SlideMagic Blog

Entrepreneurs are often so deep into their own story that they leave the supporting visuals for some of the most fundamental points of their business idea out of the presentation. “Oh, why Amazon would not do this? Well, I have a great story to tell that I usually do verbally when displaying the agenda page.”

Stories are great, verbal explanations without visuals are great, BUT. My two arguments why it might be a good idea to back up your story with visuals (in particular relevant for an investor presentation):

1. You want people to remember your story, and a big bold visual might help anchor the idea in the mind of your audience. The visual does not necessarily have to explain the idea, it should just trigger the memory when you bring up that story of the banana peel back up 3 weeks later.
2. The argument for going further than a visual anchor point is that you often lose control of what happens to your file with slides after you have emailed it to an investor. It gets forwarded to partners in the firm, industry experts, etc. Just in case, it is a good idea that someone who did not sit in the room still can understand the idea behind your business.

The other day I had a potential client on the phone who was under time pressure. She asked me whether I could work on the structure/framework of the presentation (and the template) while in parallel they would start filling things in.

When you start a project and need to cut up work among multiple team members, a skeleton or presentation framework can be really helpful: someone works on the market, someone works on the competition, while someone else takes on the financials.

When you get to the stage where you have to present your conclusions to others (i.e., the analytical work is done), putting structure before content is wrong. As a presentation designer you need to know the content first, translate that into a story, and in the process you come up with a structure which is engaging and convincing, a structure that often will deviate from business school presentation templates, consulting pyramid structures and other logical frameworks.

Problem solving: structure first, then content. Convincing: content first, then structure.

People want to be helpful in giving feedback on your presentation, and often when you send a draft to an experienced executive she will say to cut it down to 8 slides. She sat in far too many boring meetings where eager young managers try to pitch ideas with endless and endless pages of bullet point slides. She probably has not read the content of your slides, and just looked at the page count.

We have discussed many times that a 50 page visual presentation can be presented in the same time as an 8 page bullet point deck, but there is something else here.

A bullet point deck can easily be compressed: reduce font size and combine 2 slides into 1. With carefully designed visual slides, this approach will not work. The moment you start cutting and combining, you are back in bullet point land.

Instead of agreeing page count, agree the time you have to present the story.

In presentations, clear and stunning are not the same thing. I have seen many stunning infographics that are not clear at all. And more importantly, it is perfectly possible to make a clear and convincing business presentations without stunning visual effects.

Especially in business presentations, people often want to go for stunning first, and commission expensive graphics design or video creation work. It is wiser to hold of with this until you have a simple presentation that 1) makes it clear what you want (touch the head) (believe me, I have seen many presentations that do not even pass this hurdle) and 2) convinces people to do something (touches the heart).

The audience does not see the difference between 4 consecutive slides with different images, or 1 slides with 4 consecutive image build up, so there is no point in trying to cut slides by consolidating 4 images into one. Four slides are easier to edit, and four separate slides are easier to email as PDF.

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has put 400,000 super high resolution images of their collection online, free to use. Great for use in presentations.

The new Keynote creates files that look like a single file on a Mac, but on other machine appear as a folder with multiple files in them. This has implications for online file sharing:

• Gmail: emailing a Keynote file as attachment does not work
• Box: file syncing, or sharing a download link does not work
• Dropbox: seems to have fixed the issue.

Has anyone had issues or is it just me?

Aspect ratios, dots per inch, file formats and conversions, forgetting where you saved that file, these are all problems that are disrupting my creative workflow. More and more I just work with screen shots. If the image looks sharp on my big 27" monitor, I crop it as I want it, and use it in my presentation. It could have been a JPG, a PNG, a web page, a PDF document, a Keynote file, it does not matter. CMD-SHIFT-4- and “click”, done.

The behaviour of the green + button at the top left of a window is unpredictable. I found out that option-clicking it will maximise the window to the full screen, every time, completely predictable, at last for non-Apple software (Keynote does not play along).

This has probably all to do with Apple’s full screen mode, the two arrows at the top right side of the screen. I use it rarely because this feature does not work very well with multiple monitors.

The presentation creation and sharing app Bunkr has not appeared on my radar screen until recently. The company raised EUR 1m in a recent fund raising round. In the not too distant future, I am becoming a player in the market myself, so I am watching developments with interest.

I clicked around a little bit in the application and here is my impression. Things I like:

• Snappy, fast, clean user interface
• Nice intelligent rulers to snap your objects against
• Social technology integration (Disqus comments on slides)
• Online image search integration (Google images, Flickr), but watch those usage rights
• Easy sharing and embedding
• Different objects for titles and paragraphs, not just a text box
• No bullet point template when you create a new slide

My main comment is, is that all PowerPoint alternatives in the market, still stick with the same fundamental approach to slide design and drawing on a computer screen that has been around since the 1980s. And that is the problem I am trying to solve 24/7, and it is not easy…