SlideMagic Blog

Many of my clients start our conversation with a request for a “super slick” presentation. I think “slick” is not the most important requirement of a business presentation. I usually go for a restrained, professional look. Here is why too much slickness might backfire:

• Nobody trusts a smooth talking politician or car salesman. Super slick graphics might just give the impression that there is something to hide.
• Spectacular moving visual effects might just make the audience giggle, because it sort seems out of place for the setting of a small conference room presentation
• Complex graphics create technical and practical problems. They take a lot of space making it harder to share documents, videos often go wrong in live presentations, breaking the flow/momentum of a pitch, custom-made graphics are hard to edit and change (presentations are living creations that change all the time), fonts always create problems when they are not installed properly
• “The cliff”: often I see incredibly sophisticated presentation starts (slide, 1, 2, 3), but pages 4 to 50 look incredibly boring with standard bullet point slides.
• Often the key to a pitch is not a dramatic trend, but a small, clever innovation that makes you stand out. Investing a lot of time (and money) in visualising a mega trend that is already pretty obvious to everyone (“facebook is big” for example) is a waste of effort and takes the attention away from the really important point in your presentation

“Slick” does not always help to make your message clear.

This may sound like a link bait title, but there is a lot of useful stuff buried in the archives of my blog that is there free for you to use. Click the “3 dots” at the top right of the site to access a drop down menu with more options. Among them:

• A searchable archive of blog posts since 2008
• Places to find free images for presentations
• Other presentation design resources

And of course there is the full version of my book about presentation design that can be accessed free of charge.

Art: Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still-Life of Books, 1628

It is hard to nail down why good design looks good, and poor design does not. We see it, but articulating why, it is hard. A good designer has an “eye” for design (a combination of talent and experience) to make things just look right.

Having said that, here are some of the things to pay attention to.

• Layout along a grid, everything is spaced out, lines up
• Restraint:
  • Colours, not too many
  • White space, have the courage to leave things blank
  • Font sizes, maybe smaller is better than screaming big, if it adds white space to the page
• Limited number of words per line (10 points text on a 16:9 slide spanning the entire width does not read very well) and carefully selected line breaks
• Nice images that set the right mood (avoid cliche stock images)
• Use vertical positioning as well as horizontal ones (a different way of saying there are more slide compositions than lists)
• People thought about every word, sentence, shape on the page. Changed it, repositioned it. Changed it again. Good slides very rarely come out right in the first iteration.

All the above can be found in any design book. We read it, we understand it, and still when opening a PowerPoint template when we are back at work, we ignore pretty much all the rules.

A good exercise could be to make one slide (just one), look exactly like a poster designed by a Swiss graphic designer from the 1960s that you like, or maybe like a slide that Steve Jobs used once. Push yourself really hard until the style is identical. You will be surprised by the amount of changes you need to apply to your design.

Founders tend to cut out slides about the technology of a startup in an investor presentation. Too detailed, too difficult, they (potential investors) won’t understand.

But I usually push back. In early stage startups, the technology is actually almost the only asset the company has. And, every technology, yes every technology can be explained and understood (it is a presenter problem, not an audience problem). Believing that you can’t might also cause huge offense with your potential investor.

And there is the opportunity to show how clever your platform is. Here are some steps that I usually take when presenting technology to investors:

• Find out what bits are interesting, innovative, and what bits are not. In IT for example, there is usually some process: we load the data, we do this to it, then store it there, sync it here. But usually, one of these steps is the clever one. An approach to an algorithm nobody has taken before for example.
• Dive really deep into the interesting bits, and leave everything else at a higher level. Invent, show a case example where your technology comes up wit something counter intuitive, unexpected.
• Quantify, make it tangible where possible. If this is big data, show how much data you need to process.
• Clean up diagrams (architectures, process flows), re size boxes, align them on a grid, group things that belong together, use colours. You will notice that even the most complicated architectures can be visualised in a simple way. Listen to how the “technical guy” talks you through his diagrams. Often it will be completely different from what is on the slide. Ditch the existing visual diagram and visualise the verbal one.

I saw this pie chart in the presentation below (full of interesting Internet stats). It is interesting to extent the chart into its own background. It is easy to recreate with some triangles and rectangles, you need to fiddle a bit with the angles of the triangles to get it right.

Here is the full presentation in case you are interested:

Art: Still Life with Turkey Pie, 1627, Pieter Claesz

Based on many requests, we deployed the ability to create arrows in SlideMagic. You will notice a more elaborate user interface when working with connector objects. Try them out and let me know what you think.

