SlideMagic Blog

Most companies have some sort of corporate PowerPoint presentation template sitting on the file system. It consists of a title page, some trackers, some bullet point layouts, some picture slides. The template probably looks ago, but as soon as employees start to use it, this is no longer the case.

Why?

• Most templates are designed as an afterthought, after the logo, web site, letterhead and business card have been approved
• PowerPoint templates are created by designers who understand graphics design, web/print design software, but NOT PowerPoint and as a result a lot of technicalities go wrong
• But most importantly: templates are designed on a blank canvas, encouraging the designer to “do something” with all that white space.

A better approach: start with an actual presentation. The general company introduction, a product sales pitch, last quarter’s analyst presentation. Make that deck look perfect and put on the on the file system as a starting point.

1. The template is designed around actual content, rather than content being forced to fit around a template
2. Most companies need very specific templates. Consumer goods companies: products/packaging demos, market shares and sales across many channels, consumer research data. Pharma: scientific clinical trial data. Chemicals: process layouts, project maps. Consulting firms: fancy frameworks.

I am contemplating some new ideas for SlideMagic to make the above all a bit easier.

Photo by MagicPattern on Unsplash

Contracts and other legal documents look horrible and are impossible to read.

Even documents produced by the world’s most prestigious law firms are basically Microsoft Word files in Times Roman font with hard coded formating (i.e., no style sheets or templates, but text is formatted directly to be centered, bold, italic.)

But the content is even worse than the design. Complicated sentences and unclear paragraph structures requires you to look for hidden clauses that could be hugely important for the meaning of the contract. (The legal profession probably has an interest in keeping it this way).

Two improvements:

• Bring the design, the look and feel, back to 2021. Fonts, white space, paragraph hierarchies.
• Add a non-binding layman “so what” summary before each paragraph, backed up by the legal code.

As a result contracts will be shorter to negotiate, and people might actually read the terms of use. I might have a look at the SlideMagic terms of use and see if I can give an example…

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Eye contact is essential for any presentation. Just think of the speakers you have watched who were staring at the ceiling, the floor, or their slides on the projector.

And eye contact means eye contact. Lock in with a member of audience for a few sentences. Quickly moving from one audience member to the other will make it look like you are looking for someone in the room.

This eye contact with strangers will feel awkward for the presenter, but it does not for the audience. There is a way to make it slightly less uncomfortable though. Call it “imaginary” eye contact. Look at random spots in the (dark) audience, for away to the back. Look in between 2 members of the audience. The audience thinks you are connecting with someone, but you don’t really.

In video calls you need to be aware of the camera as your point of eye contact. If you are looking at the screen, the audience will see that you are “looking down”. The closer you are to the camera, the stronger this effect is. If you are relatively far away from your camera and/or laptop, it becomes hard to tell what you are actually looking at.

One other solution is using an external camera and a teleprompter (Seth Godin created the shopping list for you). You look straight into an angled semi transparent mirror, behind which you position your camera. Direct eye contact news anchor style. This setup is great for one on one discussions. But the picture in the teleprompter is relatively small, so it works less well for group calls and presentations where you have to follow along with slides on the screen.

Mostly thanks to COVID-19, the venture capital industry is going global. Which means that VCs are increasingly willing to invest across borders. Some implications for investor pitches.

VCs get the confidence to invest further away partly because of increased specialisation. They know exactly what sort of deals to look for, have a very deep understanding of technology in that particular field, and as a result can size up opportunities easily, even at long distance.

[P.S. Something similar happened in my bespoke presentation design business, where I specialised in a very specific type of presentation which is highly similar across borders, and usually have very similar type of clients. This was both important in terms of deciding whether you can do the project, winning a pitch for a project, and making the call whether this unknown client in a different country would eventually pay my fees].

Even more than before, as a startup, you need to do your homework and select potential investors carefully. The upside of this extra work is that if your company fits a specific investor profile, you are very likely to make it through the first investor screen, people will actually look at your deck. “Hmmm, these guys are not from Palo Alto” is no longer relevant. The cost of a brief Zoom call to check you out in person is much lower than a “coffee chat”, so you might score that one as well if the field is relevant.

For a highly knowledgeable investor with an office 5 time zones away, that first deck might have to be more specific than a nice mysterious teaser inviting her to schedule a phone call. You can cut slides with general industry background, but probably need to add data that investors in a specific technology segment are expecting to see (experience from looking at hundreds of other companies in your specific sector).

