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It is extremely hard to make a digital composition of multiple images look credible as a realistic scene. See in the ads below, the sizes of the objects are not right in relation to each other, and the angle of lens is inconsistent.
Alternative approaches:
Israel caught Iran stealing IAE documents and using them to conceal dubious nuclear activities. Israel put Iran’s plan in a Google Drive folder for everyone to read.
The video to explain all this to the world is not very strong though:
There is a better way to do it I think. First of all, the audience does not consist of Israelis and other people who already are on Israel’s slide. The target segment are the ones who are sitting on the fence in the middle. The message ‘look at these dark and evil people’ will not stick. What might work though is a message of ‘these people who seem so friendly in your negotiation meetings do something completely different behind your back when you are not looking’.
To create this effect:
Why does certain typography look great and others not? When a designer ‘get its right’, she is intuitively adjusting a great number of parameters. And the most important ones are not the obvious ‘in your face’ ones (such as the font type). Paragraph width, line height, lots of subtle adjustments that can make a big difference to your layout.
This online typography tool lets you experiment with some of these parameters and get feedback on the result
When you right click an image in Google Chrome, you now get an extra option to search the image with Google Lens, which generates similar images, find places where the same image is used (often including the original source), translations etc.
Often used as an excuse for a meeting, but is it really?
Every meeting should have an objective. Just casually chatting is a waste of time (in a professional context). The PYB sentence has been abused so many times that many investors and other people receiving such requests will instantly turn it down. There are better things to do.
Making a company business plan is tricky. Nobody can predict the future. Everyone can argue about the validity of a point estimate of sales in year 5: $45m…
I tend to remove as many of these hard coded point estimates as possible from my spreadsheet, and instead build the whole thing up from drivers or factors that ‘you can touch’. Instead of a hard sales number it is # of potential clients x market share x price per client.
Here is my approach, starting top down, then building a bottom up model
Now that you have set the revenue forecast, apply a similar approach to cost. Given the amount of clients you need to get every year, how much would it cost to get them? Sales trips, sales people, conferences to visit etc. etc. How much would it cost to support each client? This is a much better cost planning tool that simply adding a number in your P&L.
The result of this exercise is that you get a dynamic company model which logically makes sense, the only wild card being that number of clients that you put in.
Many visual identities use a dark or even black background. It looks great on web sites, or presentation slides, or print ads, even billboards. One place where it does not work: flags. Flags should be happy and/or vibrant. A row of black ones looks depressing and even scary.
If your identity does not have any happy colours: go for black on white which should work fine.
Over the past year I have been working on another project together with my co-founder Anat Naschitz (my partner in life as well). This week we are quietly revealing things to the public: 9xchange is a marketplace for molecules. There are a lot of molecules on the shelves of pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, and academic institutions that never get turned into drugs. It takes a lot of effort, and requires you to reveal your pipeline strategy to start selling these assets to players who could use them. 9xchange is going to make that easier.,
I have not spent a huge amount of effort on the design of the landing page, most energy went into coding a secure B2B marketplace (a much bigger technical challenge than the SlideMagic app). But I like the graphical language which is very different from most corporate websites. Have a look here. The messaging of the front page is likely to change as we interact more with users.
Membership of 9xchange is still by invitation only at the moment. Contact me if you work and/or invest in the healthcare industry and would like to try it out.
This project does not mean the end of SlideMagic, which will continue to be developed, don’t worry,.
An important lesson from my negotiation class in business school was the concept of ‘the river’. When two parties battling in a war are negotiating a ceasefire line it is often not the relative power of the armies that dictates where the line is drawn, it is a geographical feature that is the natural separation line between the two forces. You can argue as much as you want, you know where the compromise is going to land in the end. Useful to remember when negotiating a business deal as well.
P.S. I was reminded of this by one of the endless tweets about the conflict in Ukraine today.
This Zelensky speech will be studied alongside “I have a dream” type of presentations in the future.
Very well written, and very well directed with the setting and the black and white colouring.