Art: Guido Reni, Reclining Venus with Cupid, 1639

Five years after the iPad launch let’s take a step back and see what is actually happening in the world of presentation software and the use of mobile devices. My observations are based on the people I see around me everyday: startup employees (mostly mid 30s to 40s) and staff in big corporates (a bit older).

• Designing. Apple has made a big inroad in terms of hardware, but it is still PowerPoint that runs on a laptop machine that is the preferred set up to create slides. I have not encountered anyone who uses a mobile device to do this. Apple Keynote is pretty much still a niche application.
• Frankensteining / finding stuff. Cloud-based file systems can be confusing to use. I still do not understand exactly what happens when Keynote on iPad tells me it is converting a regular Keynote file. In practice, the file system that everyone is using is… the email inbox and sent box. People with gmail can find stuff faster than Outlook users.
• Viewing. Yes, more and more, people use their mobile devices to view a presentation. And it is not the iPad, a tablet, it is the mobile phone, where people squint to see what is in the slides. These are investors looking at a pitch deck, these are managers/superiors proving input on a slide. Think about it, this might be a more important audience for your slides than the ones sitting in conference room.
• Emergency edits. Still laptop, although a tablet could work here, few people use it in a corporate setting.
• Coffee chat, 1 on 1. Mostly laptop, I see fewer iPad/tablets than I saw 1-2 years ago.
• Conference room. Laptop. The crappy VGA projector is being replaced by crappy LCD screens. Presentations that look beautiful on your retina display, look absolutely horrible on an LCD screen with poor resolution and overly bright settings. (Test, test, test). Advanced meeting rooms now allow you to airplay your presentations into the screen. People use their laptops to do this, not their mobile devices.
• Big keynote. Conference laptop with a memory stick plugged in.

The other day I had a frank discussion with a client. Usually, when an investor does not believe you, she might ask a polite clarification question, leave some hints in her body language, but most of the times, probably move on.

When preparing the pitch, we can be more frank. The answers to the “I don’t believe you” point were as follows.

• Repeat the description of what the system can do one more time. But I understand that that is what the system is supposed to do, I just don’t believe it can deliver.
• Remind me of the credibility founder. Yes, the track record of the entrepreneur is very impressive, and no, I have not doubted a single second that there was an issue with the management team. I am just suspicious that the technology cannot deliver what it promises.
• State that my question is really, really easy to address, but that I fail to understand the big questions that I should be asking: how to make money of this. (And then the second question is answered, not the first one).

Answer the investor’s question, even if you think it is not a smart one, or the right one. If not answered, you will have had a nice meeting, but blocked the door to the next step in the due diligence process.

Text: “[The Ghent Altarpiece - Singing Angels (detail)](“Jan van Eyck - The Ghent Altarpiece - Singing Angels (detail) - WGA07642” by Jan van Eyck (circa 1390–1441) - Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_van_Eyck_-_The_Ghent_Altarpiece_-_Singing_Angels_(detail)_-_WGA07642.jpg#/media/File:Jan_van_Eyck_-_The_Ghent_Altarpiece_-_Singing_Angels_(detail)_-_WGA07642.jpg)” by Jan van Eyck (circa 1390–1441)

Some presentations stay in use for years. The designer has made small updates to slides, but overall the document has not changed. While the slides are more or less the same, the story probably has moved on.

Signs that this is the case:

• The presenter puts the first slide on, and then runs the entire presentation without clicking to the next slide
• The presenter discounts every slide, “what this slide really should say is [this] and [that]”
• The presenter skips through the presentation

If this is happening, it is time to let go of the presentation and create a new one from scratch. A fresh presentation that follows the narrative of your latest story.

I tried doing this the other day, but when asked for feedback, I got the old presentation back with bullet point added here and there, because “it was more familiar to edit” than the new one. I am going to push back.

I design probably around 100 presentations per year and over the past decade or so there have been a few projects (out of 1000+) where it did not work out between me and the client.

• The biggest one: the story was actually not that compelling. Even the best design effort can turn a poor story into a great one
• The client insisting on very remote, forced, unnatural visual analogies.
• The client insisting on overly “spectacular” animations and graphics (1. I think they do not add anything to the story, the opposite is probably true, and 2. they are hard to do in PowerPoint).
• Not being at the core of the design process, when you are 2-3 steps away from another team that is writing the story and designing slides.

Art: Escape from the ‘Luxborough Galley’, John Cleveley the Elder, 1760