SlideMagic Blog

I remember doing a project for a TV broadcaster back at my days at McKinsey. Because the client was in the business of communication, it was very picky on how reports should be written and presented.

Presentations are part of your corporate culture. If they look sloppy, are full of pages with boring bullet points, contain incomprehensible diagrams, are loaded with buzzwords, it says something about the organisation that produces them, especially when you requires staff and customers to sit through them.

Maybe you invested a lot in that first meeting sales presentation, but you can’t keep it up in the decks for the 2nd, 3rd or 4th due diligence meeting. This is where you show your real face.

These follow up decks do not have to be master pieces of graphics design, they still should look decent, consistent and on-brand.

(SlideMagic is here to help).

Photo by Raphael Renter on Unsplash

When you page down through all the slides after you completed your deck, you can feel the excitement (or lack of it) they bring up to tell your story.

• Great slide
• Great slide
• Great slide
• Ahh, here we go into the clinical data
• Great slide
• Great slide

Certain slides ended up in your deck at a certain spot for a good reason at the time. But your story might have moved on, things that were an issue might have become obvious, or maybe the message that chart brings is now a different one. When you get that “aah, that one” moment when clicking through your deck, it is time to make some changes.

Every slide should be an invitation for you to jump in add something exciting to what you already presented.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

That’s the one that is sitting on the Zoom screen for 30 minutes when you take questions. Here are things that are a bit boring to look at during that time:

• THANK YOU!
• Q&A
• Appendix
• A super detailed recap of the entire presentation in 15 bullet points
• A super detailed Gantt chart of the next steps
• The chart with your weakest data that you had to pull up to answer a question
• The chart with the calculation mistake that triggered a question

The last slide is a billboard that can get engraved in people’s memory like a Super Bowl ad (with a slightly smaller audience). So better choices are a memorable visual that you used somewhere in your presentation to explain the opportunity, a nice product shot. Make sure you navigate back to it when needed.

Photo by Jaxon Lott on Unsplash

I came across a pitch for a business idea that involves a few different businesses, with a number of different people.

The natural way to tell the story is a build-up: here is this interesting problem, that is a massive opportunity, that only we can solve with this interesting technology.

Investors are different from viewers of an action-packed thriller. The moment the “opening title” starts rolling, they start evaluating the investment opportunity, trying to identify the obvious strengths, the obvious weaknesses, and the question marks.

So for investors, you might have to skip to the last page of your thriller and uncover the mystery, before starting your pitch. Here are the 3 businesses, this is what they roughly do, and these are the people involved for each one of them. No let’s start from the beginning.

Photo by Quinn Buffing on Unsplash

Professional designers can do it all:

1. Give slides a professional look
2. Come up with innovative visualisation concepts that make messages stand out
3. Use advanced software features to craft technically complex slides

The amateur designer is in a different position and needs to pick her battles. That amazing visual concept of the elephant riding a convertible car does not really work if it does not look picture perfect. That very clever consulting diagram does not really contribute when it actually does not support your message.

You do not need to be a graphics designer to ensure number 1, a decent professional look of your slides. Simple designs can look great (look at Swiss graphic design for example).

When in doubt, drop ambitions on point 2, and 3, and but never compromise on 1. (And this is exactly what SlideMagic is trying to do).

I am intrigued by the dynamics surrounding how people make the decision whether to take the COVID vaccine or not. Unlike most other countries, people have the luxury to ponder this decision here in Israel. The government has a real communication challenge here.

We spoke about segments before. If you are a fundamental anti-vaxxer, or have severe doubts about the vaccine safety, you are unlikely to be convinced.

There is a segment of young people though that “can not be bothered”. The personal risk of getting severe COVID is very low. They consider it the same as joining public roads every day. You consciously take this calculated risk, knowing that the probability of getting stuck in a severe accident is very small, especially when you drive safely.

What people forget, is the indirect impact. Big number of people x tiny percentage is still a big number of people at country level. And filled up intensive care units, trigger more lockdowns, more closed restaurants, bars, parties, zoom schools, etc.

