SlideMagic Blog

Up until the early 2000s, TV programs in The Netherlands would be announced by an ‘anchorman’, often a woman (Dutch people can refresh their memory here).

I was reminded of them by watching a number of high schools pitching themselves to my son via Zoom. Some schools had a fully prepared introduction video, linked by a pre-recorded ‘anchorman’. Others had a live anchorman that connected the various videos together.

The latter approach worked much better in my opinion, creating a stronger bond with the audience. But you got to rehearse that switching between anchorman, slide show, and video stream though. In the 1980s, this was the job of the TV control room…

In scientific documents, there are chart making conventions that make sense, clearly labelled axes, titles, etc. etc. Use these charts in your article that you submit for publication in a prestigious paper. For an on-screen slide show however, you could deviate from this standard. Your objective is to communicate the findings as best as possible, referring to the paper for the details.

See the example below (source), lots of duplication in axis labels.

You can make the page a lot calmer be omitting some of these labels. I quickly cut and paste the elements in the image below. (This is not a makeover, just a super rough reshuffle to show you what I meant).

I saw these headings of a well-known story line structure being put up literally on a website in a big font size. What? Paragraph of text, how?, paragraph of text, why?, paragraph of text.

I like to use these frameworks in a more indirect way. Use them as guidelines to set up your story. Use them as a checklist to see that you covered everything, use them as a starting point if you are stuck in writer’s block, and most importantly, if they don’t work for your specific situation, pick another one or use your own.

The same applies to visual frameworks (SWOT, etc. etc.). They are designed to help you get started with grouping ideas, but if you find yourself forcing things in boxes that do not really fit, pick another one.

I love digging into COVID-related statistics. Recently, this paper was published that shows how vaccine effectiveness in local communities can be a lot lower than at the national level. Seems counter intuitive, but this chart explains the math.

I have added this slide to the SlideMagic library, so you could use it in your own presentations as well.

BI (“Business Intelligence”) dashboards with data used to be a corporate thing. Firms such as my previous employer McKinsey would advice clients what metrics to put on them, and how to display them. This is tricky, there is an infinite amount of data to choose from, and even more options to slide and dice the figures.

The COVID outbreak has created many country-wide public dashboard with data. In Israel where I am based, a large tribe of “amateur” statisticians has emerged that runs and discusses analyses on Twitter. The other dashboard I had a look at is the Dutch one (part of my family still lives there).

• Dutch board
• Israeli board (use the translate option that is offered by the Google Chrome browser)

The approaches are different, and I prefer the Israeli one.

• The Dutch board looks very pretty, has lots of explanations in text, and has useful maps of regions with color coding. The problem is that it stretches out over many, many, pages, and priotises static data over time series.
• The Israeli one is just one page, with lots of time series graphs, so you can see things develop over time. And not for basic statistics such as overall cases, benchmarks can get very specific. Benchmarks are normalised so you compare apples with apples (i.e., cases / 100,000 by vaccination status). Also, government policy and benchmarks are tightly integrated. The government wants to encourage parents to vaccinate children, so there are statistics specifically aimed at that target segment. Another example: after discussions whether to close the airport or not, stats about airport tests were published (split by country, so citizens can make the call to travel somewhere or not based on their personal risk appetite).

I looked briefly at Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for SlideMagic a couple of years ago, but never really pursued specific ideas. Recently, I revisited things and was surprised by the amount of progress that has been made. Not so much the actual technology itself, but more how accessible it is for anyone to use.

“AI” and “ML” are big buzz words at the moment and many of you are probably be wondering what it could mean for the industry you are working in. You read some blogs, books, watch some videos, but don’t really get it.

I would recommend to actively dive in and follow an online video course. The actual coding knowledge required is now very minimal, it is all about learning how to select and apply models. Sometimes, all the “AI” you need is basic statistics and regression. Sometimes, highly advanced image recognition software has already been cracked and can be used and accessed with a few lines of code.

Such a course is great fun, helps you understand what these technologies could really mean for your business, cuts through the buzzwords and makes you a better manager in case you are hiring people or service providers to build things for you.

Two charts about a new sub-Omikron (BA.2) variant in Denmark. This line graph shows 3 variants as a % of all sequenced samples in Denmark.

Source: https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1485456877723045891

The chart below shows the total number of variants found in the samples. The stack approach does a much better job to give the full picture of what is actually going on,.

Source: https://www.covid19genomics.dk/statistics

With just one data series, showing a share of the total as a stack or line (column) is the same chart. As soon as you have more than one, pick a stack chart so the audience can see the data in context.

Many of you readers are independent presentation designers. Having done a large number of online courses now, I think these udemy, coursera, etc. instructors could be great potential clients for you. Most of them talk through a set of poorly designed bullet point slides with a picture in picture video super imposed on them.

• These slides can obviously be improved, by a lot
• The narration and creative brief is there for you: the instructor gives verbal instructions as audio and often in a transcript
• These presentations can have a huge audience, and the overall visual quality can make a big difference in their marketing strategy: if the free sample lessons look really good, students will convert and buy the course
• As a presentation designer, you can specialize in a certain field: you start a self reinforcing loop: you understand the subject area better, you do better work, you can attract more work in that same speciality area as a result.

I myself don’t have the time to all this design work, therefore I leave it up to you :-)

A smart online instructor can do 2 things:

1. Outsource design work to a great freelance presentation designer
2. Do the slides herself, but in SlideMagic

I am dusting off my knowledge about machine learning and data science, and stumbled upon this handy definition of false positives, false negatives, and a bunch of definitions (I always find it hard to keep them apart). I turned them into a slide template that is not part of the SlideMagic library for you to use in your own presentations.

(I use this course if you are interested)

Some of the best images you can use in a presentation are those with lots and lots of white space. Photographers tend to crop images to make their subject stand out. Great for the image, but often less ideal for the layout of your slide.

Instead of searching for functional or descriptive words such as “car” or “bucket”, search for “background” or “wallpaper” in SlideMagic and something unexpectedly useful might show up.

These examples are pretty straightforward to recreate in SlideMagic, with your own background images and text. Still, I added them to the library so you can use the min your slide designs