SlideMagic Blog

Online, I currently get bombarded with “ads” that contain city landscapes for some reason. What they have in common are unusual perspectives: the pictures draw your attention. (At least mine).

What is going on? You are seeing familiar compositions and/or places you recognize, but the camera angle seems different. Most shots use an extreme wide lens effect, might have been taken by a drone rather than from a standing position on a building, add a very strong zoom, only using a very small crop of the center of the original image and put an object in the front (either photoshopped or real).

All interesting techniques to learn from, I think soon we will see these types of images more on open source image collection sites, so you can use them in your presentations as well.

I discussed this effect earlier in this post about the “Corona crop”, with extreme zooming, you can make almost any public space looked packed with people.

Academics and other teachers like to write out their points in full sentences on black boards, so that students can copy them in their notebooks. This could actually be useful, the slowly spoken sentence, combined with the hand writing, gets burnt in memory easier. Also, that sentence becomes a sort of mental placeholder on the big collection of black boards. To refer back to it, you can simply circle the sentence, and the text itself reminds the audience what is meant, but more importantly, it is that “geographic location” of memories around that sentence that creates the right context.

As I ‘sat’ through’ a 1.5 hour video on encryption technology of an academic lecture last week, the teacher took it to the extreme though: not making his big point before starting to write it down…. “That… makes… it….”, what will it be “possible” or “impossible”?

I would pop the suspense, before writing things down…

The chart below could have been made a lot better using a bar chart. You can avoid the many legend labels, which have a 1-to-1 relationship to the columns

Image source

Guitarist John Mayer starred in the launch video for a more affordable version of his signature guitar for PRS Guitars. Some interesting presentation lessons in here.

• It worked, the video gets even linked to on a presentation blog
• A naked and vulnerable pitch. A bare bone background, just him and the instrument, putting his entire reputation at stake by recommending this guitar. “Skin in the game”. Different from celebrities wearing a watch, driving a car, or holding an espresso cup.
• A very nice use of the “best of both worlds” storyline. Up until now you had to choose between A or B, but as of today, you can have both.
• Very clever addressing of target audiences. Hard core guitar players that admire John for his skill, and die hard fans that admire John for his songs are included implicitly. But parents buying guitars for their kids (and maybe secretly for themselves) are addressed directly with a clear excuse to go and get one.

A great sales pitch

For another project, I had to get a better understanding of the blockchain and various encryption algorithms. This summary helped me a lot, how it is possible that a total “stranger” can verify the validity of a digital signature without sharing confidential information.

Still this explanation suffered from an issue with almost all explainers and technical presentations: certain critical steps that are blatantly obvious to the expert, but very hard to get for the novice get skipped over. The big online YouTube stars in education are masters in getting it right: anticipating what an audience is likely to struggle with.

Anyway, in the process, I added a chart to the SlideMagic library with the very basics of encryption:

Search for “encryption” in SlideMagic and it will show up as a slide template.

Why does furniture always look great in ads? The beautiful castle or villa as its backdrop is only a small reason. The big visual trick is space: lots of it, not only square meters, but also very high ceilings.

Most houses and apartments are designed functionally, rooms with just enough space to put a sofa and chairs against the wall to sit a normal sized family with a few guests. If there is more floor space available, we tend to add rooms rather than giving the furniture more space to breathe.

The same is true for museums. Huge open spaces with big white, clutter-free walls. Paintings are made to look good in museums. Put that masterpiece (or a copy) on your kitchen wall, and it looks less impressive.

When making presentations, you are not constrained by white space, so add it freely.

The thumbnail strip to the left of most presentation software is not only useful for switching to other slides, it also is a good feedback mechanism for slide layouts. It is like sitting in the back row of a big auditorium, or viewing the slide in a small preview window on a Zoom call.

I took my daughter to Paris a few weeks ago (just before the new COVID wave) for a very short trip (Thanks Giving). She found it far too short, while I agreed that it was short, but still felt it was a nice and restful break.

The probable reason? I have been to Paris many times before, even lived right next to it for a year. For me, going back to it simply triggered a memory of all the stories and experiences I had there before. (A tip for prioritizing short holiday destinations).

The same happens with a presentation slide. For the person / team that made it that bullet point sentence (or even word) makes perfect sense, because it packs the entire 3 months worth of effort. For the first-time listeners, it is a cryptic sentence.

If you are daring, you can consider letting shape go off the page, or tilting text in them to make your slide look more alive. And/or tilt things a little. Text could even run a bit out of the page frame. The good thing about circles is that tilting text does not impact your overall slide layout.

(Yes I know, no circles (yet) in SlideMagic.)

The building manager finally installed a house number on our building, to reduce the amount of desperate calls I get from couriers. Still, I wished he had asked me for a suggested position where to put it. “Bleeding off the page” is not the right concept here…