SlideMagic Blog

You have that big presentation coming up and you cannot get yourself to get started on it. Too many distractions, and too few ideas what to actually do.

Some ideas:

• Open a little (paper or digital) scratch pad somewhere and start jotting down ideas weeks before your presentation. Presentation design and storytelling are creative processes that need some brain incubation time. Your subconscious mind will chew on ideas you started without you realizing it. It is possible to crank out slides the night before the presentation, it is not possible to crank out creative ideas under last minute time pressure. Start early, even with scribbles and notes
• If you have a bit of time, postpone looking at existing decks and start fresh. Maybe the thought of having to iterate that same old boring, stale presentation is preventing you from getting into it.
• The other extreme: make one really great “killer” slide for which you have a clear idea and push it all the way to the finished product. Ignore story flow and its overall context, just make it. This ice breaker or sneak peek of what slides in your deck could look like might get you over that initial writers block and get motivated to get started.

I just caught myself adding a few words to a sentence that added no meaning whatsoever to the slide, but the layout of the whole page just looked so much better… Usually, it’s the other way around.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Something does not seem right in this photo:

The Bidens look gigantic compared to the Carters. What happened? The photographer used a wide angle lens to fit everyone in the frame, but was standing very close to the subjects. The result: distortion. Look at Jimmy Carter’s shoes, they seem at the scale scale as Jill Biden.

This is the opposite effect of the “Corona crop” where taking a picture of people with a zoom lens, and then cropping a small shot, suggests a very dense crowd when people are not that close to each other.

If you are not an honest journalist but rather need a picture of a dense crowd for your presentation, you can use the “Corona crop” effect to your advantage, the resulting image might not reflect the truth, but it does not look weird. The “Carter crop” on the other hand, will always look distorted and unnatural.

Musicians learn other people’s music, and then use it to create their own style. Architects, painters, writers, chefs, follow a similar trajectory. But even if you are not Beethoven, you have probably acquired skills this way. Carpenters, teachers, mechanics.

When it comes to presentations, use this process as well. Develop a (very small) set of slide layouts that you know how to use well. It becomes a visual vocabulary that you can use to express pretty much anything.

This is why people that spend some time at a management consulting firm can churn out all these slides without effort. This is why simply copying a slide template out of the blue and trying to fit it to your situation rarely gives good results.

SlideMagic has done the hard work for you. You get a consistent style that you can adopt as your presentation style, and each slide is simply a small tweak of a language you have learned to understand.

The highschool teacher of my daughter handed out small cards to the class. Every student was allowed to fill it with whatever they feel like and take it to the upcoming test, or… sell it to the teacher for 3 points extra. The teacher’s sneaky strategy: making that card is actually 80% of the work of mastering the material for the test.

This is a bit like holding a small piece of paper in your hand during the wedding speech, or peaking at the speaker notes when doing a stand up presentation. In the world of Zoom, it can even be more blunt: lots of cheat sheets around your screen that nobody can see.

There are 2 ways to approach these cheat sheets:

1. Write down the actual content that you want to remember, literally.
2. Fill it with little hints that make you remember things.

The second strategy is more effective, it is easier to remember things, it takes less space (or time to look at your cheat monitor) and you will present things in a more natural way (reading out bullets from your speaker notes is even worse practice than reading them from your slide).

Maybe write “P.O.P.” or “pop” when the three words you need to remember start with a P, an O, and another P. This is similar to the strategy that memory champions use: put things you need to remember in an imaginary 3D space. (Number 42 sits under the pink elephant, next to the grand piano).

Zoom is introducing some “immersive” backgrounds to group video calls. A nice try, but something does not look completely right in this image:

It is very hard to get 3D photoshops right. If it does not look perfect, I recommend not even giving it a try in your presentation. It is like handing the pen to your 4 year old for one of your 30 slides. Instant loss of professionalism.

Why is it tricky for Zoom? Headshots are taking at different distances from the camera, and the camera position of the room is very high, in an environment with a very strong unnatural 3D distortion.

