SlideMagic Blog

I am working on a new introduction presentation that should explain potential clients a little bit about my background, but most of all, convince them that an investment in a professionally designed presentation is worth their while.

I would welcome your thoughts, especially on the idea of using the part of the full width of the 16:9 format for an image subtitle.

More presentation design and art today. I had a very clear policy on the use of fonts and typography:

• Do not use ALLCAPS
• Do not use non-standard fonts that can create problems on “foreign” computers
• Minimize the use of bold

Until now. I just finished a presentation:

• Set in ALLCAPS
• Using the Futura Bk font
• 90% of the slides are set in bold (yes, ALLCAPS bold)

The Futura font family is to blame. The history of the font go back to the 1930s and its design is heavily influenced by the Bauhaus movement. Clean geometrical shapes, look at these o’s, almost perfectly round.

Maybe being located in Tel Aviv, a city that has one of the world’s most extensive collection of Bauhaus architecture, had something to do with it. The picture below is an example of a Bauhaus-style building in Tel Aviv, the “Bait ha’Onia” or “Ship house” on 56 Levandah Street, designed by architect Arieh Cohen and built in 1934-1935. To make the side track complete, if you are interested in Tel Aviv Bauhaus architecture, make sure to get your hands on this book (text both in French and in English).

Back to presentation design. In particular I like two font variations of Futura. The Light version (Futura Lt) for thin, elegant, sentences in sentence case, and the Book version (Futura Bk) for all caps. The allcaps look especially impressive in fat bold (look at the font in the image). Obviously, some of my old font design principles still hold. Allcaps bold fonts should only be used in presentation that contain a few words per slide.

Recent tweets by Nancy Duarte about her reading up on classic rhetoric and a clean-out of my book shelf with old McKinsey training material triggered this post. How can we use the ancient rules of logic and rhetoric in our presentations? Some of my observations.

Logic is necessary but not enough to convince. The perfect logical argument often fails to make people believe your message with their heart. There are still many people that smoke despite this:

1. Smoking causes cancer
2. Cancer kills
3. People do not like to die
4. Therefore: stop smoking.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle was well aware of this. Logic and rhetoric are often confused to be the same thing. Actually, logic (logos) is one of three components of rhetoric. The other two 2 are ethos (credibility of the speaker) and pathos (emotional appeal to the audience).

Why is logic so popular among McKinsey consultants? A number of reasons:

• Lack of time. There is an often overlooked difference between a problem solving structure and a solution presentation structure. Logic is a great tool to solve a problem: cut your issue up in pieces, find facts and other evidence to solve sub-problems, and finally build up the overall solution again from the component solutions. Management consultants often stop there and do not invest time to translate the problem solving structure into a compelling and convincing story to communicate the solution. It is not that they don’t want to, at 2AM before the final review meeting there is often simply no time left.
• Like-minded people. Management consultants usually are very logic-driven people. It is logical work, that attracts logical people, who hire more logical minds. So, the language between management consultants among themselves is highly logical. Some people however have a totally different brain structure (clients of management consultants included).
• Collaboration. A logical language and structuring technique is very well suited for people that need to work together but have never met each other before. Once you have learned the methodology, you can put a team of consultants from different countries together that can produce results almost immediately.

A presentation should have a consistent look and feel on each slide. When you are using just text and PowerPoint shapes, this is no problem: just use consistent fonts and colors. Images complicate things because they usually come from different sources and - as a result - have different styles:

• Colors
• “Real” images versus studio shots
• “Real” images versus computer-generated renderings
• “Real” images versus “real” art versus stock image art
• Vintage versus modern images
• Portraits, landscapes, objects

Have a look at well-designed books with many images: the images are different but somehow fit together. You as a presentation designer can do a number of obvious things to harmonize image styles:

• Actively pick an image style when you start out designing a presentation (or - like me - adjust the image style as you go through the design process, replacing images as you go)
• Minimize the number of image sources
• Use less images
• Take out the color of all images, and just use black & white, or apply a color overlay

Recently I discovered another solution: applying consistent PhotoShop filters throughout your presentation. A slightly brutal way to harmonize images, but the result can be a presentation with a unique look and feel. The image below has been subjected to a “poster edge” filter, creating a pop-art style of presentation if you apply it consistently to every image in your presentation.

