SlideMagic Blog

More and more I am trying to self-analyse the process I go through when designing tricky charts for my clients, all with the hope of one day putting all that skill in my presentation design app SlideMagic.

Here is a process I went through yesterday:

1. Write all the key things that need to come out on a piece of paper (the most important objective of this exercise: the things that are NOT written down).
2. Cut down the messages to the bare essential:
   1. Re-write them as short as possible, no filler words
   2. Group similar points, eliminate duplications
3. Underline verbs/action words: “is at the centre”, “nobody can do these 3 things at the same time”, “integration is possible because of IT”, “across all channels”
4. Map cause and effect/result
5. Select the most important action (something being at the centre, the IT that integrates everything, a Venn of 3 overlapping things?) and sketch a basic visual concept ignoring any conventional way to depict things in the specific industry
6. Now fit in the other bits
7. Re-shuffle, re-position to make sure lines, arrows don’t cross and related things are close together
8. Add colour (selectively)
9. Make sure everything lines up with a grid
10. Fix typography, odd line breaks, orphan lines, etc.

I still have some work to do in SlideMagic…

Image from WikiPedia

In little bursts of work I will be updating my presentation app SlideMagic over the coming weeks. I noticed that many users stick to the 9 box grid that is the default blank layout of a new slide. Yesterday we released a new insert routine. You now get presented with a number of slide layouts to choose from when inserting a new slide, without having to import and/or clone template slides.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

When people get invited to speak at a conference about their specific expertise and/or profession, they usually have no problem creating an industry story. It is easy to understand why: they are their home turf, feel very confident, have lots of interesting things to say and are in a relatively risk-free environment (there is no business proposal that could be rejected).

The draft presentations I receive from these type of clients usually need very little work. Here is what I usually end up doing:

• Switch to a big conference white on dark template, without any logos, banners
• Replace the standard Calibri or Arial font to something safe (i.e., no custom fonts that can cause trouble on foreign computers). Usual choices: Arial Black in all caps, or Century Gothic
• Replace cheesy stock images
• Replace low resolution images
• Replace images with copyright issues (Google image search, search tools, “labelled for re-use”
• Restore original image aspect ratios and stretch/crop images to full screen
• Spread out slides with multiple messages across multiple slides
• Cut text and reposition text boxes in the context of the underlying image

Art:  Johannes Moreelse, Democritus, 1630

Early stage investors make a risky bet: 1 or 0, either the company will work, or it doesn’t. Later stage investors don’t take that make or break risk, they invest in companies that have gotten some traction but need capital to finance growth and expansion. Which markets are you going after, how are you going to sell to them, what new products can you launch.

Valuation of early-stage startup is usually a mysterious process in the absence of sales and profits. For growth-stage companies it usually boils down to some sort of discounted cash flow analysis.

This is important to remember when presenting to these type of investors. In the end, a junior analyst will sit down, take your presentation and try to come up with some sort of financial business forecast for your company.

One way to deal with this is to email your own business forecast ready in Excel. But by definition, the buy side will never believe the assumptions of the sell side in a transaction, and worse, the potential buyer might just use your own spreadsheet to salami slice every single assumption down in order to end up with a value of $5.

The best approach is to feed the buyer the assumptions (market growth, market share growth, pricing, number of sales people you need) without doing the adding up of all the numbers. And feed those assumptions in the form of stories about your business plan, rather than a dry set of numbers.

Prioritise your sources of growth according to likelihood of success, first existing customers, existing products, then maybe new geographies, new verticals, and finally completely new products.

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.