If I were Zoom, I would keep it simpler, with an artificial rendering of headshots, taking out their distracting backgrounds of bookshelves, kitchens and children’s toys, and paying careful attention to the relative size of the heads, position of the eye line.

Here is a (sad) chart from today’s Economist:

The Economist put the data series that carries the main message of the chart at the bottom, pushing up all the other data series. My preferred option is the other way around, put it on top. In that way you can see all other regions staying pretty much stable, while India grows strongly.

(Unrelated). India has a very large population, and you need to look at COVID in that perspective. In terms of caseload, it is still behind other regions (such as Europe). The problem is the quality of the healthcare system, and the availability of basics such as oxygen in emergency rooms. Europe could handle the load (more or less), India is in a far worse position. Also, the India stats are averages for the entire country. On a region-by-region basis, there are likely to be places with much bigger caseloads than Europe. Let’s hope that it gets better.

I stumbled on the slide below by @ING_economics.

This is a slide intended for reading, rather than serve as the backdrop for a TED Talk. It can be improved on a number of fronts:

• Move the aspect ratio to 16 x 9 to make more space for text in the boxes
• Actually reduce the font size (we are reading anyway), to make the text fit better in the boxes, with more white space, and less irregular sentence wrapping
• Make the rounded edges less extreme
• Make the dark colour accents a bit less strong
• And most importantly, fix those misalignments that make me cringe…

I did a quick re-do in SlideMagic, with is particularly powerful when it comes to text tables. I added the slide to the SlideMagic library, search for “economics” in the desktop and it will show up.

Apple is known for setting the standard when it comes to product presentations. It is interesting to see what they produced in yesterday’s event within the constraints of COVID. A pre-recorded, pre-produced long-format “television commercial” without a live audience.

As we know from Zoom calls, webinars-style presentation of slides with a presenter voice over can be pretty boring. Adding a small picture-in-picture video of the presenter makes things a little bit more interesting, but it still does not capture the energy of a live presentation.

Apple used an auditorium-style camera position in some of the presentations:

This enables the speaker to walk around, to create a much more interesting presentation. Big budget, multiple camera editing completed the effort.

This is something you could copy, if your business has a large neutral wall, record yourself event without slides in the background, peeking at a small presenter laptop, and later on edit the slides in the background. Or if you have an amphitheater around (if you are a university student), you are lucky and can use that.

I guess this could also be a good idea for some future startup, that maybe can record you in a much smaller setting, and add the digitally created auditorium in a later stage. I see Prezi moving in the direction of video now, but it tries to make the slides more dynamic and exciting. I think this opposite approach is more effective: very calm slides with an energetic presenter.

The aspect ratio of a slide influences the type of layout you come up with. Over the years, presentation slide aspect ratio tend to follow the dimensions of computer screens. The first computers typically had a 4x3 screen ratio (80 x 25 characters of a punch card, sort of resembling an A4/letter format, and probably easier to design when you need to redirect electromagnetic beams in pre-LCD traditional televisions/monitors), while modern machines have wide screens in 16 x 9 ratios (the preferred format in movies).

A 4x3 canvas is very different from a 16x9 canvas when it comes to design (spoiler, I prefer the 4x3).

Most diagrams and frameworks work best when width and height are about the same. When you look at many of the classical management consulting frameworks, you can see that they were originally designed in a 4x3 aspect ratio. Modern interpretations simply stretch them out, making the whole thing look unbalanced.

Process diagrams and tables on the other hand, work great in widescreen format. There is a lot of space for left-to-right steps or columns with information.

What to do?

• There is nothing wrong with white space. If your diagram needs a 1x1 aspect ratio, put it in the middle of your 16x9 slide and resist the temptation to fill the left and right sides with text or other distracting clutter
• Alternatively, consider putting the titles of your slide on the side, creating a mover vertical canvas for the body of your slide (SlideMagic can switch seamlessly between different slide title layouts).