SlideMagic Blog

Some slides can stick around forever in a presentation. Over months, maybe even years, they turn into mental placeholders for you, the presenter. You see the slide from the corner of your eye, and you move effortlessly into a section of your pitch.

But the content of the slide might actually no longer resemble what you are speaking about for someone who sees it for the very first time. Time for some spring cleaning in your pitch deck.

Photo by Arno Smit on Unsplash

A heads up.

Google is shutting down the email subscription service of Feedburner. It probably does not like blogs very much (The Google RSS reader was suspended as well a few years ago). As a result, I need to move the email subscriptions of this blog to a new platform.

The only thing you will notice is probably the format of the email, the rest should work as usual.

A bit of a technical post. Google Docs is changing the way it renders documents. Instead of HTML, it will move to something called “canvas” (no, not Canva, the design platform), partly because of the same limitations of web page layouts that I have been battling with SlideMagic.

HTML was created in the 1980s to render text and links in web browsers. Over the years many features were added that improved its graphics capabilities. The result are the modern web pages, mobile apps, and desktop apps such as SlideMagic that we know today.

HTML is great for displaying content on a huge range of devices, different sizes, different process speeds, different resolutions, different generations of technology. The NYT front page will look great on all these screens.

But graphics applications require more than that. Specifying the exact crop of an image, exactly setting the font size to prevent an orphan word of a title dropping to the next line. What-you-see-is-what-you get editing. Copy-pasting of text or images. Exactly scaling up or down a layout rather than changing the point sizes of fonts with steps.

In SlideMagic, I had to apply a lot of tricks to get things to work, and basically created my own (x, y) coordinate space to do what I want. It looks like Google is going a similar way. My approach is to use vector graphics, that can scale to any size you want while being able to detect mouse clicks on elements.

Google is taking it further and moving to a complete blank “canvas”. Everything is “painted” bit by bit, letters are drawn, images are merged in, selection boxes are merged in with the document. To drag a box of text, Google will have to write software that fills the pixels of the box with the underlying pixels, then redraw all the pixels a bit to the right.

Building on a great blog post by Seth Godin.

In my (previous) career as a presentation designer, I walked the path from selling hours to selling presentations, but I did not start with this “pricing for value” right away. Finding your pricing strategy as a freelancer is tricky, especially if your field of work is not yet well established (which was the case with freelance presentation design back in the mid 2000s).

What did I do?

• At McKinsey, we were billing hours, and I made an estimate what someone at my level (just before partner) could charge per day without the direct McKinsey brand. That daily rate was the input for project proposals priced per day, with a directional, but not binding budget. If the client gave an unclear project briefing, insisted on tons of meetings and revisions, or had lots of iterations, that was her problem. (I always was confident enough to offer a full refund for unsatisfactory work though, and there were probably only 2 projects in 15 years that took me up on that offer).
• This daily rate soon translated into the dreaded hourly rate, and I was truly selling time. Not scaleable and instantly comparable to all other by-the-hour consultants that work at a client. It was important though for me to find out how much time it actually took me to create presentations. Which type of projects I could do amazing work in very little, and where I delivered less “bang for the buck”. Most designers could calculate their time by pages that needed make overs, each page so many minutes. In my case, I had to come up with the whole story (concept) and then execute it in PowerPoint and get the client to buy into it. Far less predictable. Bit by bit, I moved to projects I liked most, clients I connected with most, and noticed that I got much, much faster at my work.
• As I got busier, I could raise my hourly rates (pure demand/supply, “sorry, no problem, let’s work together some other day”, but arguments about hourly rates, I hated those. So I switched to project pricing now that I had the confidence to size up project properly. I always did keep an hour book keeping in the background to keep myself in check, but never used it to renegotiate projects budgets with clients. It was much easier to raise prices for entire projects than hourly rates (which usually needed to be approved by purchasing departments)

An interesting perspective from AVC:

1. Three-hour internal strategy session with VC partners worked great in person
2. Shorter follow-on investment decision meeting with Singapore-based startup worked great remote

I think we will get smarter which meetings work remote and which ones don’t.

Why does meeting type 1 work in person?

• People are in the same location anyway, and can all be in the same room (no “zooming in”)
• A great setting to bounce off ideas between people who know each other well, have worked with each other for a long time,
• That meeting required a significant amount of time to go through things (3 hours on Zoom… no). Also the relative cost of a commute for a 3 hour meeting is lower, than spending the same time in traffic for a 30 minute chat.
• The type of interactions in this meeting are probably “messy”: lots of n-to-n question, answers and discussions. (Unlike a 1 to n presentation with a few specific questions)
• It depends on personality: extroverts love to go back to long in-person problem solving sessions, introverts might not

Meeting 2 is the opposite:

• 1 to n presentation with Q&A
• Predictable content and questions to cover
• The meeting was shorter, and maybe stacked with other similar type meetings.
• And the obvious one: people were a continent apart, and the meeting (or even a call) might not have happened if it weren’t for Zoom.

The short pitch via Zoom (even if you are close physically) has opened up a real new way to connect. In a call investors can’t really size up the team. With this uncertainty, a full meeting with filled with small talk and other logistics is too expensive and will not happen. The Zoom call fits right in between.

If everyone is on a Zoom connection, the meeting works, we have gotten used how to deal with the new setup. If a few people are present in person, and a some others are “Zooming in”, the meetings dynamics are broken.

When planning meetings for next year, think about the time, money, and the environment wasted in travel, and prioritize which meetings really have to be in person, and which ones can be done remote. If you go for in-person, everyone has to show up though. Another reason to think twice about that option

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

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.