SlideMagic Blog

Microsoft did not want to pay font license fees for Helvetica and designed its own Arial knock off. Arial definitely does not look as good as the original (earlier post here). Why? There are only minor differences in the characters.

I think the main reason is the availability of weights. In Helvetica, I like using the light and medium font weights. Arial installed on my machine comes in a blunt regular (somewhere in between light and medium), and has a bold that is too heavy.

What do you think?

Slides with quotes can be powerful. The standard lay out of quotes is not very interesting. I make manual adjustments to increase the size of the quotes, and make sure the first quote has a small indent. See an example below.

Update January 2018: I have added quote slides in the SlideMagic template store, below is an example:

A PowerPoint slide with a quote

Presenting to an audience is no different than having a one on one conversation with someone. You can read the signals. When are people surprised, amused, intrigued, bored, confused? Pick up the non-verbal feedback and try to adjust.

You will be in for some surprises. I have been surprised many times. Slides that I thought were funny, were not. Points I thought were clear, were in fact confusing. Stories that I thought were somewhat dull (and I was considering cutting them), got people interested.

If the lighting in the room is poor, the people in first-row will probably end up being your focus group.

Over the next weeks I will be spending more time with my family, and less time at the computer. Hence, the frequency of posting on the blog will go down. But many of you are probably doing exactly the same thing, so hopefully you will not feel too deprived of your daily dosis of presentation inspiration.

What do I mean by an “icon image”? A direct visualization of the title or a concept. For example: a small image of a wallnut on the summary “In a nutshell” slide, a photo of Albert Einstein on the page that reads “Smart product architecture”, a bag full of $100 bills on the revenue model chart.

These images are similar to icons that people use in computer software or web sites. They quickly remind the viewer what it is that you are talking about. But these icons are exactly as inefficient as text in getting your message across. When the audience sees the word “smart”, or sees the small image of a brain, it still does not understand why that product architecture is so smart.

You can find a better visualization.

Maybe not such a smart question to ask, if you can read this, then there is clearly not a problem. Still, 2 readers have complained that they had difficulty accessing the site. Anyone else had trouble? If so, I am actually not sure what to do about it, I am in the hands of Google. There is always the good old stickyslides.com, but in the end all URLs forward to stickyslides.blogspot.com, the Blogger name that I registered back in 2008.

Most web sites are designed around functional content rather than story: find our address, learn about our environmental policies, see how we value compliance, here is a list of all the products we sell. But is that what should get all the attention? Maybe a first-time visitor of a company web site is more interested in the story behind the company? That story should be eye catching. The functional information should be accessible, but does not have to jump at you when you enter.

Similar to PowerPoint templates, web site templates waste too much space on screen clutter. Multiple menu structures, lots of links, buttons. It is all too busy and confusing. The language on corporate web sites is full of clichés. The text sort of all say the same thing. Images are often the cheesy stock photos that good presentation designers try to avoid.

Corporates probably copy each other. They brief a design agency with “I want something like that”. As a result, the same concept gets repeated and repeated. Web design is probably mostly lead by technology developers, not story tellers. The structure, the layering, the architecture come first.

Maybe corporate web design is also ready for a revolution, and maybe story designers can play a big role in it?

Here in Israel, people always answer their phone and then say: “I will call you later, OK?”. That interruption just broke your line of thought, your concentration, you probably going to check that Tweeted link, catch up on some email. So much for creativity.

Email is much better for small admin-type message exchanges. And I am going even further, slowly phasing out the use of voice mail. Voice mail is very inefficient to access, and it does not enable you to use your inbox as a todo list. In the end, voice conversations will be to talk to close family members or remote meetings.

Until everyone moves into this direction I will get “Did you get my message?” a lot.

UPDATE: After a reader email, I will clarify and assure you that I do communicate with people, just at set time intervals.

You emailed the presentation to your boss, and it comes back the next day with the comment: “I edited it for clarity”. What this means is that she edited the text in the first few slides, but probably ran out of steam after page 14.

Bosses have this urge to take out the fountain pen and start scribbling (could you print that slide deck please?), especially on first pages. They do not take the time to digest the entire slide deck (20 minute story), but rather want to make sure the summary page is right. Make sure the vision is in. Make sure that we mention that benefit. Make sure to emphasize the long history of the company.

Editing text is useful for books or legal contracts, text on a presentation slide can only absorbed 50%. The audience will not remember how you put that sentence exactly.

So, spending a lot of time on carefully crafting sentences is not the best use of your time. Given that, why not focus on writing short, punchy headlines and add the nuances in your verbal explanation.

Whenever you present a piece of analysis (a table, a chart), round up the numbers so you are left with a digestible amount of numbers; so $1.3m instead of $1,354,673. And when you add up numbers, make sure the calculations are correct. And I do not mean just calculation mistakes, it is obvious that you lose credibility if you get the basic math wrong.

Adding rounded numbers can slightly alter the total of your sum. I usually make sure that the total is exactly what it should be, and make a short adjustment to the largest number in the addition.

For example: 3.49 + 2.55 + 1.25 = 7.27. But when you round up you get: 3.5 + 2.6 + 1.3 = 7.4. So I adjusted the 3.5 and will put in my chart 3.4 + 2.6 1.3 = 7.3.

Why? If you have to explain why numbers do not add up, it will cost you credibility. Secondly, most people actually will not ask, they will just go and check every number in your document. And an audience that is running mathematical calculations does not have time to listen to your story.

Watch out the quarterly results presentations to investors though. If you bump into rounding issues, you might have to add in those extra digits to make sure you are not misrepresenting the financial situation of your company,