Image via iStockPhoto

A client needed to visualize the regulatory uncertainty in his industry after the financial crisis. This traffic light tree in London is a very useful art installation that you can use in many other confusing situations. The high rises of large financial services firms in the back help complete the picture (my client works in that industry).

The Internet is full of images of the sculpture. Try searching Flickr for images with a Creative Commons license.

Sometimes, a live presentation can be a pretty inefficient way to get a message across. For example, TED presentations are usually really good, but they still need around 20 minutes of your time. Have a look at the new fund raising video of the Acumen Fund that was released yesterday. It lasts 1:35.

In this 1:35 the video manages to explain a completely revolutionary concept to charity. It is not about giving food, it is not about giving the tools to grow food, but it is all about investing in profitable businesses that produce goods/services, create wealth and can grow by themselves.

The video does not need long speaker introductions, does not use spectacular motion graphics, does not rely on “look how miserable these people are” images. Just a number of upbeat people talking straight in the camera at you. It is hard to do this in 1:35 on stage with PowerPoint slides.

Sign up for the recently established social network of the Acumen Fund to learn more about the dramatically different approach the organization is using to combat poverty.

I have been thinking hard about how to incorporate negative numbers in stacked column and bar charts. The example below shows that it is possible. However, it might be the exception of the rule that graphs are usually better at presenting data than tables.

• The chart takes a bit of time to figure out. “It’s about cost, so income is negative”. “Ah, the negative offset of the chart is revenues”.
• The chart goes against common practice of accountants and other financial professionals to look at annual financial data in tables.

What do you think?

More and more, I am trying to make each presentation in a unique style that is consistent on each slide. Paintings are a good source of inspiration, but so is cover art of CDs/LPs. Today I used this one from Remastered: The Best of Steely Dan - Then and Now

Steely Dan used an image of “Carhenge”, an art installation by Jim Reinders, somewhere in Nebraska, a modern-day version of Stone Henge in England.

It provides all I need for a presentation with a consistent accent:

• A slightly apocalyptic theme (this presentation was for a client in the asset management industry talking about changes since the economic meltdown of 2008)
• Cars, especially vintage cars, a rich hunting ground for images expressing all kinds of concepts
• The large bold font with a blank fill
• Blues and yellow/oranges as colors.

Disclosure: I earn a small commission if you purchase products on Amazon through links on this site.

Paintings are excellent inspiration for presentation design:

• Color schemes designed to provoke an emotion, often going against the rules of color theory
• Lessons in composition and page layout
• Ideas to give your presentation a distinct style or personality

The Dutch educational system plus graduate degrees in computer science and business administration have not contributed much to my knowledge of art history. I want to catch up quickly, but it turned out to be more difficult than I thought:

• There are many web sites devoted to a painter or a museum, I have yet to discover one that cuts across artists, locations, styles and periods in time
• The same issue is true for many art history books: one style, one painter, one museum.
• More-over art history books (surprisingly) have usually more text than images in them. Text full of elaborate interpretations by the author, that is clearly written with student education in mind.

How happy I was to find this book: 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die.

Thousand pages of one painting per page, designed as a guide for museums to visit before your time on the planet is up (but then, there is no clear museum index, and many paintings are taken from private collections).

Leaving this small criticism aside, I found this book truly useful to digest a vast amount of images of paintings in a short time. Color picture, a bit of background on the artist, a bit of background on the painter. It contains both the block busters such as the Mona Lisa as well as lesser known works of art. Great.

I saw this spot light concept in an invitation for an event. It can easily be recreated in PowerPoint, ideal for a chart to make a big announcement. Click on the second image for some more explanation about the shapes to use. And if you like those tiny eyes, you can read more about them in one of my previous posts.