SlideMagic Blog

I will be getting back to writing blog posts as we are slowly moving towards autumn.

Over the past weeks, I have been preparing a switch of cloud infrastructure provider for SlideMagic to Amazon AWS. The second (stealth) project I am working on requires a very high level of security that could not be delivered by the existing platform. It is amazing what infrastructures you can put together in 2021 at the click of a button.

I have just switched the SlideMagic backend over to the new servers (sweaty palms…) and everything seems to be working OK. I know that there many pioneer users among the readers of this blog, if you spot anything unusual happening, please reach out to me at jan at slidemagic dot com.

Another slide makeover. I will post the ‘after’ before the ‘before’, since the email delivery service sometimes does not render all the images I put in my blog posts…

And here is the original, created by The Information

What did I change?

• I shuffled rows and columns to get the biggest possible continuous space of similar blocks, this is visually more pleasing, and groups/ranks players in a better way. (Hmm, should have swapped Instagram and TikTok now that I look at it).
• I changed the colors, the traffic light analogy does not really work here. The “yes” and “testing” should be very similar in color, while the “no” should be a clear gap.
• I added a more punchy headline
• I calmed the whole chart down by simplifying the legend and taking out the logos.

I have added the slide to our template bank. Users of SlideMagic (try it, there is a free version), can access the slide by searching for “social” in the template bank.

It is raining COVID statistics in Israel as we are the first country in the world to deal with a post-vaccination outbreak. Below is one table that was released by the Ministry of Health (I found it here).

I have translated it in a quick SlideMagic chart (it always puts a big smile on my face to see how quickly this can be done).

But this data is horrendous to understand. Percent of what? What is 100%? The audience is left to do the math themselves. Compare the categories to the breakdown of the population, look at differences between 3 and 7 days ago, look at the ratio between mild to severe, etc. etc.

Using bars instead of numbers (another smile) makes things a bit clearer.

But in this case, it would have been clearer to release the data in absolute numbers and let people construct their own charts.

I have added the charts above to the SlideMagic library, search for COVID in the app and the slides will show up (see the search here).

As usual, I am dropping the frequency of blog post for a few weeks in summer, I hope you all have a relaxing holiday.

When looking for images for your presentation (SlideMagic has a great built-in image search engine), consider searching for images that are relatively “empty”, i.e., images with a lot of white space. This allows you to set them as the background for your entire slide. See the example below.

Pick your keywords to find these type of layouts: empty, background, wallpaper, sky, cliff, horizon, etc. etc.

Photo by Zoltan Fekeshazy on Unsplash

The chart below (source) is a good example of “axis”. The drop in life expectancy looks huge, but upon closer inspection, we see the the vertical axis starts only at 72.

There is another problem with the chart: “the sharpest since World War II” is not supported by the data.

One way to bring out the significance of the message, and support the WWII point is to show the annual change (not the absolute number) in life expectancy since 1940.

A “presentation template” is usually a PowerPoint file that new employees receive on their first they of work. There is more to a presentation template I think.

1. Your corporate visual communication style/culture

   • Consulting firms: lots of complicated diagrams and frameworks, meant for solving a problem rather than presenting
   • Investment banks: dense text and tables with graphs, meant for reading rather than presenting
   • Consumer goods company: product packaging shots and bullets
   • University: list of bullets
   • Etc. etc.

2. The actual software file that holds the basis layouts, logo, and colours (this is the one you get on the first day of your employment)

3. Running versions of important presentation documents that get constantly updated and tweaked

   • Sales presentations, each for a different lead or a different customer segment
   • Quarterly results presentations with - well - different quarterly results
   • Strategic planning presentations, each one for a different product group
   • Etc. etc.

Most of the day-to-day presentation work in companies is in step 3, the tweaking of existing documents to update it for the latest sales meeting or board meeting. These presentations are in fact the “templates”, not the empty file.

In most presentation design software the tweaking of an existing slide is tricky and over time a slide degrades after many iterations where users insert the wrong fonts, colours, and trip up a decent slide layout that worked for 5 boxes, but not for 6. (“Template rot”).

The above is true for both existing corporate presentations and shiny new templates purchased online. The latter look amazing fresh off the press, but it shows when a non-designer tried to fit it to her needs.

Here in Israel we are ahead of most other countries in terms of vaccination and the prevalence of the delta variant. After almost zero cases, the count is starting to creep up again. There is a lot of confusing data going around and it is surprising to me that the scientific community does not have a generic approach to evaluate the effectiveness of vaccines.

Last night the following table appeared on the TV news. Severe cases by age category and vaccination status. But these absolute numbers cannot be taken at face value.

Source: https://twitter.com/arad_nir/status/1416832997597265933/photo/1

“Open source” statisticians went to work and made some adjustments. The population categories are not equally big (there are more young people than old people), and the vaccination rate is not the same (older people vaccinate more). So the correct approach is to look at severe cases / million, split by vaccinated and unvaccinated. I put the results in the graph below and added the chart to the SlideMagic library.

I put the results in the graph below and added the chart to the SlideMagic library. Search for “vaccine’ in the SlideMagic app and the designs will pop up, either for use in a COVID-related presentation, or maybe something completely different that requires a similar layout.

Many presentations are good because there are many steps involved between the “source” and the “receiver”

1. You have the story in your head as a complex set of ideas that are entangled and interdependent
2. You start writing it down in short hand, which require you to “flatten” the multi dimensional story into a sequence.
3. The sequence of bullet points now becomes a visualisation of your story. Instead of listening to a complex verbal argument, your eyes glance through the points and you can change the order at lightning speed. Cut, paste, slice, dice, until it looks good to you (without taking into account how it sounds).
4. Many people stop here and jump to stage 6
5. Now, chunks of this “visual” bullet point story get translated into visuals, another transformation: sentences, words, paragraphs get turned into visual compositions and graphs.
6. The presentation to the audience is no longer your story, it is you translating the visuals back into sequential verbal text.
7. The audience listens to the sound track of your slides and tries to reassemble the story that was in your head when you started the whole process.

Photo by Eirik Skarstein on Unsplash

We are doing some SlideMagic user interviews and the term “secret weapon” came up. One user, somewhere in a big office tower, is a lone user of SlideMagic and uses the build-in PowerPoint conversion to share slides with colleagues. People start to notice the difference in the slide the person produces.

Here are some situations where you can use SlideMagic as a secret weapon, a starting point for setting up the beginning of your presentation. Most of these slides are very time consuming to set up in PowerPoint or Keynote:

• A perfectly lined up, massive grid of logos (you finished the 10 x 4 grid, and now you need to move to 7 x 6 because you got 2 more logos)
• Data tables with bar charts that need to line up (oops, 12 rows instead of 10)
• 2x2, 3x3 matrices, other consulting style matrices
• A diagram with boxes that are connected with arrows
• A team chart where all the headshots need to have more or less the same size, with the “eye line” at the same height

Nobody needs to know / find out that you use SlideMagic, but we would not mind if you spread the secret…

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash