SlideMagic Blog

SlideMagic uses a simple colour scheme: (just) one distinct accent colour and lots of shades of white/grey/black.

What are good accent colours?

• One that stands out

• (This is the tricky bit):

  • One with good contrast with white
  • One with good contrast with black

• One that fits with your brand and/or industry, or the opposite one that really sets you apart from everyone else in your industry if that is what you want to do.

• One that you like

People often forget about number 2, which cuts off a lot of creative possibilities with your design

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

The former head of the US gun lobby was tricked into rehearsing a graduation speech in front of 3000+ empty chairs. The event was fake and the chairs represented the number of high school victims of gun violence.

Whether you are in favor or against guns, the visuals of drone going over the audience with the voice in the background make an impression.

In the comments below each of the posting of the video you see the hard core pro and con camps engaging in typical uncivilized internet debating.

I think adding the sounds of gunshots and 911 calls was actually not needed at all, the effect of the video might have been better without them. It is the doubters, the ones that are sitting on the fence, who the video needs to influence. Most anti gun media has lots of noise, graphic images, and violence which might not be the right influencing strategy for the middle group. People discount it, tune out, and it sets up everyone for that heated debate that polarizes even more.

When your project manager tosses a bunch of vague suggestions your way, “ok this deck is easy, we start with the vision, then show the strategic buckets and mirror these against our core competencies”, and you don’t get it, it is not your problem.

Asking for explanations of everything might annoy her. Instead, ask for a quick example. “Which bucket for example?”, and “and can you mirror it against 1 core competence for me”?

This is like a small “Rosetta Stone” for you, you have decoded this particular case example, now you can take on the rest (and in the process write a presentation with fewer buzz words).

Image by Richard Porson - “Rosetta stone, brought to England in 1802” in Archaeologia vol. 16 (1812), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10617134

Seth “stole” my thunder… A blog post about how nagging and insisting without introducing new information or ideas is not going to get you anywhere has been sitting in my mental pipeline for a while. Some examples.

• People here in the Middle East can be very defensive, and this happened a few times in presentations I attended here around Tel Aviv. After your presentation you get a question, the presenter answers it. The question gets asked again, but it was not really answered. The presenter is not really listening, and more or less repeats the same answer, this time a bit louder. This pattern might repeat itself a few times without a resolution
• As a startup CEO, I get tons of “spam” emails with subject lines and opening sentences that sound like spam. That first email does not trigger a response from me, but it gets followed up by pretty much the same email, with the same subject line in bold
• The investor is not going to invest in you, because she does not invest in medical diagnostics companies, and you are a medical diagnostics company. Trying to convince her that she should invest in these companies will get you nowhere. Either move one, or give the pitch of your company a different spin, away from that particular field.

Parents might succumb to repeated pressure and buy calm in the house, pretty much everyone else will just ignore you.

Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash

My amazing wife Anat Naschitz has always supported me in developing SlideMagic behind the scenes. Going forward, she will become more visible to the outside word. Recently, she created a deck to demo SlideMagic to a potential client. We have added these slides and the entire deck to the SlideMagic template database, so they all should be available in the SlideMagic app for you to use in your own presentation, simply search for “anat” and the slides will pop up.

It is usually hard to find good images of products made by well known brands that are of high quality, not obstructed by advertising copy and free of copyrights. Free photo site Unsplash is trying to change that by building up a revenue model where photographers post (and get paid for) posting images with brands in it. (Curated for quality by Unsplash and endorsed by the brand in question).

This is very useful for presentation designers. Looking for a nice Harley-Davidson motorcycle? Here you go.

I agree with Unsplash’s observation that advertising has deteriorated in quality over the years.

But on their own web site, they can do a bit better with ads for their new shareholder/investor….

Photo by Harley-Davidson on Unsplash

On page 41 of the coalition agreement of the new Israeli government, some restrictions are put on PowerPoint presentations:

• 10 pages maximum
• 36 point font minimum
• 20 minutes maximum
• Presentations are not a substitute for reading material

I think the last point is crucial: the presentation of your proposal and your working document with all the facts and backgrounds are two documents. Most people now write their working papers in PowerPoint and then are lazy by putting those slides on the screen. If you made something in presentation software PowerPoint, it does not automatically mean that the end product is a presentation.

I offered the government a special version of SlideMagic with minimum font size 36 and 10-slide page limit.

Source on Twitter.

The award ceremony of a piano competition builds up to the climax of announcing the #1. But keeping the suspense is not always right. In investor pitches, keeping your audience guessing what it is you actually do, is not a smart thing to do (previous post).

The other day I came across another situation where it did not really work. Email invitation: important org update during the weekly update call. So everyone expects the announcement of a promotion or departure of someone senior. Leave the anecdote, intro, buildup aside. Say what is happening in the first sentence, then provide compliments, congratulations, thank you’s.

Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash

Here in Israel we had an eventful swearing in of a new government yesterday. The “swearing in” was preceded by a lot of swearing, heckling, and screaming. One of the members of parliament tossed his prepared speech and instead delivered a spontaneous one on the spot, denouncing the behavior of some of his colleagues.

In the world of presentations, many probably have observed this. You work for months on a document/presentation, think carefully about every slide, and then, when put on the spot without your slides, speaker notes and/or projector, you delivery the whole story eloquently and seemingly without any preparation.

Well, not really without preparation. You have been building this story for months in your head. Without the work, the spontaneous presentation would never have worked. It always a good health check for your presentation, “ditch the deck”, and scribble your story if you had to tell it right now without any support. Then compare notes honestly.

Spontaneous speeches are not for everyone. You need to have the plot very clearly in your mind and avoid being side tracked on tangents, losing your energy and ending the story without the punch.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

There is a strong divide between “tech people” and “business people” in startups. Usually people start in “tech” and then move on to “business”. Tech people usually do not want to get into anything “business” and/or pretend not to understand “business”.

Maybe all of this goes back to high school / university where the introvert technology student never was accepted in the extrovert world of fraternities. Later on their careers they were just amazed by all these people that knew all these important sounding concepts and knew exactly what to say in meetings.

Having made the unusual reverse path from “business” to “tech” some advice:

• Yes, every technical founder actually needs to understand a few basics of business. It is like having some proficiency in English, know how to ride a bike, drive a car. It is essential in “business” but also in your personal life.

  • Being able to understand a financial statement: P&L, assets, liabilities, equity, debt, cash flows. It is not hard at all. What matters is not so much the technical terms, but the general approach and philosophy behind it.
  • Understanding the basics of law: agreements, liability, ownership. A tiny 2 month course in engineering school I did was probably one of the most important subjects I took on.

• Ignore and don’t be intimidated by any sophisticated sounding buzzword or concept, if you don’t understand it, ask what it means, or Google the term and you will be surprised how quickly the bubble pops. This is the equivalent of “tech” people claiming their server supports AI-driven cache invalidation (Business people: this does not make sense).

• Every one can make a pitch or tell a story. Your “tech” background does not automatically imply that you should give the pen to someone else. The flip side of this though is that you should invest time and effort in it, rather than using your background as an excuse not to bother.

• A career path that start in “tech” does not necessarily have to end in “business”. “Business” is not more important than “tech”. People often confuse “management” with “business”. Some people like running things (management) and that career is measured by how many people report to you, and/or what amount of revenue your are responsible for. There are other careers in “business” where managing people is less important.