SlideMagic Blog

In an earlier post, I have already declared Microsoft to be cool again, and the release of Windows 10 this week proves the point.

Microsoft products in the past looked like the inside of boring office cubicles that they were most used in. Fuzzy gradients, drop shadows, it all blended perfectly in the surroundings. That started to change with Windows 8. Windows 8 looked great but was hard to use for people that grew up with Windows since the mid 1990s. With Windows 10 Microsoft has got it right. A nice clean look, flat design, no gradients, monochrome app icons, fantastic. It looks better than OSX. (If you switch off the live tiles)

The whole operating system is built around apps and has the feel of a mobile device. The minimalist mail app can easily be set up with my gmail account (it misses some functionality though). Beautiful Twitter and Facebook apps.

Some 1990s features that I miss in OSX are still there. Windows resizing/maximizing/minimizing is more intuitive. I like the bread crumb threats when browsing through file hierarchies. While other 1990s features have gone. The messy control panel is still there, but there is now a more friendly, simpler way to access basic computer settings.

The Edge browser is great, minimalist and beautiful. Browser innovation always starts with a basic, fast browser that then gets loaded with features over time (Firefox, Chrome). Hopefully Edge stays simple.

I installed Windows 10 on top of a Parallels 10 virtual machine. The install was not yet completely smooth. Microsoft complaints that the Parallels display adaptors is not compatible. After a few hacks I managed to bypass this bottleneck, but after installing Windows 10, I see the issue. The screen resolution in some apps is not there yet. I am sure that Parallels is working hard to fix this issue. It is strange that it still pops up, Windows 10 has been released to developers for some time now.

The 14 bullet points with they key messages you want to give in a presentation is not a summary slide, it is the entire presentation.

• Those 14 points are not messages, they are pieces of content, story elements. A presentation usually has 2-3 big points that qualify as messages
• Nobody can remember 14 things
• If you cram 14 points on a summary page, you have to write them down in a way that is too short, too generic, too vague (= not interesting)
• If you discuss 14 points on a summary page, you have to spend too much time on each of them to explain things

What to do? Use the summary page to set the stage of your presentation, give a hint at an interesting, counter-intuitive, surprising conclusion, and say what it is you actually want. Then dive into the 14 story elements one by one, slide for slide, without summarising them beforehand.

So, the mistake of the 14 bullet point slide, is not the slide design. (The correct summary slide might actually consist of 3 bullet points), The mistake is the way you structured the presentation.

Art: Flaming June is a painting by Sir Frederic Leighton, produced in 1895

Fred Wilson discusses a blog post by the CEO of eShares about his fund raising experience. Let’s throw in my experience as an investor presentation designer (both for startups and VC/PE funds themselves).

• A decision in 5 minutes. Yes, most VCs will make a decision whether an investment merits deeper due diligence in 5 minutes.
  • This might actually be good news for startups. If you have a good deck, you can get to a decision without travel-meeting-travel.
  • It proves again that a 5 minute pitch is not 5 minute filled with fluffy buzzwords.
  • If the feedback from a phone call is “no”, it is probably highly unlikely that banging the VC on the head for 60 minutes in a meeting or coffee chat is going to change her mind. Better spend that energy on another investor. If you ask why, and she says “the market size” politely, coming back with 50 slides about the market size is not going to change her mind. Market size is probably not the real reason
  • That coffee chat, is actually a meeting that is further in the due diligence process: you passed the first stage (you seem to have an investable idea), now things have moved on to checking you out as a person/CEO. There is no better way to do that then a brief meeting. Even if you just talked about the weather, the investor will make up her mind about you.
• Risk-related questions are a sign that you are moving in the right direction. An interested investor is trying to figure why she should not invest in you, much better than a bored investor trying to fill the 30 minutes with asking questions why she should invest.
• Combine the above points and you can see the implication for your pitch deck: very focused, highly emotional, visual, charts to get the big idea across in a few minutes, and actually more charts for those risk-related questions, to take the obvious questions out of the investor who has bought into the basic idea.
• Investors are increasingly specialised and have a specific mental model against which they evaluate opportunities. If your business does not fit a specific model/investor profile, find a different one rather than forcing let’s say a semiconductor business into a CAC/LTV/churn SAAS spreadsheet
• One more point about the 5 minute pitch. I had client briefing meetings where I only go the point of the pitch after 45 minutes of discussion. I tried from the left, from the right, tried again, thought it was just me who was to ignorant not to see something, until finally the coin drops. Be very perceptive when someone in front of you who is willing to grant you the 45 minutes, this might just save your 5 minute pitch.

Many presentations contain updates: sales results of markets, investment return on portfolio companies, productivities of plants. If the list of markets, portfolio companies or plants gets pretty long, the presentation gets pretty boring. How to cut the boredom?

