SlideMagic Blog

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

Many of my high tech clients hire me to design a product presentation that gets them higher up in the client organisation, the so called C-suite (CEO, CTO, CFO, etc.). The IT department buys features and equipment in a tight budget, the CEO can spend more money on what she sees as strategic priorities for the company.

The approach that vendors typically take is to frankenstein “business benefits” slides to the existing technical slide deck.

• Market research slides that show the ever growing bytes of Internet traffic
• 10-line quotes of customers who feel more flexible now
• An Excel spreadsheet that shows how one custom managed to save $42,345.87 in 2013
• A list of recent technology buzzwords (cloud, flexible, scalable, ROI)

I usually try to go for a different approach. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Trash the traditional system architecture charts. Cut the “business benefits” slides. Instead, I create a presentation that explains why this particular IT problem is so hard to crack, and how clever the client solution is.

The result is a presentation that looks “simple” to techies. “Simple” does not mean “simplistic”. It just does not use the complex looking visual language that engineers have gotten used to since graduating form university: network diagrams and acronyms.  Two engineers can communicate using these slides, but the content that is transferred actually has little to do with the network diagram on the slide. If you are not an engineer, you don’t get it. And as a result, most of the C-suite will not get it and send you back down stairs to IT.

Here is a question I was asked to answer on Quora:

“I heard a famous silicon valley investor saying that “the investors and the VCs are able to see if there is something going on through a bad pitch”. That being said, why should the entrepreneur care about having a good pitch?”

Here is my answer:

1. Not all investors are like that
2. Seeing through a bad pitch is especially hard when you are cold emailing someone a deck without explanation, Q&A
3. You probably also need to the pitch to recruit people, strategic partners, maybe even customers
4. Building on 3, settling for mediocre is not a good way to start creating an exciting company culture for the years to come
5. The pitch is likely to be the basis for other marketing collaterals: web sites, brochures, etc. etc.

Image by Wystan on Flickr

In a pitch there is always pressure to keep things as short as possible. It is therefore tempting to compress the problem you are solving is as few words as possible: “[x] is not very flexible”, because hey, people know this, right?

I tend to drag out the problem section of the pitch a bit:

• Remind people of the problem in an emotional way, that they “feel” it, usually with a picture or a statistic
• Point out what is the cause of this problem, it is often soften very trivial that people did not realise. (“Did you know the reason is that there are no batteries light enough to do this?”)
• Point out why it is so hard to solve the cause (not the problem itself). ("The law of physics that you cannot have this, and this at the same time)

Now you have set up the audience to show why your solution is so clever.

Image: Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr demonstrating ‘tippe top’ toy at the inauguration of the new Institute of Physics at Lund; Sweden

Many people start of a presentation design project with “we want a presentation like Apple”. A great intention. But after you come back with a first version (black background, a few words per slide, no bullets, no agenda pages, no summaries, no logo, no page numbers), people feel that it looks too dark, the flow is not clear, they want to summarise upfront what they are going to say, it is hard to refer to pages, it needs some branding, and to make sure that a certain point comes across, you better spell it out word for word on the slide.

Image by Danny Lion

On Quora, I see questions like which presentation software did [company X] use at [event Y]. For the audience there is no difference. The same simple, good slide can be made in PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, and Adobe InDesign. The exception is probably Prezi and its complex zooming capabilities.

The process that got you there makes a big difference though. How easy is it set up a basic presentation template (colours, fonts, positions of titles, page numbers, aspect ratio), how is it to create a basic slide layout other than a list of bullets, how easy is it to align items properly on a grid, how easy is to create basic data charts, how easy is it to keep everything consistent page after page, how easy is it to do basic image manipulation (cropping and repositioning).

Either the audience cannot tell in which program the presentation was made and you were either a design pro or have made a huge effort to master the software. Or, the audience can spot your software instantly (most likely PowerPoint), which means that you did not get much further than the standard slide template.

(A secret: you can get away with taking design short cuts in my presentation app SlideMagic and no one will notice).

Edgar Degas, Rehearsal on stage, 1874

One of our clients back at McKinsey in the 1990s used to say that “the paper in McKinsey documents is always warm”, i.e., they came of the printer only minutes before the meeting. Now that documents/presentations are all in digital form there is even greater opportunity to make last minute changes, especially if you travel by taxi to the meeting.

It comes at a price though. First of all, last minute analysis is prone to mistakes. But secondly: “frankensteining” quickly a chart into a presentation might break that super professional and impeccable look of the presentation.

If the change does not involve the correction of a major error,  it might be better to make that missing point verbally.