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If that is your message, you can write the sentence “There are 45 applications” with a cutely formated 45 on a background of a stunning image. The other solution is to write out the applications in 45 boxes that are nicely spaced out over the page. The latter solution is more cluttered, but actually makes the point in a more convincing way.
Related to Monday‘s post, there is another way to use a poor quality data chart image in your slide. Crop out all text elements (axis labels, footers, titles, etc.) until you are just left with the lines/bars/columns themselves. Set the background color of your slide to the same color as the image and manually recreate the text labels (if necessary, many graph images contain huge footers and duplicate titles that you do not need).
This Tweet is spot on:
Tired of seeing “pretty” slides that suck at communicating. — Roger Courville (@1080Group) April 8, 2013
Making pretty slides (beautiful picture, nice font) is not the same as making effective slides.
Sometimes the image quality of a graph is low, and/or the color scheme does not match yours, that you may want to recreate the data chart in PowerPoint. If there are proper labels, it is no problem. If not, here is a fix:
If there is a very important message in your story, there is no need to make it on every page in your presentation. Fifteen half-baked bullet points are not as powerful as one carefully crafted slide that drives your message home. Added side benefit: you can make your presentation even shorter!
I get this question sometimes. Almost all content on this blog are disguised client examples. Every morning I sit down, reflect on what happened yesterday, and extract from it a small piece of advice that could make you a better designer. The advantage of being in the trenches of presentation design day to day.
“Our solution is flexible!”
To you and all the other industry insiders it is perfectly obvious why being flexible matters. For everyone else, including potential investors, it is not clear what flexible means, and why it is a big deal.
Explaining the problem is often more convincing than explaining the solution.
The common way to present people that endorse you is a bullet point list of names and titles. Make that much more powerful by changing that to a mosaic of faces. Avoid the uniform conference-speaker-headshot-gallery, rather:
Now this makes for a much more dynamic visualisation of the people who support you.
When pitching to a new client, you often carry a deck of slides with you to cover your uncertainty. “At least I can lecture about X or Y and flood the prospective client with facts”. In the end what makes the sale is not the lecture about you, but the dialogue about the client’s issues.
It also works for me and my presentation design business. A quick email conversation when a prospect asks “What do you charge and send us a link to an example of your work” is less likely to convert into a project then a half an hour conversation about the actual story.
Most of the times, clients think they are looking for slide make-overs, while actually they need a story redesign. Stating: “I redesign stories and look here is where I have done it 500 times before” does not make the same impression as doing the actual thing on the fly.
Sometimes bar charts have a clear order, a ranking of items. In other cases it is less obvious. Still, you slide looks visually more appealing when you sort them in descending order even if the ranking is not the core of your message.