SlideMagic Blog

Happy 2022! I am returning to blogging after the holidays. Over the past week I have been busy designing the web page of our new medical startup (still in stealth, so I cannot show it to you yet…).

The more I thought about this page, the more I came to the conclusion that the web presence of this company at this stage should be a pitch deck to potential partners, rather than the usual feature list and headshots of the management team.

Most “presentations” on web pages are either a static gallery of images/screenshots, or an embedded video., but this layout does not look very good across a wide range of unpredictable screen sizes. For a chart to look good on different screen sizes, and more importantly different aspect ratios (phones are portrait, computers are landscape), you need to break the fundamental layout of the page.

Most slides have the classical title-on-top, content-in-a-rectangle-below layout. For my site, I changed that to 2 squares, one of which takes the role of the slide title with a big written message, and 1 with a supporting graphic. The layout changes depending on the device you are watching the site.

This layout change is common on web sites, but it is used a bit randomly. Pictures and text blocks move around disconnected depending on the screen size. For a “presentation” you need tighter control.

Another major problem for a web designer is rapidly changing content. It is common to make small and big changes to pitch decks all the time, while websites are relatively static. To solve this, my experience with SlideMagic came in very handy. I wrote a simple chart engine that reads “slides” with their titles and shapes in a simple format, and then renders them on the screen in the desired aspect ratio.

How do we end up with so many presentations that are mainly slides with bullet points?

A pitch usually has 2 types of slides. The clear cut ones: head shots of the team, columns with revenue forecasts, pictures of the product, screenshots of the app, table of the budget.

Then there are the ones that are less clear, the ones that need to tell the story behind your idea. When we start off,:

1. we don’t exactly know what they need to say,
2. we don’t know exactly what they should look like

These are 2 big challenges. It is not obvious to craft the story line with messages, and after you did that, it is not obvious to design a slide that delivers the message.

What happens? We open a slide editor and start putting in sentences on slides, move slides around. We can’t think about design, because we don’t know the content of the slide yet. As a result, the default bullet point list becomes the design that actually sticks.

We work really hard on the messages, get our colleagues to comment on them, get our boss to “sign off” that exact message (after we added the qualifying comment on line 3). And more and more, the presentation starts to make sense to us (the writer). The slides become mental placeholders, and in our bullet point frame of mind, every new slide will look exactly like the previous one. This is the mental model we are working with.

We have been iterating a presentation for our new venture for months and months, and then just before we had to send out the first deck to a very serious potential partner, I re-wrote the whole pitch in just 30 minutes. New format, new colours, new sequence, new everything.

Unfortunately, you need those 6 months of pondering in order to pull of 30 minute trick. There are no shortcuts.

But on the positive side: if you have been using a deck for a very long time, you could give it a try and come up with a completely new visual approach for your story.

This Venn diagram is a great visualization of why you still see vaccinated people in the hospital.

I gave it a go myself a while ago, but this visualization is better. Source of chart: RIVM, source of image. One improvement suggestion: switch the colors red and green.

In 99% of slides, it is better to round financial data. $1.9m is easier to read than $1,898,456.34. Also the rounded number is more in line with a financial model that relies on rough assumptions. If you project your company sales in 10 year down to the dollar, you lose some credibility with your audience.

In some situations, the opposite approach can work. Look at this poster below of an Israeli anti-vax group who makes the argument that the money that is spent on encouraging hesitating Israelis to get a vaccine, could have been used better in a different way. (I leave pro and anti-vax debates out this blog, although you might guess in which camp I sit).

Here the big number actually works. Anyone looking at this big amount of money instantly starts comparing it to other lump sums you know: how much do you make as an individual in a year, how much does a car cost, how much does an apartment cost. Also, the precision and suggested accuracy of the number adds to the drama. This is a similar effect that National Debt Clocks try to convey.

The correct way to look at these numbers is to relate them somehow: $ per citizen, % of total corona-related cost, compared to other government advertising campaigns, etc. etc. After that, you might still conclude that it is high, but you used the correct metric.

The internet is full with standard layout for pitch decks. Yes, they mention all the ingredients of your story that should be covered. Many of these topics will be “hygiene checks”, the audience will get them instantly and you can cover them with a placeholder slide.

Where your story is different from others, you have to elaborate with some good visuals.

• A business model that nobody has ever seen before (think eBay when it just started out)
• Photos of your the prototype of your hyper car which prove that it actually exists
• A detailed CV timeline to show that you are perfectly able to run this company at the age of 21
• A collection of the standard KPIs for online retailers that every investor is expecting
• A market size that nobody realized existed, “wait, what, $5b per year on erasers?”
• Etc.

An almost 50 page scientific article was published last month that looks at the impact of images, on financial investment decisions. A quote from the article:

We demonstrate that positive images significantly increase and negative images significantly decrease investment, despite the fact that the images do not provide additional information relevant to the investment tasks and should be disregarded by rational investors.

It all seem statistically relevant and scientifically sound.

It makes intuitive sense as well. A boring presentation without any images is not very effective. But people sometimes ignore the ‘mood’ of an image. Even if the visualisation of a concept is perfect, but you picked an image that is ugly, scary, gross, its visual impact will be the opposite of what you want it be.

Does this mean that you should plaster an financial presentation with meaningless pictures of rainbows? Probably not, everything in moderation.

See the results of the study here.

It is a waste to spend presentation on things your audience already knows, or already assumes is the case.

• Already knows: common knowledge among informed audiences. A specialized investor who invests in crypto knows the basics of what is going on in that market.
• Already assumes: something that people guess instantly, you IPO-ed both of your 2 previous startups, so the question can she be a startup CEO does probably not need any more time

You can score the obvious points very quickly with a snap reminder slide. Now it is time to move on to things that might surprise the audience (in a good way).

But remember, things can work the other way:

• Already knows: “It is impossible to make good returns in healthcare diagnostics”
• Already assumes: “She looks like she just got out of college, she cannot sell to big pharma”

Put yourself in the shoes of the adience.

A random chart on Twitter made me pause to see what is actually graphed. The chart title suggested a positive correlation, but the line is actually sloping down.

On closer inspection you see that the vertical axis is “low is good, high is bad”, and the horizontal axis is “left is bad, right is good”, also the horizontal axis talks about “decline” instead of “growth”, so a positive number is actually a decline.

To analyze data, it is OK to ponder and study a chart. In a presentation of final results, not.

In slide design, every detail counts. Pay attention to the length of text blocks when putting them on a page. Sorting them by length can give an interesting visual effect. Or the other extreme, picks words on purpose so that the length of each text box is more or less the same.

PS. How did I get the picture? Search for “diagonal" in the SlideMagic app and you get lots of suggestions