SlideMagic Blog

A good sales presentation is important for landing a deal, but other factors play a role as well. It is important to understand the dynamics of the decision makers. Investing a lot of time and effort in making slides prettier is a waste if the decision has nothing to do with the presentation.

Some thoughts that can go on in the back of the mind of the decision maker:

• “These slides look totally 1990s and are full of typos, they are not serious professionals”
• “Great slides, but I have no idea what they are trying to say”
• “They never seem to understand/answer my questions”
• “They are always 5 minutes late, what about future project deadlines”
• “Better play it safe and hire a big brand for the project, I need a promotion at the end of the year”
• “Sorry, but I cannot see myself working with this woman managing the project for the next year”
• “Hopefully she notices my favourite tie I always wear on the days of the tender meetings”
• “We need on the ground presence in China, and I already told them it is a deal breaker if they don’t have it”
• “They do not know what they are doing, they charge far too little for all they are doing”
• “Again trying to argue why we need to spend $10m when our budget is $5m”
• “The other contender offered a summer job position for the daughter of my boss”
• “Last night’s venue was a bit shady, but they kept their promise and opened a 1996 Dom Perignon at the end”
• “All these small calculation errors, not a big deal in a presentation, but a catastrophy for the project”

Either you make a perfect digital fake image, or you go for a less ambitious slide layout. I laugh when you seen an obvious Photoshop mistake, I cringe when I see a 95% correct image. “Something is not right”

In the image above, the light on the cars, the camera angles, something is not working. Ultra high definition monitors now also give away the artificial digital backgrounds of movies.

In a few years time, software will have solved this problem. Until then, your presentation slides, web sites, and other marketing material will look like the work of a young kid who slowly starts to add the 3rd dimensions to its drawings. (In the early years children do not actively notice the concept of perspective, and things getting smaller towards the horizon).

Today I reached the point where I have much improved, fully working, stand-alone version of SlideMagic running on my machine, every line of code put in by myself. That was quite a journey…

• I started with experimenting with PowerPoint macros to automate some processes for the template store
• Then I moved on to Windows and C# to start writing a 100% accurate conversion plugin that can read and convert SlideMagic files to native PowerPoint and was considering expanding the plugin to cover a full slide edit engine inside PowerPoint
• I got the sense that Microsoft is not putting all its energy into C#/com plugins for Office, but rather is focusing on Javascript. At the same time, I discovered Electron (owned by Microsoft…), that would allow me to write an app that would run on both Mac (early adopters) and Windows (the market).
• Next phase: learning JavaScript and coding a stand alone SlideMagic to PowerPoint converter, outside of PowerPoint.
• Then came the big leap: why not write the whole app from scratch…. Writing a converter is relatively straight forward: you read the file and translate it. An app where the user can click an unlimited amount of items is a different piece of cake…
• Bit by bit, I made progress: all app modes in one screen, live what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing, hard core image cropping and processing, drag-and-drop (tricky), shift-click selecting multiple objects (app complexity to the power n), and a complete PDF rendering engine in addition to the PowerPoint conversion.

Most people who go up the career ladder in big companies have no choice but to delegate the activities they were good at and got them promoted. (This provides problems for brilliant stock analysts, architects, coders, designers and other creative people…).

One thing will stay with you though: making presentations. Good managers know how to tell a story, and it is almost impossible to leave creating the story to your junior team. Yes, a little help can be useful to run the numbers and fill in the data, but when it comes to sequencing the points and getting it just right, you are on your own.

Sometimes it looks like you delegated presentation design. But the old-fashioned senior manager who is micro managing the slide production process by making corrections on slide print outs and handing them over to a large team of secretarial staff is still writing the presentation herself, when it comes down to the actual content. She just could not be bothered to learn the basics of PowerPoint herself and is using an army of people to make up for it.

SlideMagic 2.0 is trying to solve this: creating a tool that enables busy people to jot down their story in a decent format quickly.

