SlideMagic Blog

I get this question a lot from (potential) clients in Europe and here in Israel. Ten years ago, I would have answered the question with a usual rundown of presentation design basics: not too many bullet points, visual slides, etc. etc.

But in 2016, I think the playing field has levelled. Audiences in any country now recognise a good or a bad presentation.

There are still differences between audiences though, but they do not differ across geographical boundaries. Here are some contrasts that I often come across. It is especially in these situations that an outside presentation designer can help to bridge the cultural gap.

• Engineers that need to present to more sales & marketing oriented people
• Engineers that need to present to potential customers
• Founder/inventors that need to present to potential investors
• Small company that needs to present to a big trade show and/or large Fortune500 company
• Internally focused managers (production, logistics, finance) that need to present to an outside audience (M&A due diligence for example)
• Local subsidiary that needs to present to corporate headquarters
• CEO that needs to present to Wall Street analysts
• Sales Director who needs to present to distribution partners

When presenting to someone outside your typical circle of “audiences” it is important to put yourself in their shoes. Simply recycling your usual presentation is unlikely to work.

Art: Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954

Management consultants produce tons of charts that might look professional, but in most cases, they are actually not that good. (Most management consultants will admit this if you ask them).

Why does this happen?

PowerPoint is a slide design tool that can be used in many ways.

1. The tool to create beautiful keynote address slides
2. A quick canvas to jot down an analysis
3. An alternative to a word processor that is better at handling graphics, tables, and shapes

Management consultants use PowerPoint as 2. and 3., and forget to make the jump to 1. after they are done with the analysis. Most verbal presentations go OK, management consultants are usually reasonable presenters and when a horribly dense slide goes up on the screen, the explanation is usually clear.

Still, the visuals can be better, and here are some steps to clean things up based on the work I did for a management consulting client yesterday.

• Cut sentences down to the essence and leave out filler/buzz words. This is probably the biggest improvement you can make. “Value creation potential”, “customer success journeys”, “centers of excellence” you know what I mean
• Rethink the basic setup of a page. Sometimes you start of with a straw man or template: a number of rows with “category” - “elaboration” for example. After you filled out the whole thing, maybe the categories are not right, maybe you don’t need the categories because they say exactly the same thing as the elaboration.
• If you are left with some bullet points, at least make sure that they line up properly, have a small indent, and leave more than 2 words on one line
• Add movement to your slides. If there is a sequence, put the boxes in sequence. If there is an impact, use an arrow to point at something, if there is an overlap, draw a circle
• Don’t repeat the headline message in a bubble on the chart, one is enough
• Make sure all slides follow the template: headlines in the same font, in the same place, if the headline does not fit, cut words until it does, do not be tempted to reduce fonts, or go beyond the margins
• Try making shapes without box lines around them, usually colours have enough contrast. This makes the slide a lot calmer
• Clean up logo pages: use the latest ones, use high res logos, line them up properly. If things get too cluttered, make them black and white, or fall to back to just names. Not every company name needs to be expressed in a logo.

I usually spend 80% of the production section of a pitch on the problem, and 20% of the solution. That might seem an uneven balance. But in fact, these two sections are one and the same thing, they go hand in hand. The way you frame the problem, sets up the way you introduce the solution.

Image: Wikipedia

I have been working with a client on a presentation with 2 different pieces of software: she on Keynote, me on PowerPoint. She kept importing and exporting. The conversion is actually pretty accurate (a compliment to Keynote). The only glitches are in drawing guides and page numbers and the occasional font here and there.

Image by Kreg Steppe on Flickr

When you need to list a handful of companies on a presentation slide, the main visualisation people use is a logo. It always looks great. Make sure you have the latest one (they tend to change rapidly), and pick one in a nice high resolution. If the colours clash too much, consider toning them down by making them black and white.

But the alternative to the logo, is actually getting an image of the company in action. An ad on the street, the neon on the corporate headquarters (no, not the HQ reception desk), a store front, etc. Make sure you don’t have any copy right issues. I usually search for photographs on Google Image search that are “labelled for reuse” Below an example for Vodafone:

Image by Moyan Brenn on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aigle_dore/15754634911

If you need to deal with a lot of company names, there is no escaping to the logo page. My presentation app SlideMagic makes lining up lots of logos very easy. Use the black and white toggle to mute logos if the colours get too busy.

Banner image from Wikipedia

A lot of the progress of humanity boils down to improving and simplifying communication. There were huge wins when we figured out how to speak and coordinate hunting strategies, learned how to read/write/print books, speak long distance instead of taking the ocean liner, video, etc. etc.

More subtle improvements happened as well. Clear, simple language impacts the premium/position that bosses, priests, doctors, lawyers, politicians, can command. Long-winded corporate memos and formal letters made way for informal emails and now messaging to get to the point, quickly.

What we lose in style, we gain in efficiency and clarity. Gone are the beautifully hand-written letters without grammatical errors. Now we have the universal “business English” with a tiny vocabulary, full of mistakes, and pronunciation can be whatever you see fit. The English might not be perfect, or sophisticated, its meaning is crystal clear.

The same happens to corporate language. Management consultants took a first stab at making memoranda logical and structured. The exhibits in these documents slowly become more important than the written words themselves. And now presentation software/slides has become the main language in which we do business.

We need a crisp, simple, visual language to get a business concept across. Everyone can understand it, everyone can use it. That’s what I am trying to do in the presentation app SlideMagic.

Art: Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Tower of Bable, 1563

It is interesting to hear/see that when older startup companies (let’s 5 or or more years) always start with a background of the market and the company. Back in 2005, this happened, we did that, then this, then we got acquired, then this.

The audience is probably not really interested, they want to find out about today’s products or investment opportunity.

So why this habit? It is hard to change your company pitch once you have gotten used to it. Back in 2006, that intro about what happened in 2005 probably was really important to the story. In 2016, it no longer is.

Contradicting myself, this is probably not true in all cases. The company Slack, for example, was born out of a side project for team communication of a failing game development company. That’s an interesting detail to bring forward. Keep it short though.

A post for the purists today. In PowerPoint, a text box and a rectangular coloured shape with text line up the same way: you hover them across the slides and “snap” lines appear that encourage you to line things up with items above or below. To do it correctly though, you need to make a small adjustment.

A text box with a transparent background: line up the edges of the text (without padding) to the object below

A text box with a coloured background: line up the edge of the box with the item below

With my presentation app SlideMagic, you don’t have to worry about this. I remember “arguing” with my developer why this was an important feature :-)

I am experimenting with a new way to organise SlideMagic presentation templates and started adding them to www.slidemagic.com/templates. I will be adding more over the coming days. Please let me know if you have request for specific slide concepts I should add and I will see whether I can help you.

This animation (GIF alert) shows the distribution of music sales over time. Wait a few seconds and you see the pie chart changing for multiple years. This data can be represented much better by a series of stacked column charts. The animation takes too long, and the audience does not have the overview of all the years.

I copied this image from a Tweet that did not include the reference to the source.

There are other problems as well with this chart, gradients, standard Microsoft Office colours, drop shadows, small data labels, and ambiguous labelling (“Internet”, “mobile”, “video”, etc.).