SlideMagic Blog

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

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.