SlideMagic Blog

“Do you do web design as well?” was probably one of the most-asked questions in discussions with new clients. I still don’t do it for a living, but finally finally, I caught up and have a pretty decent understanding about how it works. I must say, web designers have to endure a pretty big mess.

It takes an incredible amount of trial and error to get basic things sorted (try lining up things in a straight line for example). Unlike writing back end algorithms, which you can sort of read/follow, a page full of HTML tags is impossible for a human to understand. Pages are set up as long scrolling bits of text.

No one is to blame though, HTML needs to be backward compatible and fit a huge range of screens and devices.

For productivity application development, things are different. Screen dimensions are more or less the same, people usually work in (almost) full-screen mode, scrolling and resizing is less relevant… All you need is a decent x/y coordinate system and you are done (almost).

That is another business opportunity for someone to cover…

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It can be fun to add little “easter eggs” in your slide design. If you need a location, a photo of a city, a street, a car, pick one that is familiar to you. If you have a choice, why go with something generic? To the CEO of the client of your consulting project, it will look like any other presentation and she won’t wonder why your visual comparisons have a car-related theme, or why that quote from the rock song appears on slide 4.

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I am starting to get really excited about SlideMagic 2.0. It will not be an app that instantly wows you with amazing and spectacular effects. Instead, it will all be in dozens and dozens tiny details, that you will start to appreciate as you use the app more. The design of the interface, the positioning of icons, what you can, and cannot do on a certain screen, what happens if you click. I can now fully understand the stories about Steve Jobs micro-managing the design team with seemingly ridiculous and detailed requests.

The lack of this instant ‘wow’ might give me a marketing challenge as I need to win over people bit by bit. Let’s hope that people catch on to the idea. Personally, I now start using my own tool (in pre-alpha stage) to quickly layout a chart export it to PowerPoint to integrate it with more conventional charts. And that is a good sign, since I already have a pretty design speed in PowerPoint and can still find ways to improve on it with the tool.

Working alone gives me a disadvantage of speed when it comes to number of hands and brains. On the other hand, I am free to experiment with features very quickly, including the ones that turn around common software practices completely.

To be continued.

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People spend too much time on creating slide decks. SlideMagic aims to change that. My minimalist designs really help I think: they are super simple, look good, and cover 95% of charts you need in a business presentation.

Now that I start test driving my 2.0 app at speed, I see the next challenge: workflow: finding the right template to start with, modifying it quickly, diving back in your slide archive for inspiration with intuitive controls. In PowerPoint this does not work very well, with 20+ years of professional experience I have learned to navigate the menus quickly but the average user is struggling. Apple Keynote looks prettier but is even less streamlined to use.

My efforts continue, it is all about optimising tiny details that make a surprising difference in the speed at which you can put slides together.

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People recognise an email address when they see one, or a street address, or a phone number. People understand that they are reading product benefits or seeing a price of a product or a competitive comparison. It is OK to let go of the labels and descriptive titles if you can.

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Coding a program, building a spreadsheet, and designing a presentation follows a similar pattern for me:

Coding: quickly put together something to see whether it works, then clean up to make the script more efficient, and the code better to understand (especially if I have to get back to it in a few months)

Spreadsheet: create the required calculations quickly, then optimise so that it becomes easy to generate multiple scenarios, multiple business units, and most importantly, I can regroup and slice the economic drivers of a company (per unit, per client, % of sales, fixed, per product, etc. etc.) so you get a great understanding of how the profit “engine” actually works.

Presentations: especially for complicated tradeoffs, my “pros and cons” diagrams go through many iterations of regrouping, consolidating, separating, re-ordering rows and columns until a very clear picture of the message emerges. Also flow diagrams can benefit a lot from repeated iterations until you get one that is clearly laid out with minimal crossing of lines.

We start from simple, the (over)complicate, in order to end up with something simple again, but that final simple version looks very different from the one you started out with.

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Most books, blogs, and courses about presentations aim at a setting where you present for a big audience. The role of the sides is the support the presenter, who is the central element of the full theatrical performance.

The majority of decks as I see them coming across my desk are meant to speak for themselves, as an attachment to an email for example. “Send me the deck”, says the investor after a 2 minute talk at a conference. Your audience here: impatient speed readers.

Think about yourself browsing a newspaper, or a piece of research. What do you pay attention to, what do you ignore? Some points to consider:

• Like on the big keynote screen, a page full of dense text and bullet points will get skipped over
• But, super short, summary statements will not be understood without context, since you are not there to explain them.
• Anything that sounds like what everyone else is writing, full of cliches, will get skipped over.
• Real photos attract the attention, people on the team, the prototype, the office, even small text surrounding it (you often read the small print under an image in a newspaper)
• Arguments, comparisons, pros and cons, need to be made very visible in clear tables or graphs, remember how in car or consumer electronics reviews to skip right to the end to the red and green check marks.
• Personal stories that sound interesting on stage, might look clumsy when written down in a deck.
• Watch out for inconsistencies, errors, in financial data and/or market sizes, someone reading at a screen has more time to go back and forth than someone sitting in an auditorium. Errors cost you credibility.
• Consider putting links in your deck so people can instantly go to LinkedIn profiles of team members, or the source behind market research.
• The speed reader is a bit less patient to wait for the big punch in your story. Building excitement and anticipation can work great on stage (like a DJ building towards that drop), the speed reader can’t resist and will click through the last page to see how the story ends.

Many company web sites feature some sort of video that plays in the background, covering the entire page. Some things to consider:

• This is a background, and should not claim all the attention of the visitor. So pick calm videos, not highway car chases. Also, a series of 5 different short videos of lakes in New Zealand that loop every 10 seconds is still distracting.
• A web site without content, but with a video in the background does not create a professional company presence. Content first.
• Stock photos with model-turned happy diverse employees are boring, so are videos with the same people featuring in them.

If you have looked a web site (or presentation slide) for a long time as a designer you stop noticing things that a first time visitor will spot. Your brain knows the video loop by heart, filters it out, just to let you focus on that annoying DIV tag that refuses to line up. Force yourself to take that first time visitor perspective and ask yourself whether that video really adds something.

In the very early stages of a company, your website as actually aimed at investors. They want something that looks modest, professional, and with the essentials: a description what it is you are doing (consistent with the confidential pitch deck), a sense that you can communicate professionally and convincingly to future clients and investors, links to team bios, and hygiene factors such as a street address, proper domain name, etc. that shows that you are serious about your venture. Wild animations and spectacular videos do not always support this point.

Before putting your pitch deck together in it is good to think about where your audience stands. Investors can have varying backgrounds and knowledge about a certain market. Also the stage in her due diligence process will make a difference.

• Is she even aware of this market? “What, x million people in the world buy product y?
• Does she understand that you are addressing a problem? “What, all this is still done manually in 2019?”
• Is she overlooking a possible solution? “Hey, I did not know that you could apply technology x to do y!”
• She has seen hundreds of your type of startups and wants to dive straight into the traction numbers to see how you stack up.
• She gets the opportunity, but is wondering about the quality of the team (including you)

Different audience, different priorities in the deck

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This is a useful list of design myths. Here are a few relevant for presentation design (I adjusted the wording a bit here and there):

• Myth #34: Simple = minimal
• Myth #28: White space is wasted space
• Myth #19: You don’t need the presentation content to design a presentation template
• Myth #14: You are like your audience
• Myth #13: Icons enhance slide clarity
• Myth #10: If your design is good, small details don’t matter
• Myth #8: Stock photos improve the audience’s understanding
• Myth #7: Graphics will make a slide element more visible

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