SlideMagic Blog

Theory and rules are not enough to create good looking slides. It is a bit like interior design. Architects can use nice materials, pick matching colors, and still, somehow the overall design does not look good. And you cannot exactly pinpoint why this is.

I often have these moments where I am starting over, trying again, do something different, put a design away to give it a few extra days, because it just does not feel right, despite that I used good fonts, matching colors, the right proportions. So why is it not good? I would not be able to tell you.

This is not a problem if you allow enough time for the design process.

This Wednesday, 29 June, at 15:00 EST I will be hosting a webinar about presentation design. Maybe useful for those who were not able to join my NYU presentations. The event is hosted by SalesCrunch, details on how to register are here.

Computer screens have gotten bigger and bigger, and I suspect that most users will use the extra screen real estate to keep multiple windows open on their desktop. One for email, one for Twitter, one for PowerPoint, one for Skype. Designers do not have this luxury to spread everything out in front of them, they need a big calm design environment with minimal distraction. My PowerPoint or Keynote screen is always set to the maximum.

I used to work with a laptop in clam shell mode in my office: the laptop is closed, and a big external monitor is used as a display. For copying and pasting, inserting Excel charts in PowerPoint, I was constantly moving windows around. Until yesterday, as I looked at the closed laptop screen.

So now I created a dual monitor screen set up. My slide design application is up full screen on the large monitor, and my laptop screen is used as a collection bin for all kind of bits. It has been a liberation. My 17" laptop actually is big enough for the little side apps that I am running in that screen. Great.

If you are on a Mac, here is how to do it:

It is better to email a PDF of your presentation than the original PPTX PowerPoint file.

1. Fonts get rendered correctly, even if the receiving party does not have them installed on their computer. This is especially true now that more and more people are starting to use Macs and are running PowerPoint for Mac, an application that does not allow font embedding.
2. Many people open PPTX files on their Blackberry. A PDF is your safest bet that everything renders correctly.
3. Many people use Gmail as their email system (hiding a gmail address behind what looks like a regular domain). In Gmail, you have the option to view a file rather than downloading and opening it. When you select view, the document gets opened in Google Docs, which is not very good at rendering PowerPoint files (not only fonts go wrong, but entire shapes can go missing)
4. A PDF opens nicer and cleaner than a PPTX that lands in you the slide edit mode.
5. PDF file sizes are usually a lot smaller than PPTX file sizes.

The consequence of all this is that you should think twice about using animations in your slides. I switch more and more to just copying a slide and building content page by page, so it will show correctly in PDF format.

Here is an impressive piece of video animation work by Patrick Clair. Watch the use of narrow all caps fonts.

Hand drawn graphics can work great together with images in slides. As an example, see these ads below. (I am not sure whether these ads do a good job in selling markers, they are great though in warning you to take care of your health).

It is possible to draw shapes using a mouse or a drawing pad in PowerPoint, but I always find it hard to replicate that marker effect. Instead, I scan in real hand writing using a scanner, and then kill the white background with the Photoshop color range filter.

The Impact label font by Tension Type can work great in a presentation design. It is open source, you can download it here at Dafont. It also comes in a white reverse version.

Back at McKinsey in the 1990s we would write a long-hand sentence, or a “lead” at the top of every slide (similar in length to today’s 140-character Tweets. This sentence would give you the message of the chart and you could get the whole story by reading all the leads in a document, without looking at the exhibits below.

I am re-discovering the sentence recently.

1. In some presentation designs, I switch to a slide template with a 2 line title, creating space for longer sentences at the top of a slide.
2. Certain thoughts or concepts are just too complex to shorten to 2 bullets of 3 words each, so I am just writing them out.

Most slides with images work best when you scale up the photograph until it bleeds of the page.

Making the image a bit smaller leaves a distracting white border around your slides that does not look good when projected on a big screen.

However, recently I started using a layout that is very often used in print advertising. An image which is more horizontally cut and more white space above and below the image. It is maybe not the best for large on-screen key note presentations, but it looks great for corporate decks that are discussed in a smaller setting.

This layout is often used in CD covers, see Similar to this album cover of a 1990s hit by Everything but the girl:

Online presentation sharing services such as SlideShare allow you to upload an audio track alongside your slides. You need to make sure that the narrative is exactly in sync with the visuals.

I have seen (heard) examples where the audio presenter starts talking about data or concepts that are not present on the visual in front of you. As a result, the brain starts to wander off, looking for missing pieces of information on the slide.

When talking to a live audience in person, you can draw the attention from the visual back to you. An exact sync is less important, and it is easy to fit in a slide story. During a short web presentation with audio, your audience is using the narrative as an explanation of the slides. Make sure they are lined up.

Sometimes, when you are short in time, that might actually mean inserting a slide with some quick (very short) bullets (did I just write that?) or a short sentence to support your side story. Something like: “Case example: 22% cost savings”