SlideMagic Blog

I noticed that many of the pitches I have been designing recently follow this kind of narrative:

• [Something] has been going on for ages
• It is hard to understand that with all technological progress we still have to do [this], [this] way
• Well, there is a good reason for, because until now it was not possible to get [this] right
• Enter [company] that for the first time can offer [this] and [that] at the same time
• This is not as easy as it sounds: for example look how hard it is to do [this]
• It is not hard to see why in a couple of years, everyone who used [this] will now be using [that]

After this, the more standard “about” section follows with information about the company, the product economics, financials, team, etc. etc.

Art: Vincenzo Campi, The Fruit Seller, 1580

The majority of business presentations are not TED Talks, are not major product launches, are not State of the Unions. Corporations automate and simplify many processes: accounting, HR, planning. These non-critical “presentations” are the glue/oil on which corporate middle management runs. Decision making and deal making is done around endless iterations of confusing and boring PowerPoint decks because we do not have time (see the irony) or are not in the same place to communicate directly and clearly and sort things out on the spot. Asking for another version of a PowerPoint deck and a meeting next week is the most convenient form of procrastination.

My presentation app SlideMagic (sign up to try it) has been created to kill this inefficiency and give everyone a simple tool to create good enough, decently designed business documents that can be created in an instant, freeing up time to do more interesting and important things.

Here are 2 types of internal corporate documents and reasons why you spend too much time creating them, and the audience is spending too much time decoding them.

• Big decision trade offs. The audience wants to understand what the options are and a clear set of pros and cons (preferably quantified and comparable) to make a decision. And, yes, they want to know which option you prefer. You write endless pages with market context, general trends, project team history, description of the work, without getting to the point.
• M&A deals. Consultants produce endless amount of pages with company backgrounds, company history, description of assets. While the buy side is out to make a DCF valuation model. It needs to understand what the basic business units are, how the economics of the business work, and how to think about forecasting things in the future. Maybe you should not write down a generic business description, but instead create a document that spoon feeds assumptions for a valuation model.

Social media is full of inspirational quotes, and some of them make their way into business presentations as well. I am not a big fan of them. A few nice ones from Quartz:

“By maturing, we self-actualize.” “We dream, we vibrate, we are reborn.” “Choice is the driver of purpose.”

And now there is research that found a negative correlation between people who like these quotes and IQ (it looks genuine).

When are quotes useful in presentations?

• When they are relevant to what you are talking about
• When they are given by someone with credibility
• When they have a nice, unexpected, twist or contradiction
• When they are not cliche
• When they are easy to read/digest (most of the time, this means short)

It is not very often that you find one that matches all these criteria.

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

Image: The book of nonsense by Edward Lear

Many of you are requesting PowerPoint conversions of the templates that ship with SlideMagic. You will see that the conversion works nicely, but that it is inconvenient to make structural slide edits in the PowerPoint version of the file, doing them in SlideMagic is much easier.

If you want to check out how converted SlideMagic presentations look, I have put the files all in this shared Google Drive folder.

In every client project, I try to get rid of the dreaded summary page in front of the presentation. Instead, I give a very clear description of what we are actually talking about, and a teaser of what the presentation is going to show.

Here is a check list of things I regularly see on first pages.

• It is written in font size 8, in looooong sentences that stretch over the screen (especially on 16:9 wide screens)
• It is an invitation to tell the entire story (too detailed for a summary, but not detailed enough to cover the content correctly)
• It is written in chronological order, then we did this, then we did that, then we did this, rather than an order that makes sense to the audience
• The same point / bit of information is repeated multiple times
• It is loaded with quantitative data, but because of the text format, this data is impossible to understand / relate to each other
• It contains dry information, and no encouragement what so ever to be excited about the content that is going to follow
• It is full of values, mission statements, generic trends, buzzwords and other vague concepts that are context, rather than the core of your idea
• It is full of details (number of employees, founding year, etc.) that are not a crucial part of the “summary” of your story
• It has sub bullets, and worse bullets that have just 1 sub bullet hanging below it. It uses different font sizes for the main bullets, and the sub bullets. Bullets are not properly intended, (space space space space)

We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way.

If you have to repeat it that often, people might just think you are.

Image source

1. The curse of knowledge, you are so deep in the material that you:
   • Cannot see anymore what points of your story are obvious to an audience, and which points are not (and vice versa, which points are difficult to understand while you think they are very clear
   • Cannot see anymore which details are important / add flavour to the story, and which details are tangents that lead to nowhere
2. You probably hang on to a story structure that you designed for your first presentation a long time ago. Your company and your story has moved on, but your slide deck has not.

Art: Franz Marc, Die großen blauen Pferde (The Large Blue Horses), (1911)

Lining up a data chart and a table in PowerPoint or Keynote is very tricky. And that is a shame, because it is one of the most useful compositions to present data. Just tables, and you cannot really see the trends. Just data charts, and it all becomes cluttered.

I took the data from an earlier blog post and quickly turned it into a combined table/data chart. You can clone the slides I create in presentation app SlideMagic into your own SlideMagic account by clicking this link.

The first layer of the image in an image is what it is about, a tree, a house, a car. The second layer though is what general mood it evokes. Even if your images depict the right thing, somehow they do not feel right, and it is hard to pin down why. Here is a check list, I am exaggerating on purpose.

• Cheesy, tacky, not real, fake people
• Something aggressive, violent, scary
• Things are gross, ugly, not pretty, repulsive
• A bit too racy
• Girly, cutesy, childish
• Dark, somber (including colours)
• A closed, trapped setting
• College humour that is actually not really funny
• Cliche: ice bergs, dominos,

I am exaggerating on purpose. That image of the apple pie is probably not “gross”, but subconsciously, there is something not tasty about it. The image of the solider is not violent, but somehow a military association sets the wrong tone of the presentation.

The opposite is also true. The best images can uplift your mood and somehow makes your feel right. Images can set your mood pretty much like a painting / piece of art can.

If your image does not feel right, it probably is not right.

Sometimes I get the strangest support questions by users of my [presentation app SlideMagic](http://Mobile/tablet apps all look very cute but it is often incredibly difficult to find the most obvious functions.). Obviously, the user did not explore the help pages, or did not try out all the menu options, or did not understand the philosophy behind SlideMagic. Initially, I felt like pointing that out. Now I figured out that it is my problem, not the user’s.

User interface is entering an interesting phase. Mobile/tablet apps all look very cute but it is often incredibly difficult to find the most obvious functions. Desktop/laptop applications have become so bloated that obvious functions are hard to find, or are still in places “because they have always been there for the past 10 years” to serve the large install base of users. Every time I set up a new presentation, or create a new slide in PowerPoint I find myself doing a large number of repeat clicks (by now at incredible speed) that basically do very simple things (creating and aligning a grid of boxes for example).

I keep on trying to get it right.

Art: Vladimir Makovsky, Teacher Visiting a Village, 1897