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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:
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:
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
In many pitch presentations, I work hard to lift a story to its true potential. Show the bigger picture, put things in a historical context of where humanity is going, visualise the - dreaded word - vision.
In some presentations the opposite is required. The audience will get the dream, but will wonder whether any of this stuff is actually real, or happening within the next 2 years or so, because it all sounds too good to be true, or too expensive, or too science fiction.
Thinking about your audience before you start designing is a cliche from communication trainings. Maybe make it a bit more practical and try to imagine what stereotype people would assign to you after they see/hear you speak for 1 minute.
Image from WikiPedia
I have written about the poor quality VGA projectors that are still sitting in conference rooms of many companies before, but I myself fell into the trap again yesterday. A presentation that looked great on my computer screen was barely readable in a conference room, I have gotten used to high resolution screens and the option to use thin fonts and very subtle colour shadings. Reminder: these do not come through on projectors.
Now we have a dilemma:
My presentation app SlideMagic should be OK, it uses fat Roboto fonts and reasonably blunt shadings. For PowerPoint, think about where your deck will be used most: a person reading the attachment of an email or an audience watching things on the screen. If the latter, test your presentation before the all-or-nothing pitch.
When a VC says “no, sorry”, she usually means it. Arguing and repeating your viewpoint over and over is not going to change her mind.
What you can do is inject new information into the conversation. A new customer signed up. A similar company got funding. A new team member came on board. A new way to slice the customer data gives a new insight. Chances that it will work are low though.
Image: Franklin’s footpath by Gene Davis
I have written very positive reviews about PowerPoint 2016 for Mac, even calling it better than the latest version of Apple Keynote. But there a few annoying bugs inside. This blog is read by a lot PPT experts, so maybe one of you can help.
Are these just me?
Image from WikiPedia
The recently joined web site Data USA (datausa.io) is a great source of maps that can serve as backgrounds for presentation slides.
Often, when I start a presentation design project, I find that the real message of a pitch is buried.
As a result, I tend to get back to the same questions in a briefing meeting. “Why are you different again? What is the difference between your product and the one that company is offering?” My first version of a slide deck often contains deliberately blunt charts that force the client to react and correct a positioning that I think I understood (sort of).
Some people in the room fear that they hired the wrong presentation designer, who keeps on asking the same ignorant questions. Most of the time, I manage to convince them by the time my final product is delivered.
Image on Flickr by Nic McPhee
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