I compared the two scenarios in the chart below (search “COVID” in the SlideMagic app to use something like this logic flow in your own presentations for other topics, also put it in the web template bank, download it here).

“Slide magician”, that is what you become right after using SlideMagic for a while?

Recently, I had to go back to PowerPoint for wireframing some new app screens (it is this “free hand” doodling that is made impossible by design in SlideMagic). Here are some of my impressions.

• PowerPoint has gotten much more polished. I do not use PowerPoint that often anymore, and you see improvement in the details of the UI elements (I have developed an eye for app design now).
• Some elements are a bit intrusive. I had to work hard to save my work on a local drive rather than the Azure cloud folder, and the “AI-powered” design ideas with bold pictures and graphics took some time to switch off.

The biggest change was in my head though and has nothing to do with PowerPoint. I have become so accustomed to making slides in the SlideMagic-style (boxes and grids), that I started trying to make these slides in PowerPoint as well. And here I noticed how hard that was.

Something interesting is happening. I start to ‘forget’ certain workflows in PowerPoint, things are getting a bit rusty, compared to 3 years ago when I would fly across the user interface with the help of my custom toolbars. Maybe that is the same starting position as most PowerPoint users who are not professional designers.

Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

A follow-up on yesterday’s post about convincing the center when it comes to COVID vaccines.

Most people who create presentations are not marketeers or PR professionals. They hear people (including presentation designers like me), talk about how important it is to think about your audience when crafting slides. And when thinking about the audience, they don’t have much sophisticated data. Insights are likely to be basic: “They do not believe that we can get traction with our search engine that needs to beat Google”.

Global Web Index did research in people’s attitudes towards a COVID vaccine, the results of the findings are put in this visualisation by Visual Capitalist. The main message to me about this pretty but busy graphic is that it is complex, things are not clear cut.

Here is my summary of the segments, and a possible communication strategy. (You can find this slide in the online template bank, or search for ‘covid’ in the SlideMagic desktop app)

Most business presentations will not have the luxury of a detailed audience analysis, but it is an interesting thought process of running through an imaginary one.

This posts keeps on coming back, usually around elections. This time around the trigger is the debate among “younger” Israelis (below 60) whether they should take the COVID vaccine or not (widely available here in Tel Aviv).

Normally speaking, the risk of serious COVID complications should be relatively low for individuals in this group. With the immediate threat out of the way, people can start arguing. Messaging groups are now a favorite channel for heated debates about the pros and cons of vaccination.

Some points to remember when persuading people:

• Focus on the center, the people who are in doubt. It is 100% certain that you can convince a die-hard anti-vaxxer, or genetics professor to change her mind in a few message exchanges
• “Screaming”, aggression, calling people on the other side of your argument stupid and incompetent is not going to score you sympathy points (and help you become more convincing).
• People in the center are likely to be reasonable people, so wild conspiracy theories or unusual scientific “evidence” might not stick very well

All the above applies to investor and sales presentation as well. Pick your battles and focus on the people who could change their minds

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

Here in Tel Aviv, I was lucky enough to receive my second vaccination with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The whole world is watching us:

• High vaccine availability
• Advanced healthcare infrastructure, with a centralized IT system (any medical professional can punch in my ID number in her computer and get all my medical records on the spot, this would raise some privacy issues in other countries)
• (Unfortunately) we are set up to deal with national crises and get organised quickly

There is lots of data available, cases, hospitalizations, difficult cases, casualties, by age, religious background, location, total cases, new cases, etc., etc. And everyone is looking at the top line number, will the big case graph go down and can we declare victory over the virus. Unfortunately so far, it stays more or less stable (at high levels).

This is a typical case of data overload. If you want to see whether the vaccine works you need to compare 2 things like for like: people who got vaccinated, and people who did not. And when you do that (pretty much like a clean medical trial), it shows that the vaccine is overwhelmingly effective, the same size is just not the entire Israeli population.

One such example is hospital admission data from a Tel Aviv hospital. Not millions of people, but a small, isolated group that you can compare. The original chart is here:

I did a quick makeover of this slide in SlideMagic.

• Colours are consistent
• Everything is properly spaced
• A better way to communicate the ‘1’ exception case