In my current (stealth) side project I need to build many dashboards to show information in different cuts and slices. For me, it is a very interesting experience as I can apply the full arsenal of my slide design experience, but now with dynamic data. I control the full stack of technology: what information to store, how to slice it, what information to show, and how to show it.

Each of the above usually reside in a different person. Management consultants spend time recutting and re-combining data manually in spreadsheets because systems can’t do it. So called “BI” applications take data from systems and spit out an endless amount of bar and pie charts in the hope that it will give some insight in where things are going. Traditional front-end web designers can make data look pretty, but don’t really understand what data is required.

The principles of a good dashboard and a good slide are completely the same. Every detail is important. What information to show, what rounding, what order, what sort of graph, what headings, bold, not bold, margins, right aligned, left aligned., how to group things, where to put subdivisions, etc. etc.

But once you get it right, it will work for a long time.

Photo by Cody Fitzgerald on Unsplash

Sometimes, you can be so absorbed in your own story that your forget to put in the obvious in your pitch deck.

Yesterday I overheard a healthcare VC reviewing a pitch deck for a new diagnostic tool. Pages and pages about the impressive team, the excellent trial results and robust data, until what the tool actually was diagnosing was revealed on page 15.

An investor who is scrolling through a deck to find an answer to an obvious question is not paying much attention to other information that is put on the slides.

Maybe in this case, this answer was actually written somewhere in page 1 of the deck, but remember that when it comes to presentations, the audience is always right.

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This chart shows 2 interesting things. One, Finland was pretty happy under lock down. Two, an interesting way to put data labels on a stacked column chart. The small boxes are always a problem in a regular format. Here you get the combination of the visual effect of the size of the boxes, versus the table of the actual information. This could be inspiration for a future SlideMagic expansion.

I would do some things different though. That row of zeros at the top does not add much. The flags make the whole chart even more busy. And given that this is a comparison, I would have shown the data as a stacked bar chart.

If you were to use me as a bespoke designer, I would actually show this data on a map of Europe, color-coding different countries with maybe only the some of the 2 blue data series. The geographical clustering of the countries is interesting. In addition, I would combine it with one stat about the health impact of COVID in these countries.

If you do not have the software and/or the time to make a chart like this, the solution is easy, take off the data labels completely and make a straightforward stacked column chart.

I found this chart on Twitter, without quoting a source, the format looks like a page in some document by the European Union though.

Following on yesterday’s post, here are some examples of slides you could get rid of when you want to make your deck shorter, without diluting the message.

They key idea is to see the difference between an analysis deck and a story deck. The first is your working document and contains all the information, data, that you needed to get to your conclusion. Everything is organized, logical, referenced, backed up. The story deck’s sole purpose is to get your audience to do something, most of the times this will be moving on a sales or investment process to the next stage (i.e., land the invitation for a zoom call).

Some stuff that usually sits in your analysis deck, and is not essential in your story deck (in random order):

• Detailed competitor analysis, especially when they follow a repetitive framework page after page, competitor after competitor
• Historical analysis, all the milestones your company went through in the past 5 years
• Market backgrounds that do not add insight to what is generally known (facebook user base developments, mobile phone penetration, etc.).
• Any sort of business school framework that was once useful on a whiteboard, but now feels a bit forced because it does not exactly fit your situation (what the audience as you put up the SWOT slide)
• Scenario and variance analysis and/or backup of financial assumptions
• Screenshots of stages in your app that do not really differ from anyone else’s (the log in page for example)
• Etc.

Overhead: “No, don’t summarize the presentation, putting more info on fewer slides will just make it harder to read, just send the whole thing”. I see a number of ways you can make a deck shorter.

Compressing. The common approach to shortening a presentation is to take the shortening literally: reduce the physical number of pages. Smaller fonts, combining the text chart and the bar chart on one page, etc. The resulting deck contains the same amount of information, and would in theory take the same amount of time to present.

Dumbing down. The second approach is to make the story simpler. Replace complex chart with simpler headlines, eliminating complex plot tangents. Your presentation shorter, but it lost some information.

Plot writing. Here you try to extract the story from the pile of data and slides. You view your presentation deck as a completely different document than your project presentation. It does not have to be exhaustive, the logic flow does not have to be business school strategy-like, not every strategic option deserves equal wait.

Most people start with compressing. Then, after reading presentation blogs like these, realize that pretty pictures and big words look so much better, but end up dumbing down their deck. Becoming a plot writer is the challenge.

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Yesterday I moved over all email addresses that opted in to a new email update platform. You should have received your regular email updates, just with a slightly different look (the design still needs work). If not, you can re-subscribe here, or reach out to me directly.

Photo by Carol Jeng on Unsplash