SlideMagic Blog

If you find yourself interrupting your story flow repeatedly at a certain point in your presentation, it is probably time to review the story line. Why not create visuals that support that important breaking point in the presentation?

Most story flows start with a logical sequence/structure, but sometimes we find out in the dialogue with the audience that they are missing an important piece of data or background early on in the story. After 10 runs of the presentation, and 10 questions, we pre-empt the question the 11th time.

Break the logic to build the story.

Art: Vincent van Gogh, The Bridge of Langlois at Arles with a lady with umbrella, 1888

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Should you include a video in your investor presentation or sales presentation? “Video” is a very generic term for different types of videos. Whether you need them depends on your specific situation.

• An quick capture of a spontaneous 1-2 minute pitch can be a great way to convey your idea in a conversational style. In front of the camera, people are much more focussed and to the point than in a regular presentation setting. In case of an investor pitch, a short video can give a potential investor a good first impression of the management team without the need to schedule a face-to-face meeting
• A 1-2 minute cartoon or product commercial is a lot more expensive and time consuming to make. If you use talented cartoonists and/or actors, a video can be a much more effective way to get your message across than via slides. Consider it when you can use the video for multiple occasions, your presentations, but also online to share it with a very large audience. Unlike slides, videos are very hard to change, so you need to have your messages completely nailed before you commit your investment. Some videos however make a point that could easily have been made in 2 simple slides. These types of videos give the best ROI when there is an unexpected twist or slightly or a slightly more complicated story to tell.
• Costumer feedback is great to capture on camera. A “live” reaction of a real person is so much more impactful than a boring quote full of buzzwords on a slide. Customer interviews are not very expensive to make.
• Some technologies require complicated 3 dimensional visualisations, very hard to do in presentation slides, very easy to do in a video. In many startups, these videos get used over a long period of time. To protect your investment, make the video as clean as possible without audio, or text and typography. You can still use your video when the story changes a bit. I use these clean videos a lot as sources of high resolution screenshots. Instead of showing the full clip, I take 3-5 screen shots and add comment boxes on slides.
• Videos can be great to explain a problem and the corresponding solution if the props are a bit hard to bring to a meeting (nuclear reactor cleaning material for example).

I tend to look at it as a new business communication design language. When you give people simple building blocks they end up doing great things with it. Look at Lego. Look at Twitter. Constraints actually drive creativity.

I can see the confirmation that it works in the behaviour beta users. Advanced designers who are looking for the most advanced features miss certain functionality (but hey, check out that automatic light to dark background conversion). Some people are confused by the user interface which is radically different (read much more simple) than PowerPoint. But the user who makes a first effort to go through the dip and actually makes a presentation for real is hooked.

I could have written a book, created a training program, but I thought I would never get the reach that a web based tool could give. Hence the presentation design app SlideMagic.

So the ambition is not to remove PowerPoint from corporate desktops, it is bigger than that. The ambition is to change the way people talk to each other in business.

Art: Rene Magritte, La trahison des images, 1928–29, Image credit: Nad Renrel on Flickr.

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When a small startup wants to sell to a giant corporate, the startup’s financial stability (or rather, lack of it) is often a big stumbling block. Spending slide after slide in your sales presentation about how financially stable and well-funded you are might just give the opposite impression. Maybe it is better to act and behave like a grown up company and the big corporate might just believe you (or “forget” that they are working with a fragile company).

Art: Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle,1888

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The moment you click to a new slide, you will lose the connection with your audience for a moment.

• Reading bullet point 1, 2, 3, and 4
• Whoo, that is a pretty girl there in that picture, the colour of her sweater does not match her bag though.
• Is that graph sales in billions? No, growth in percentages. OK
• Why are these boxes not aligned? On purpose?

For a well-designed slide, this disconnect only lasts a few seconds. You glance at the visual, get the point, and move your attention back to the speaker.

But even for well-designed charts, I have heard the speaker going off track. The slide gets put up, and the speaker starts with an anecdote or a story (as every presentation expert is preaching to you to do), but there is a disconnect between the story and the visual. The audience is trying to make the connection between the blue square on the slide, and your anecdote involving 2 swans you saw when you were a child.

