SlideMagic Blog

Back in the 1990s, buying a new computer used to be something very exciting, today it is the replacement of a work tool after the previous one breaks down.

As a presentation designer I used to fit in the category of “power users”, people that need to manipulate images and store large files. No longer, for my work, I can use an average computer and everything will be just fine.

Portability is not as much as a big deal as it used to be. I can access all my files online. I focus my creative design work to my calm office environment and need a simple device to run a presentation in a meeting or make last-minute edits if necessary. And when I move around, I want that device to be as light/small as possible. (Five years ago I used to carry around a 3kg 17" laptop).

What is important though is the largest screen I can get my hands on. This is such an improvement in productivity.

Now, my personal hobbies (electronic music creation), complicates all this. It needs huge hard drives and processing power…

Decisions…

I made a brief side step into web design last week, when a VC fund for which I created the fund raising presentation needed a web presence as well.

This fund (like many other businesses), needed a simple “business card”, a decent, professional-looking web presence that works on all types of browsing devices. It was not trying to sell a product to consumers, it was not giving access to a content library, it was not powering a market place.

Many of these business card web sites look poor:

• People pick the wrong platform. A template that offers too many features, that can only be maintained by a web developer.
• People let the design be driven by the menu structure that the template offers, rather than the content
• People enthusiastically create active content sections (blog, news, links to social media pages) that then are not maintained.

For business card web sites, keep things very simple, but over-invest in the design of the web site. And design does not mean spectacular effects, video, and clever popups. Does the page look balanced and good (on both large and small screens). Pretty much like you would design paper/print work.

From the SlideMagic presentations that people have shared with me, I can see that the app is used in unexpected ways. I would like to understand better how you use SlideMagic. If you feel comfortable with it, you can send me your SlideMagic presentation (jan at slidemagic dot com). I will keep things to myself, and might even drop in some improvement suggestions here and there.

Art: Cornelis de Baellieur, Interior of a Collector’s Gallery of Paintings and Objets d’Art, 1737

After McKinsey, I now spent almost 14 years as a freelance designer. And my work has gone through a pattern that many others are experiencing as well:

In the beginning you run after every piece of work you can get your hands on, invests tremendous amount of energy in projects to over-deliver, producing work that would not meet today’s quality standards (I sometimes cringe when I encounter my early design work). At dinner parties you have a highly elaborate pitch of what you do, and what you don’t do (that story changes monthly).

After a while your work pipeline starts building up. Reputation spreads, and happy customers come back to you for more work. You become more efficient at what you do. And at some time, that efficiency starts eating into your work. You try to please everyone and the only way to do it is to start cutting corners. The result: stress and work that is not as great as it could be. Designs still look a lot better than when you started out (you have learned a lot along the way), but the sparkle in the eye of the client is less bright than it used to be. I hit that point a couple of years ago.

I made a conscious decision to change things. Only accept projects that I knew I could add great value, and take things all the way. This means saying “no” to a lot of distractions. Creative work requires a lot of concentration and even the shortest coffee chat can render an entire morning useless. Out go:

Presentations that run in conference booths have a few special requirements

• Smaller screens, probably a 16:9 aspect ratio. One set of people will stand close to watch it, the other will see the screens far in the distance. The screens become part of the overall branding of the booth. For the latter group, it is important the the graphical look & feel of your company pops out. Not through the use of big logos, but by applying the corporate colours boldly.
• Viewers are unlikely to watch through the whole thing, but rather look at a slide here and there out of context. There is no one nearby to explain, each slide needs to stand on its own. This calls fro big bold visuals, with a clear headline that spells out the message of the slide.
• Go for a relatively slow page rotation. If you are focused in the office, the presentation might run very slow, you have read the slide 10 times over before it goes on to the next one. In a conference booth, especially with more screens, things can start to look ver nervous when each screen is moving quickly.
• Related to this. If you keep the differences between the layout of the slides similar, the page transitions will look less dramatic, creating a calmer overall feel of the presentation

Art: Pieter Aertsen, Market Stall, 1569

Whenever I need to get my head around a new presentation I often start with scribbling a map of competitors and the differentiation that my client has versus them. The result is a messy table full of scribbles which is definitely not the right end product to put in a presentation.

It informs however the whole story. Now that everything is on a piece of paper in front of you, you can start to think about what story you need to convey all this information.

Most management consultants stop at the busy table. That is the end of the analysis and the beginning of the presentation design.

If your technology is very complex, you have 2 challenges:

1. Still explain the principle of the technology in a simple way
2. Show that the incredible complexity is an asset that is hard for competitors to copy

Don’t mix the two. If you cannot resist and make the explanation of the basic idea behind your technology complex, people won’t get it. If you oversimplify things and hide the complexity, people will think that this is something obvious and not worth investing in.

You need to separate (sets of) slides.

Image by Panayotis on Flickr.

If this is the main message of your presentation, very few will believe you, unless you have a very credible explanation why you can offer a free lunch where others can’t. “It is like magic” will not cut it.

Image by Eva Peris

In order to make a nice profile slide about a company, you need to find good images of their products, ads, head office building (no, not the reception desk). One good trick to mine one specific web site for images is to go to the main Google Image search page: https://images.google.com/, and enter a query that says “site:domain.com”. Here are the images that are stored on slidemagic.com.

Some new users of my presentation app SlideMagic complain that you cannot import any existing PowerPoint presentations, you have to start from scratch to design your pitch. “This will take me too much time!”

There are 2 reasons why SlideMagic does not import PowerPoint presentations (export is OK though):

1. Technical: SlideMagic uses a very strict slide layout, which simply cannot be matched (automatically) to the wide variety of PowerPoint designs
2. Behavioural: SlideMagic aims to make corporate communication simpler and less time consuming. The fact that it takes too much time to re-create a PowerPoint presentation one-for-one in SlideMagic probably says something about your presentation. SlideMagic has excellent tools and templates to take your message and show it in simpler form.

If you really need to import that one complex PowerPoint slide, you can always use a screen shot and import it as an image.

Image by Alexandre Duret-Lutz on Flickr