SlideMagic Blog

The team introduction page in a presentation is always a tricky one. Some much information (text) that can be shown, so many logos, so many pictures. How to make it all fit?

First of all, it is important to realise that team introduction slides do not equal CVs. They are not meant to provide the full background of someone’s career, rather you want to present specific strong points of your team.

Things you can cut: personal interests, not every bio needs to cover every year of someone’s career (unlike HR people that are always on the look out for holes), academic degrees if they are no longer that relevant (i.e., the person is older than 35). Job descriptions usually have very long titles (that makes them look more important). In your team slide, you need to do the opposite cut them down to save space.

Before you design your team introduction page, think about what it needs to say, and plan your design accordingly:

• We worked at big blue chip companies before: put the logos of the big blue chip companies on the page (and leave other logos out)
• We worked at the same companies: put the logos of these same companies multiple times on the slide (next to each team member’s name), this repetition will drive the message home
• We did something really amazing at a company no one has ever heard of: leave the logos out, go for a more elaborate text description
• We have lots of experience with lots of companies: fill the page with logos, even if they are not that well-known
• We worked at an amazing company that no one outside country [x] knows: forget about the logo, add explanation about that company

This visualisation is brilliant. I have never thought about using columns in a column chart as domino pieces. One to add to your repertoire of visual tricks and let’s hoop that this doom’s day scenario does not play out.

TechCrunch blogger Mike Butcher wrote an interesting blog post about how to pitch to tech journalists/bloggers. It is well worth a read (below are his slides that convey a similar message from 2012).

Like VCs/investors, tech journalists are overloaded with inbound pitches. There are similarities in the way you should pitch them:

• Get straight to the point, cut the fluff/small talk
• Give more or less the full info the 1st time around, no “can I send you some more information”
• Be concise and clear what your project does and why it is great

There are differences though with investors:

• Exclusivity (breaking a story first) is really important to journalists, so blasting your news out to 100 people is not going to make it more attractive
• Journalists really want something to be news (dah), something that the world has never seen/heard before, investors are looking for the big returns, even if it is an old idea that is recycled
• Big $ fundraising is seen as validation by journalists, investors probably care less (at least the good ones who can spot a rough diamond before everyone else)
• Journalists might not have the in-depth technical knowledge as a highly specialised VC (an early stage medical device investor), and like to compare/contrast companies and technologies to the ones they know (competitors).
• He loves plain text and hates PDFs/attachments. This partial because of practical reasons (mobile devices, copying quotes), but also - I suspect - the journalists are actually used to digesting written/verbal communication and less used to digesting visual slides (hypothesis).
• The world of tech journalism is changing. In the early days TechCrunch used to be all about startup discovery, now there are increasingly other news sources that plays this role (Product Hunt for example). Mike says he is increasingly interested in deeper, background stories. So putting your pitch into the context of an overall trend that is happening might make it more interesting to publish.

Recently, I have changed the first presentation that appears when people sign up for the beta version of my presentation design app SlideMagic. If you are an existing beta tester, you can still access it in the templates folder of SlideMagic, or you can clone the presentation by clicking this link. I hope it helps you get the most of SlideMagic:

• Importing and cloning template slides
• Working with the grid including images and data charts
• Formatting cells in one go, rather than one after the other

A technical post about PowerPoint templates today.

When you copy the slides of one PowerPoint presentation into another one, the copied slides get formatted according to the template of the presentation your are copying in. Colours and fonts get adjusted. But the most surprising things happen with text placeholders.

The template I typically use is pretty simple: a blank page with text placeholders for the slide title and footnote to make sure they are anchored in a consistent place across slides. Now the strange thing happens. Because the footnote is the only text placeholder available, PowerPoint starts copying text into the footnote.

To accommodate clients who want to use my template after the presentation design project is over, I now add a plain text box to my template slides. Here is the key thing, make sure that plain text box is the first text place holder you create, that’s where copied text will go. (In other words, remove the footnote, put the text box in, recreate the footnote place holder after that).

If you often experience problems with inconsistent formatting of presentations and the issues with copying slides across you will appreciate the way I designed my presentation app SlideMagic (sign up for the beta here).

• One slide layout grid for all presentations, everything lines up perfectly, always
• No need for template programming
• It is not possible to corrupt a template and having it slowly propagate throughout your company
• Changing the look & feel of a presentation is easy: change your logo and accent colour and you are done (including bar and column charts, try that in PowerPoint)

Not every image that is used in advertising has a functional objective. Take fashion ads, for example, sometimes the product is missing all together.

1. Images that show something highly specific: a product, a medical condition, a location
2. Images that show a relevant scene or background: people tapping on their mobile phone, a driver in a traffic jam, calm bamboo forest, a sunset
3. Images that make a visual metaphor: a prisoner in a cage, a cat chasing a mouse
4. Images that just set the mood of the presentation

I use 1. and 4. more, and 2. and 3. less because they often lead to visual cliches.

Art: “[Self-Portrait, Yawning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ducreux#/media/File:Joseph_Ducreux_(French_-_Self-Portrait,_Yawning_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)” by Joseph Ducreux, 1783

The films by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tennenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel among others) have a very distinct visual style. This blog highlights colour patterns of selected scenes. Nice inspiration for your presentation if you like light pastel colours.

Presentations grow over time, stuff gets added over months, years, often by different users/designers.

• The company started with 2 products, and these 2 products - at the time - seemed like a natural way to structure the story. Now with 7 products that story gets a bit boring. Maybe we need a different presentation structure all together?
• In the beginning the company had 15 customers which we could nicely lay out on a page, now our 100+ customer list becomes a pain to maintain. Maybe we just show a map with countries where we have customers?
• When we just moved in, we were really proud of our office and that big picture showed it. Five years later, having an office is not something that merits a slide.
• In the beginning, the company was equal to its 2 founders. Now that 15-person team slide on page 3 seems a bit out of place.

When it is time to mow the lawn, do it.

Art: Vincent van Gogh, Patch of Grass, 1887

In big, multinational corporations, many projects follow this pattern:

1. Templates with extensive data request is sent out to all relevant business units weeks/months in advance
2. One week before the meeting the chasing for data starts
3. At the last minute, business units merge pages of filled out templates with existing presentation material (Frankensteining)
4. At the in-person gathering, each business unit representative goes through page, by page, by page, by bullet, by bullet. Everyone is physically, but not mentally presentation (doing email, walking in and out to take calls until…
5. …only at the very end the hot issue that has been hanging in the room comes out and becomes the subject of a heated debate while time is running out.

You don’t need the reading out aloud of data templates (people can read for themselves), but you do need a good structure to guide that heated group discussion. The time that people are together is better spent with identifying options and listing pros and cons.

Art: Argument over a Card Game, by Jan Steen, 17th century

If you are pitching a healthcare IT business to a healthcare IT investor, she has probably seen hundreds of pitches of healthcare IT companies. If you are pitching a mobile content service to a mobile operator, she has probably seen hundreds of pitches by other mobile content providers. If your pitching an IT solution to a RFP evaluation team, they are likely to have invited more (similar) companies to pitch.

• Check whether you need to invest time in presenting industry background. If you are number 50, others probably have covered that ground (no need to preach to the converted)
• Don’t make up facts about the competition, the audience might have invited them before you and heard the actual information first hand
• Use most of the time in the meeting to emphasise how you are different from all the other ones.

Art: Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski (1849–1915)  The lone Wolf