The solution is simple: quickly explain the big point of your slide (that blue square), and then feel free to wander of with your personal story.

Art: Rembrandt, Self portrait, 1630

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The way I work with files is changing:

• I stop organising downloads in carefully structured folder trees. If I need that bit of information again, I will find it again through search, or simply by sorting things chronologically. A time-based filing methods works actually pretty good over the course of 1 month
• I use screen shots to move images between applications, rather than finding the image, importing, converting, resizing it.
• For projects I am currently working on I create a folder that I pin to the left hand bar of the Finder (Apple’s file manager), once the project is done the folder gets unpinned and disappears in the hard drive somewhere, only to be found via search.

Dropbox and Apple are trying to get me to give up version management by enabling file history. I do not use these features and use “save as” to create a new restore point for files, very 1990s.

Art: Carl Spitzweg, The Bookworm, 1851

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Typographers had big debates when Apple launched the first iPads and iPhones with retina displays (“Retina” is the marketing name for a screen with such a high pixel density that your eyes cannot see individual pixels anymore). Retina displays are obviously different from low resolution screens, but - as the typographers discovered - are also different from paper/print.

I now see similar issues with large retina monitors. A traditional PowerPoint presentation with an Arial or Calibri font looks somehow off. You need lighter, thinner, crisper fonts. Macs have Helvetica light installed, but Windows machines not. Drop shadows look “dirty”. Outlines around boxes look too heavy.

My guess is that Microsoft will fix the font issue in upcoming releases of Windows and Office products. But, if we fix the issue for computer screens, we are still left with this huge install base of crappy VGA overhead projectors in corporate conference rooms that never get replaced…

If you are working on a really important, one off, presentation find out about the screen you are going to present on and test your design.

Art: Vincent van Gogh, Starry night, drawing, 1889

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They are different. The audience will put more value on:

• Entertainment value (“stunning” slides, unusual props, presentation style)
• Emotional connection to your business idea (not-for-profit ideas do well)
• Emotional connection to the speaker (is she sympathetic, an underdog taking on big bad forces in the world)
• Whether they actually remember you after a long morning of pitches (most of the audience will not take notes)

The professional audience will put more value on the business potential of your idea.

Focus on the objective: winning the pitch competition, which is different than receiving a cheque.

Art: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Police Verso, 1872

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The cover page of a presentation is an important page. It sits on the projector as the audience walks in the room. It is featured in the thumbnail of an email attachment. It sets the look and feel of your presentation.

Many clients want to have a cover page that says it all. A perfect image that reflects the entire story. In the absence of this image (99% of the cases), they want to do the next best thing: make a collage of smaller images that together tell the story.

I think it is better to pick just one, imperfect, image as a cover page. A collage of tiny images without explanation does not mean anything to the audience, and looks very cluttered. If people could get your message by just looking at a picture collage for 15 seconds, there would be no need for your presentation?

Art: David Teniers, The art collection of Leopold, 1651

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Presentations have become incredibly important in business:

• It is harder to stand out to sell stuff. Fifty years ago, people would buy products from local, familiar suppliers. Now companies buy from suppliers across the globe.
• The amount of new ideas is proliferating. Fifty years ago, you learned how your industry works and then spent 40 years working in it. Now, technology and creatively linking multiple disciplines give an endless flow of new business concepts that need explaining.
• Good presenters get promoted in big corporates, good presenters manage to get funding fro their startups. Presenting is a key career skill.

Presentation design needs to be incorporated in the curriculum and include elements from traditional courses:

1. Art, drawing, photography, typography
2. Data visualisation (mathematics, economics, science)
3. Psychology
4. Literature, (story) writing
5. Computer skills
6. Acting

I can see that it is hard to implement drastic changes in the curriculum of schools. One solutions is to give students one big presentation project throughout the year, and have them work on it during lessons of existing classes (mathematics, economics, art, etc.).

I have worked with 15-16 year olds (as part of the MEET program here in Israel) and discovered that these kids - free of historical baggage of bullet points - are actually pretty good at designing bold visual slides. What needs work is the basics of pitching a business idea, and presentation delivery skills.

Art: Charles Hunt, Children acting the ‘Play Scene’ from “Hamlet,” Act II, Scene ii, 1863