SlideMagic Blog

While I have been upgrading my phone fairly frequently over the past years, my iPad has pretty stayed the same for a long time. I got the first one with Retina display (the 3 I think), got frustrated with its weight and got a Mini as soon as that one was equipped with a Retina display. Last week, I got an iPad Pro 9.7.

Why? I will be honest, screen size. I subscribe to many iPad magazines in niche categories (mountain biking, synthesizers if you are interested) and these smaller publications do not always have apps that adjust to small screen sizes. At 46, I found them increasingly hard to read.

Also I was curious about the Apple Pencil and keyboard. The big iPad Pro tempted me, but I held out long enough to read the reviews of most users who found its size too bulky. So, here I am with an iPad Pro 9.7.

The first thing that strikes you is the incredible screen this iPad has. My iPhone 6S looks poor next to it. Second is its weight. Feels the same as my old Mini, despite a much larger screen.

The pencil is the first one that actually works for an iPad. Over the years I have tried many, many styli, and always found myself going back to paper. All my slide designs start as a sketch on a piece of paper, I like to make them big, so I burn through many trees in a month. I am hopeful that the pencil will finally end this waste. The real answer will come after a month of use or so. The pencil works nicely in the Apple Notes app, but really shines in the Paper app by 53.  The only drawback of the pencil is that there is nowhere to put it. I reviewed a leather designer cover I got for my iPad 3 to carry everything around.

Communication in the work place in general has its problems:

• Email wording
• Making a point in a meeting
• Trying to get to a decision in a meeting
• Annual feedback sessions
• Handing over web/app designs to the implementation team
• Product one pagers
• Press releases
• Keyword-loaden blog posts
• Marketing slogans
• User manuals
• Travel policies

In presentations, the issue is most visible but it is sitting everywhere. People are used to transferring ideas in a dialogue where the recipient asks questions to help her understand what is being said. All this breaks down in one way communication.

Art: Tower of Babel by Pieter Breughel the Elder

It is holocaust memorial day today in Israel. Here is a presentation I created back in 2009:

The eye wants boxes on a slide to be equal in size. That is why I am always battling with the box with the largest amount of text, it determines the shape size and/or font size of all the boxes on the chart. Here you need to be a newspaper front page layout designer/editor and cut down the text of that box carefully without diluting its meaning. It will improve the look of your entire slide.

I really don’t like the word “management” for example. You need it a lot in business presentations and has all these wide letters, which makes it hard to fit.

Image from WikiPedia

This chart taken from the Economist shows a nice use of stacked bar charts: 3 variables in one.

Photo taken from the facebook page of the British Royal Family

The main reason to design a new presentation app that is an alternative to PowerPoint (SlideMagic) is the flaw in the windows/mouse-based user interface design that has been with us since the end of the 1980s. Users can drag, move, place, distort, objects as they see fit. Inexperienced designers will get it wrong and put things in the wrong places.

Over my holiday, I have been listening to this Andreessen Horowitz podcast that discusses whether tablets are finally ready to eliminate the laptop:

Some other interesting points that came up:

• “Where is my mouse?”, the mouse pointer is actually not the most logical computer input device. After 2 decades we have gotten used to it, but is not perfect. In the 1980s, engineers combined multi-tasking and windows as one user interface concept. They are different.
• Arranging and resizing application windows as actually not that user friendly. Most of the time, you want 1, 2, maybe 3 applications open in a convenient grid. (Similar to placing objects on a slide).
• One of the big shortcomings of tablets today is the ability to create presentation slides (making small edits is not a problem). Maybe it is time to expand SlideMagic to work with touch screens :-)

Image from WikiPedia

I am on vacation with my family at the moment, posting might be a bit unpredictable. Going against good blogging practice, I am not working with a big post content pipeline but rather write entries almost all “live”. You read it five minutes after I wrote it. Authentic and raw, but less good at incorporating family holiday schedules. Apologies.

Most presentations have some sort of written summary on the first page. You often almost skip it when presenting live, but it can be important for an important that reads your slide deck at the computer rather than attending a live presentation.

The one thing that I find really hard to summarise are financials. Prose that goes like “sales were x, up y% compared to last quarter but z% versus the same quarter last year at a slightly higher operating margin of v%” makes me totally lose the picture.

Financial journalists fill pages of the Wall Street Journal with this type of texts. And they are upset that it is now possible for an automated bot to do this job: insert a financial table and out comes a perfectly written paragraph. (Robo journalism)

What do I do as a reader? I reconstruct the table back in my head.

So what to do in a presentation? I recommend a super simple written summary on page 1 (sales were up, but profits down), and then a very crisp financial summary table on the next page. Round up numbers, and use colour coding to show what went up or down.

Image from WikiPedia

Presenting slides in front of a big audience is just one application of PowerPoint, and probably not the one that is most commonly used. Here are a few others:

• Corporate knowledge database
• Product catalogue
• Project management and planning tool
• Word processor
• Story boarding tool
• Group brainstorming tool
• Animation editor
• System design tool
• To do list and meeting minutes recording tool

A 1980s presentation design tool ended up being the operating system that power most communication inside a company.

Not every presentation slide is about finding the right image. In my work, I encounter a lot of “layout puzzles”: tables or diagrams of boxes that need to convey complex trade-offs and relationships. The challenge is to convey the message simply, without making things too simplistic.

Here are some of the steps I go through:

• Group things together, split things up until I get to table rows/columns or boxes that are more or less on the same level of importance
• Edit down text to get clear box/row/column labels that are as short as possible, or when short is not an option, each have about the same amount of words (the number of lines covered is very relevant in typography)
• Enforce some sort of grid to the page. Each box/column/row should have the same size, or span a multiple of grid elements. (In my presentation app SlideMagic it is not possible to violate this principle)
• Swap rows and columns so that similar items end up next to each other. Re-arrange boxes in the diagram so that connected boxes are close and connecting lines do not cross.
• At the final stage, add colour to make visual groupings that you could not create with physical proximity or connecting lines.

This might sound like tedious work, but the end result is often a diagram that forms the backbone of your entire presentation.

Image from WikiPedia