• Instead of a sequential flow (market, after market, after market) break things up and compare repeating elements of data: the sales ranking, the profit ranking, headcount ranking for each market. It is much more interesting and insightful.
• In update presentations, people feel obliged to create slides, even if there is not that much to say. Don’t. Update people about things that stand out, are counter intuitive, are really important.
• Put the factual slides as an appendix in the presentation file and leave the audience to read it.
• Cut the length of the meeting to make sure everyone is focussed on getting the updates that are really important, and can spend time on the really important decisions
• Don’t be too restrictive with the presentation template. If all the slides for all the markets look exactly the same, people get bored. Make sure the right content is covered, but each market is different and might require a slightly different visual approach.

Art: Barbara Takenaga, Forte, 2011. Acrylic on linen

Sankey diagrams can be useful to show flows.

They are tricky to make in PowerPoint. The width of the arrow needs to correspond with the value of the stream. The curves of 90 degree arrows in PowerPoint are hard to control. If there is no escaping (maybe you can create a waterfall diagram instead), I create Sankey diagrams using boxes and triangles, see the example below.

UPDATE: I have added a PowerPoint template for a Sankey diagram in the SlideMagic template store:

Art: Minard’s classic diagram of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, using the feature now named after Sankey.

Some interesting feedback from SlideMagic beta testers:

• I promised some SlideMagic beta testers to convert the presentation to PowerPoint in the end (there is not yet an automated feature that does that), and it is encouraging to see that these users are postponing that conversion again and again.
• For some clients I quickly re-do a short presentation in SlideMagic. Client response: the SlideMagic one looks better, why can’t you do that in PowerPoint? Answer 1): SlideMagic uses a pretty font, not Arial, and 2) the corporate PowerPoint template has a slightly less elegant composition of the slide (position of titles, margins etc.)
• Some clients want the templates that ship with SlideMagic in PowerPoint. After sending them, there are issues with modifying the template in PowerPoint, adjustments that take a second in SlideMagic
• Some users ask where you can upload PowerPoint slides to convert them instantly to SlideMagic, that will not be possible I am afraid.

Most users are hesitant to switch because 1) it requires changing 20 years of presentation design habits, and 2) yes I admit, SlideMagic had a few bugs that need sorting out. As we make progress with the app, that second excuse becomes less relevant. SlideMagic is slowly reaching the production release.

If you have not tried SlideMagic, you should, Try it here.

Art: Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer (painting by Richard Redgrave)

What do people read in text? Big headlines (if there are not too many of them), and tiny captions under a photo. So watch out what you put right under the image, people might read before the other beautiful things you have written down.

A screen shot from an article on TechCrunch

Art: In 1928-1929, Belgian artist René Magritte painted this piece called The Treachery of Images. Below the image of the pipe he painted the French words for “This is not a pipe.” Photo by Daryl Mitchell on Flicker

Step by step, museums are putting their entire collection of paintings online. These archives make for a great source of images: consistent in style, without copyright issues (if you go back sufficiently far in time). You won’t find stock images of smartphones though, but maybe that makes your presentation actually look better.

Here are some examples of well developed web sites:

• Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
• Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

There are still big differences in how advanced museum web sites are, but ultimately every museum will come to realise that access to their collections should not be restricted to the people who happen to be in town.

Art: View from a balcony, Gustave Caillebotte, 1880

Quantitative market research companies come back with pages and pages and pages of data in PowerPoint. It is tempting to cut and paste to “add the survey results in the presentation”. Not so fast, let’s clean things up first.

1. Find out what the research actually says. This is the most important step. There is meaning in 2 levels. Level 1 is to discover what trends the data displays (not always obvious from a randomly generated bar chart or a dense table of numbers). Then level 2: is this an important insight? A segmentation or cut is not always meaningful, sometimes data points do not actually vary that much. Sometimes conclusions are obvious / not surprising, not interesting.
2. Ask for access to the original research data in a spreadsheet to find patterns, trends that have not been put in the final report of the research company
3. Clean up the graphs you want to use (or even better, create them from scratch with just the data you need):
   1. Move non-essential statistical lingo/jargon/details in small print to the foot note: n values, standard deviations, etc. etc. are not worth the screen real estate in a stand up presentation. The person who wants to read them, will find them in the foot note. (Exception: certain scientific disciplines where one statistical value is all that matters, in that case make a very prominent chart with just that value.)
   2. Cut non-essential filler words from the data series labels, think as if you were writing headlines for a newspaper article or blog post. Simplify questions that were asked to respondents, put the original questions in the footnote or in an appendix chart.
   3. Re-sort data series to match the point you want to make.
   4. Take out tick marks, make bars/columns fatter, take out Excel labels and titles, and insert your own in PowerPoint/Keynote, round numbers, fix chart colours to match your corporate colour scheme
   5. Where necessary, add circles or arrows to highlight the point you want to make. Adjust the colours to emphasise your points (apply accent colours correctly)

A decade ago, a company’s look & feel could be tightly controlled by the corporate communications department, with tight brand guidelines and consistently executed print advertising.

Today that design capability is fragmenting: PowerPoint presentations, product PDFs, web pages, mobile apps. Design is everywhere. Especially in large corporates that span multiple countries/continents it becomes hard to find what the corporate language actually is.

When in doubt, I revert to the corporate web page to get inspiration for a PowerPoint design.

Art: Gerard van Honthorst, The Concert, 1623