Frequent updates about all things presentations since 2008. Subscribe to never miss a post.
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.
Writing a good presentation is a process that takes time. There is the time to complete the analysis and make the graphs and tables, but also time to ponder the story and the flow.
If you somehow end up rewriting your whole deck in 30 minutes the day before the presentation, and leaving out many of the data charts that took you days to make, then it does not mean that you made mistakes, got it wrong, or wasted your time. You actually had to go through the whole loop in order to pull off that 30 minute rewrite.
I have been watching a few episodes of “WeCrashed”, the Apple TV+ series based on what happened to WeWork. Lots of investor pitching here, as Adam is raising money to keep his business going.
People often use this high profile entrepreneur case studies as inspiration for writing investor decks. But these were very specific types of deals. A specific entrepreneur, a specific funding and expansion strategy, a specific stage the company was in, and and very specific type of investor bet: putting in huge sums of money and hope to get your return out before the bubble pops.
Your might be a different type of entrepreneur, with a different growth strategy, in a different phase, and pitching to a different profile of investor
P.S. I wrote a few posts about WeWork on this blog before.
AI is making an entry in office applications. See this article with a funding announcement for a company. The idea is to analyse human computer input (text, clicks) and try to automate routine tasks (think booking a flight, making a quarterly financial report).
What about presentation design?
Artificial Intelligence is a very generic buzz word, and we need to be highly specific when talking about its application in any area. What the technology does is analyse vast amounts of inputs and outputs and then reverse engineer their relations without “understanding” anything of the underlying thought process that a human would go through.
I can see one type of presentation design that could be subject to automation, the 1-on-1 slide makeover. There are many designers, design agencies out there that take your slides, do not edit their content at all, but simply make them look prettier:
Feeding thousands of before and afters will ultimately lead to a computer system that could do this automatically.
They key to slide design is though to have the courage to start editing in the content. Rephrase text. Break up slides into multiple layouts. Remove table columns. Round up numbers. Change the type of graph. Etc. etc. And that is at slide level, in most cases deeper surgery is required: a reflow of the whole story line.
This chart can be improved in many ways (source), you can see it without understanding German…
SlideMagic will be offered for free to students. I am working to set up a partnership with a student validation service to create a streamlined automated signup process. In the meantime readers of the blog can already apply for a free SlideMagic membership:
This process is still partly manual, so response will not be instant. Student memberships will run until Aug 31, after which you need to apply for a new one.
See the following McKinsey framework (background here):
The slide does not look bad, but there are a few things that I would change:
Below is a quick makeover in SlideMagic, you can find this chart in the SlideMagic slide library for you to use.
