SlideMagic Blog

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…

The most fundamental feature of my presentation design app SlideMagic is the strict use of a grid to layout your slide. And there is a good reason for that.

Every slide I design start with counting. How many points. How many options. How many pro’s and con’s for each argument. How many years. How many competitors. How many types. How many team members. How many steps.

Even or odd number of items? If you end up with a nasty number (11, 13 for example), you find ways to combine 2 points, leave one of, split one up.

Then think of shapes, which boxes are “long” (text), which boxes are square (images, icons), which boxes vary in text content, which are the same.

Then comes the thinking about layouts: 3x3 5x1, 1x4, 2x2?

Almost every slide has a table hiding in it.

Image from WikiPedia

Today the Israeli startup Airobotics came out of stealth mode. They made a very good introduction video. Not only because of the graphical production quality and the story line. It is narrated by the company founder (foreign accent, some grammar mistakes) instead of a slick professional voice over. It makes the whole communication so much more authentic. Well done!

I have been observing the debate in the UK about whether it should stay in or leave the EU from across the Mediterranean.

• Like most big decisions, the debate is all emotional and “shooting from the hip”. Bureaucracy, immigration, sovereignty are all candidate topics for huge debates even in the absence of facts. Most people decide based on gut feel and it will be impossible to force 60m voters to sit through a micro-economics lecture about the impact of the EU. But the other extreme, 5 seconds sound bites by politicians will not work either. In a conference room, a well-designed presentation can offer a solution, in politics, I have no solution I am afraid.
• The biggest problem is the option that is offered. Instead of a simple “leave” or “remain”, the voter should vote on 2 specific plans with all the economic and political arrangements worked out, or at least, in a slightly more advanced stage.
• Arguments of both camps are often targeted at the believers, the people who already have bought in to a specific choice. You win elections by convincing the doubters.

Maybe politicians need to communicate like John Oliver. It still takes 14 minutes though.

Direct democracy has its problems:

• You can cherry pick issues to vote on without the context/constraints of all policies (“are you for or against a tax hike?”)
• You ask people to make decisions on simple black/white choices, without presenting the practical, day to day consequences, or a nuanced compromise
• Voter turnout is an issue
• And yes, voters don’t take the time to understand options fully

It looks like Microsoft has been listening. You can now completely customise the top quick access tool bar. For PowerPoint power users this will save a lot of time. Especially for aligning and distributing objects.

Make sure you have the latest update installed, and you will have access to a new icon in the PowerPoint preferences dialogue box.

For some reason, I still cannot find all the functions though. Flipping and rotating for example. Maybe I have not looked good enough, and/or there is still a small bug that needs to be ironed out.

I would like to recreate that ideal tool bar I posted about back in 2008.

Top image from WikiPedia.

For some reason, I find myself designing more complicated, busy slides recently. Busy does not mean more text and bullet points. Busy means showing complex arguments in diagrams: boxes that overlap, are interwoven, move from one into the next.

My guess there are a number of potential reasons:

1. My presentations are mostly investor decks, and the most important use of my slides is actually the moment when the recipient opens and reads them on the computer. The standup presentation that follows (if the first screening was successful), is almost a formality in terms of slide content, it is more about having the opportunity to get the know the people behind the slides.
2. Misuse of cliche stock images or forced visual analogies have started to make people tired of certain big picture slides. “Oh, it’s going to be this type of presentation, let’s page down to the meat quickly”.
3. Larger, and higher resolution screens create a temptation to design more complicated slides (thinner fonts, thinner lines, more subtle colour shadings). Today, these slides even look great on a retina iPad. (Old crappy VGA projects are a different story though).
4. Big, page filling image slides, are actually not that hard to make and this might be a segment of work that gets done more and more in-house.

So, not a return to crammed bullet points, but diagrams lifted to a higher level.

Image: Brianna Privett on Flickr

A question I often get after a very simple make over of a slide. Answer:

• Make boxes the same size
• Line everything up in a grid
• Cut excess filler words and passive verbs
• Us one accent colour
• Harmonize fonts
• Reset image aspect ratios
• Fit everything inside a frame with white space around it

“You make it sound so simple, but it is not.”. It actually is. If you struggle doing it in PowerPoint, use SlideMagic, my presentation app.