SlideMagic Blog

Still relevant today:

Quotation marks never come out right when you use large, bold, typography. Below is a nice idea by the designer of Gary Vaynerchuck. One huge, big, quotation market centred across the text. Note that the quotation mark is in a far bigger font size than the rest of the text.

Most quotes in presentations do not add to the story:

• Too long to read
• Too many buzzwords and generic language
• Given by a person nobody has ever heard of
• Given by a person with a position that is not very impressive (junior analyst at unknown consulting company)
• Give by a person who is very famous but has nothing to do with the subject (Ghandi)
• Used too many times

What can you do better? Find the right person, and get them to say something specific, clear, and simple: “This solution saved the launch of product [x]!”

UPDATE February 2018: I have added a new post about using quotes in PowerPoint to the blog

I get a lot of queries from startups on a tight budget that want the best presentation possible to raise their next round of financing that pretty much determines the survival of the company. Many of these projects I actually turn down when I see that the presentation is actually pretty decent. Extracting fees for a bespoke presentation design will not give them the right return on investment.

Here are some things I watch out for when deciding when a presentation is pretty decent for an early-stage VC round (which is a different audience than a major late-stage growth round, a TED talk, a pitch to a major customer)

• The slides have a decent look and feel: consistent, large font sizes, different colours than the standard PowerPoint colour theme
• It is almost instantly clear what it is that you are actually doing
• It is very clear why the company is different from what is out there, and/or why the particular innovation is so hard to do/hard to copy
• The presentation does not contain buzzwords, empty, hollow language and/or other padding
• The presentation has a sense of realism to it, forecasts and plans are ambitious, but not crazy, you see that the presentation is written by sensible people

Image from WikiPedia

Not every PowerPoint slide is meant for presentations to a big audience. Some charts are meant for pondering behind a big screen. The one below is an example (made by FirstMark Capital).

Venture capitalists love these industry overviews full of logos and sectors. You could make this chart cleaner:

• Replace logos with small text boxes
• Perfectly line up all these tiny text boxes in a grid
• Replace the rounded-corner shapes with shaded rectangles without a framing line

But that chart would be less fund to ponder…

This blog is read by many fellow presentation designers. Here are some of my clues that warn me when a potential project could be difficult to get right.

• The CEO (or anyone else who actually has to give the presentation) is not involved enough in the process, so you do not hear first hand what the person actually wants to say
• The potential client says “we just need a polish” of existing slides, because 1) she wants to negotiate the project budget and/or 2) [worse] she thinks that after all the work the company invested in the slides it is not possible for an outsider to turn things upside down and start fresh, better.
• The project deadline moves forward to a few days from now leaving no time for creativity
• The project deadline moves backward
• Every change, edit, discussion requires a full in-person meeting with many people in the room, including small punctuation edits in slide headlines
• There are conflicting story lines: 1) multiple messages for multiple audiences, or 2) “this is what we want to say, but we cannot really say it”
• “We want a presentation like this” (with an attachment of a poorly designed presentation)
• We give you total creative freedom except for a), b), c), d), and e)
• Any question re the content of the presentation gets avoided, with “just let us know the cost and the time it will take you”

Designers should look out for these warning signs and people tendering project should look in the mirror.

This picture by Anouk Zwager has an interesting list of common management vocabulary in the Netherlands. Part of these words sound perfectly fine to an English speaking audience, but in a Dutch context, with many words in the Dutch language available it just does not feel right.

I will try to translate, some of them might not work:

• To roll out
• To make an areal approach
• To hook up
• To smack on something
• To sound board (verb)
• To hit a marker stick in the ground
• “Bila” short for bilateral discussion
• To benchmark
• To level
• To secure (like you do with a ship wreck)
• Low hanging fruit
• Quick wins
• To scale up
• To wrestle
• To harmonize
• To shoot at something
• Commitment
• To press ahead
• To shoot on goal
• To tick the box
• To hit the gas
• Hands on
• To “further develop”
• To crystallise
• To adjust downwards
• Out of the box
• To “communicate further”
• Pro-active

Imagey by Jaci XIII on Flickr

Cheesy stock photos look worse than a list of dense bullets. If you need an image of a normal-looking person here some things I try:

• Try other sources than stock image sites, I put a number of free image sources here
• Use adjectives to find an expression you want: “calm”, “proud”, avoid terms such as “happy”, “smiling” which will instantly return cheesy images
• Use images that do not reveal the face (taken from the back, or a frontal crop)
• Avoid any image with a photoshopped, fake background or added graphics
• If you find one image that sort of works, dig deeper and bring up all the images that were made with the same model, maybe there is a better one hiding somewhere
• Use images of kids, they are almost always spontaneous

Image from WikiPedia

The standard cloud shape in PowerPoint is not very pretty. Especially if you need a different aspect ratio, there is no option but to stretch the shape, making it look even worse. My solution is to combine multiple cloud shapes into one to get a decent new shape (SHAPE FORMAT, MERGE SHAPES, UNION). See the example below.

It is interesting to see that merging shapes also kills the “inside” cloud contours.

You can get more sophisticated and design your own cloud shape based on circles. Here is my attempt in 2011 to recreate Apple’s iCloud logo in PowerPoint.

Art: View of Haarlem with bleaching fields, Jacob van Ruisdael, 1670

Chart loaded with detail are usually not the best way to convey a message. Except, when your message is that things are actually very busy, complex, interrelated. Then by all means make a busy chart. When presenting, don’t feel tempted to go into the detail of its content though, the message stays “things are busy” and [click] you can go on to the next chart.

Art: The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1559