Photo by Sagar Dani on Unsplash

This chart appeared to today in Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, showing the revenues of soccer team Ajax Amsterdam:

There is lot wrong with it in my opinion:

• Mixing cumulative and non-cumulative
• A missing final total that leaves the chart “dangling” at the end
• The typography of the horizontal axis (the matches above the columns are actually much better to use as the x-axis)
• Than the “extra” bit at the end which makes a comparison to revenues over the past 10 years

Image via WikiPedia

Harvard Business Review is bombarding (spamming?) my Instagram feed with this ad almost every day (Google shows that the chart was first created somewhere in 2016):

It is a very busy chart, so not to be used in your next TED Talk, but for close-up reading these heat maps are actually pretty good. This is a pretty decent summary of what much have been a huge scoring spreadsheet.

• Only a few colours (suspiciously similar to the SlideMagic look…)
• Careful attention is paid to sorting and grouping rows and columns

Some more improvements are possible:

• There is too much text in the descriptions of the boxes: we know that we are talking about sectors, no need to remind us, and there is too much lingo in there (“digitally engaging”).
• Column headings can be shortened, especially that long word “digital” can be lost here and there
• I would move the “assets, usage, and labor” headings (nice short ones) to the top to make the link with the column headings clearer.

This boxy chart will be a good challenge for my code of SlideMagic 2.0, I am going to try it.

Photo by Guillaume Bolduc on Unsplash

I just returned from a wonderful bar mitzvah trip with my son that took me to all kind of car-related venues throughout Germany and Italy. Upon return I did two things: open the code of SlideMagic 2.0 to remember where I left things, and recording some musical ideas. Both were surprisingly positive.

Taking a break does wonderful things for creativity.

• Your brain continues to think / process thins in the background without you realising it
• Often, you dig yourself in a hole of small problems that make you lose the ability to see the big picture
• Rest is always a good thing.

I use this all the time in presentation design. A few weeks before the presentation deadline, I force myself to think really hard about the presentation. Make rough sketches, write down story lines. Then I put things away before working on the presentation in earnest at a later time. This small investment of time pays off handsomely later. The key here is to make a real effort in the beginning, not just a quick though experiment.

Image via WikiPedia

The Internet is full with PowerPoint template packs. Some are plain ugly, but others are actually very pretty. These templates are usually created by designers who are good at design, but have little understanding of business. (When the template is called “business template” you should be warned).

These templates look great as a template, but as soon as a non-designer touches them, the magic disappears. This is partly the fault of the non-designer, PowerPoint itself, and the template.

The most common problem non-designers have is item counts: my problem has 4 issues, not 3, I want to add another dimension, how to put in the business units? Simple actions like adding or deleting a row in a carefully balanced graphical composition is tricky.

In addition, designers stick to a subtle consistent style, properly without realising it. Fonts are a certain size, white spaces, margins, composition. It all looks right. The non-designer does not have this natural eye. Charts look somehow different and inconsistent, even if you followed the “rules” of the template.

Most “business” slides are not 3D staircases or beautiful maps: your quarterly budget presentation needs tables, graphs, and boxes. But a template with just boxes does not look very attractive on the PowerPoint template market place.

In my own template store I tried to make an effort to do it right, it might look less spectacular at first sight, but the design will be 500x more useful. Still, things are not perfect, hence the work at upgrading the SlideMagic app to version 2.0.

A presentation slide has 3 levels:

1. The basic information: what it is that you want to say
2. Some sort of visual organisation of that information that makes it comprehensible
3. The design production quality

It is hard to get all 3 right. Most people are stuck at 1, a list of bullets of the speaker notes of what the slide should say. People realise this, and jump to 3. Either “spicing things up” themselves or hiring a professional designer to make that slide look great with awesome illustrations and spectacular animations.

They key is number 2: what do you show, what don’t you show, and how do you organise it on the page. Yes, you need some design knowledge to do this correctly, but only 20%. The other 80% is understanding of the substance.

• Most designers lack the understanding of the substance
• Most presenters lack the understanding of design.

And this lack of design understanding is about very basic things: how to layout something quickly with a few boxes that line up. Adding a dimension, removing an option.

The SlideMagic app is working on making you confident enough to take on level 2.

Photo by Blake Weyland on Unsplash

TLV Partners is a venture capital firm in Tel Aviv, it has created a number of templates and tools to help entrepreneurs create board decks, cap tables, budgets, etc., you can find them here at the TLV Partners Funding Playbook

Although I have done presentation design work for both TLV Partners itself and a few of its portfolio companies in the past, I have not been involved in the creation of these specific templates.