charts:

1. Charts to ponder and refine research and analysis
2. Charts to communicate the result of the pondering and refining

If you make a presentation of result, you deal with scenario 2. Make a diagram completely from scratch. Start with “what is actually happening” and only put that piece of data on the chart.

For example if a complex stacked line diagram shows that the % of returning visitors gets smaller over the past 5 years, you can replace all that monthly visitor data with 3 data points: % of return visitors in the last 3 years.

Image by Phil Roeder on Flickr

There are a number of starting points for my presentation design projects that almost always result in great presentations:

• The enthusiastic CEO with a strong story who is all over the place with bullet point charts, skipping/jumping left, right, and centre
• The scientist with a strong idea that is buried in dozens of unreadable data charts
• The engineer with a great product, presented in a presentation that looks like a deck used to present the result of a school end of year craft project
• The Fortune 500 investor relations manager with a quarterly results deck in a standard PowerPoint 2007 template that is more of a general company introduction than a razor sharp story updating investors about the key business drivers in the last quarter.

Difficult starting points:

• A confident CEO, with a visual deck (lots of big pictures) that spends too much time on explaining a relatively obvious point, ignoring the “elephant in the room” practical questions that investors might have (yes, we get the idea, but how can you build this realistically in 3 months).
• A scientist who is so used to her existing slides that her pitch would not change much, even when equipped with the world’s most beautiful slide deck.
• An inventor with a great idea, but no team, no plan, no technical approach

Never a dull moment in my profession!

Image from WikiPedia

I found myself designing presentations in the beautiful world of protein synthesis recently. This is a very complex field of science and diagrams that researchers use reflect that.

While it takes decades of study and research to discover and develop them, the mechanism of action of these drugs can be explained relatively easily. The key is to forget about all the conventional diagramming approaches you see in scientific papers. Leave out any piece of science that is not relevant to the problem that causes the disease, and the way the drug solves it.

I actually start with writing down what the key steps are. Then just visualising what is written down, and not a detail more. The resulting diagrams are unusual and I often get feedback from medical professionals that it all is too simple. A great compliment I think.

The biography “Porcelain” by musician Moby is a nice addition to your summer reading list. The book covers the period from when he left home to the eve of the release of his album “Porcelain” that was his major breakthrough.

Many celebrities use ghost authors to write their books. This one is written by himself. The style of the sentences exactly matches those of his social media posts and video interviews.

The book paints a good picture of the prolonged creative struggle you need to go through in order to find your individual style. If you look at his career from a distance this is the picture that I get:

• Moby got an extensive classical guitar training (not at all mentioned in the book) which his musical foundation
• Then he got his decade or so to look for his style:
  • DJ-ing, absorbing a huge amount of music
  • Playing around with sequencers, drum machines which were relatively new inventions in the late eighties
  • Because of his low “burn rate” (living in abandoned factories) he could somehow sustain himself without a daytime job, freeing up time for creative experimentation
  • Again lack of financial resources forced him to extract the maximum out of the equipment he had.

My own efforts to get SlideMagic off the ground feel a bit like this. I try to process all those presentations I designed during my decade at McKinsey, and the decade as a professional presentation designer into a useful tool. In V2.0 I am now slowly moving from a pure focus on grid-based design to a generic, minimalist, visual language to express business concepts. Work in progress.

Large parts of the world are in a political impasse at the moment. Part of the issue is related to communication of ideas:

• The business of government is complicated, but the political debate is fought with simplistic TV sound bites and tweets
• There is an almost total absence of facts. Yes, facts and logic are not always the best weapons to convince people, but they can be effective in a targeted strike to zap a populist, simplistic argument
• Political speeches or live debates are poor platforms to discuss a balanced trade off between two options. In controversial business presentations, I like to use some sort of pro/con table that compares the 2 options, isolating “no brainer” data points from points that are more subjective.
• Audiences are fragmenting. I remember back in the Netherlands when I grew up there were basically 3 types of parties: workers, business owners, and religious people. Within these 3 groups, people had very similar perspectives on how to tackle issues. That is no longer the case. There is no longer one philosophy, or person, that can unite the viewpoints of a large majority of the population.
• Arguments focus on the extreme cases: demonstrating how totally and utterly stupid the other side is. This will resonate with people who are on your side, but is unlikely to win over the mind of the person who is doubting the issue in the centre of the political spectrum.

And finally, the 18th century nation state is losing its ability to control things. Movement of talent and money across the globe is hard to control. We are part of a global system that is driven by small economic decisions of millions voting with their money.

Many of my prospective clients think that the cost of presentation design is variable: the longer the presentation, the more slides, the more expensive it gets.

The cost of presentation design is actually pretty  much fixed. The big cost is getting to know the company, the story, the science, the technology, the market. Once you have done that, designing the actual slides is not that much work anymore for a professional designer.

So the most costly presentations are usually those where the story is not very clear.

Art: Marinus van Reymerswale, The money changer and his wife, 1539

I saw this Tweet by Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen):

I agree fully, and as the CEO of an aspiring presentation app (SlideMagic), I am not contradicting myself. SlideMagic is of course cool, but not because it adds spectacular features. It makes you design slides in a very strict grid so that your slides look good regardless of your design experience. Try it yourself.

Shapes, their sizes, and the layout grid set the balance of a slide. But text as well and is often overlooked. Watch out for these:

• One word that drops to the second line
• A very long word that makes a sentence break halfway the page
• 3 boxes in a row, 2 with little text, one crammed with characters
• Long descriptors in column headings that break line after line after line

The solution in these cases is not reducing the font size, reducing the margins, it is redesigning your slide layout and content:

• Take out filler words
• Replace long words (management, manufacturing) with shorter ones
• Splitting a point in 2 points that are more balanced
• Making a sentence actually longer to restore balance
• Flipping the rows and columns of a table
• Using a different shape (circles and long text do not go together for example)

Art: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, 1767

The little details in a presentation might not make or break its message, but they do count. A spotless presentation shows you made an effort, that you take your audience seriously.

The result of some maintenance work downstairs in the parking lot of my building

Here are some things to look out for: typos in common words (if your spell checker flags something, there is probably something wrong), typos in names of people, inconsistent use of fonts and/or colours, small misalignments of objects, a text wrap gone wrong, or making sure that the positions of titles on all slides is the correct. I remember the senior partner on my first McKinsey project coming into the graphics design room to hold all the paper slides against a strong light to check these things.

Yes, I know that I am contradicting myself now and then as I get reminders about typos in my blog posts…