SlideMagic Blog

Most people who customise a PowerPoint theme color template simply plop in new colors in the boxes without paying much attention to what they are called. It is worth doing that though to save time. When you copy a presentation with another color scheme into yours, PowerPoint will color the new presentation with specific rules. For example, text is set in “Text/Background - Dark 1”. If you colored that box with your logo accent color, you are going to spend a lot of time converting the pink text back to black every time you receive a deck from a colleague with a different template.

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I offered to do a quick slide polish on a deck of a long-standing client who gave the SlideMagic template store a go for a business plan. My objective was to learn how the slide templates are used “in the wild”. The results were encouraging, here are a few examples where I had to step in:

• Set the exact accent color that matches the company logo
• Put the occasional rogue bullet chart into a proper 3, 4, 5, or 6 box slide template
• Move slide content a bit so they fit exactly in the same frame on each page
• Reduce font sizes a bit here and there to give text a bit more space to breathe in busy tables

These were slides in a business plan, not a TED talk, and exactly the sort of every day presentation they were intended for.

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You are 2 co-founders, or have both worked on a big project, and/or could not really decide who gets to shine in front of the audience and want to give a shared presentation. You can either split up the deck and go one after the other, or, try doing it as a true duo: presentation the slides together.

The latter option is tricky:

• You very little room for improvisation or the hand over to the second speaker will go wrong
• The audience needs to lock into 2 different presentation styles
• It requires careful scripting…
• …and a lot, lot, of rehearsing

As a result, most duo presentations feel a bit unnatural. Make a video of your rehearsals before making the final decision to do it

Photo by elen aivali on Unsplash.

This diagram originally created by Mary Lippitt of Enterprise Management is floating around the internet in varies shapes of forms:

I attempted to give it a makeover by trying to do the following:

• Cut the word repetition to reduce clutter
• Simplify the labels a bit
• Add some color
• Add movement (the arrow) to show that other options are a dead end road

I have uploaded this chart to the SlideMagic template store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

A VC friend got sent a pitch the other day that sounded like an exact copy of a company that underwent a spectacular and well-known crash a few months ago. The pitch completely ignored this white elephant and followed the standard presentation structure.

It is unlikely that this copy was indeed an exact replica of the famous failure, and it is unlikely that the pitching entrepreneur would think that seasoned investors did not know about that crash.

So in your pitch, you might as well take it straight on. The highly publicised failure did already part of the work for you, that, if you get this company to work, the market expectations are pretty big. Now on to the more difficult part, why that one failed and this one won’t.

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It is extremely hard to put a presentation together from scratch on a completely new subject and make it interesting. Come to think of it, most (maybe even every) good presentation you see, hear, read is a repeat: it has been given hundreds of time before.

Not necessarily with these slides, or in this format though. The startup founder starts building the story of his company the moment he puts the first line of code down. The CEO of that Fortune 500 giant has been selling cars since she joined the company 25 years ago, now she is selling the whole company to investors. The job applicant is pressing play on the story he kept on telling himself when he left his job to study an MBA 2 years ago.

Repeating makes you get better at the telling the story, learning from the verbal and non-verbal reaction of anyone you told it to. A good story is hardly ever born overnight.

Photo by Namroud Gorguis on Unsplash

No post today as I am out with a small fever. It is interesting to see that in my previous, non-freelance jobs, you could simply plough on as a kind of endurance test with tasks that require less focus when you are a bit sick. Writing code or coming up with a new design concept for a presentation: forget it when your mind is not 100% there.

Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash

Many writers use this type of wordplay, for example Seth Godin in a recent post:

Just because it’s easy to measure doesn’t mean we should (and the opposite is even more true).

It can be a nice word play, but maybe it is me, I find it hard to understand. I actually need to reconstruct the opposite sentence, “read it to myself", and then go back to the original one.

When you use it, use it as a last sentence somewhere (like Seth did), to give the audience a little brain teaser.

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In my work as a designer, and now as a founder-coder, I have the luxury that most people working miss: hours of meeting-free, uninterrupted time to get things done. I think anyone who managed to build a career in this working model has proven to be able to stay focussed and disciplined, when there is no boss around who can remind you that watching Netflix episodes during work hours is not what you are supposed to do.

Still, my work is not an endurance test to resist temptations. I tend to group my work into different types and switch between them when I am stuck, bored, tired, energetic, full of inspiration, suffering from the downstairs neighbour who is drilling in the ceiling.:

• Cracking a complicated problem (fundamental code architecture, the visual approach to a new presentation)
• Just making something look pretty (user interface, that competitor slide)
• Googling for solutions for that nasty, but actually unimportant, bug
• Doing accounting
• Writing a week full of blog posts in one go

In my time as a consultant when I was working with lots of people, I could not really set my own working schedule. Now that that noise has disappeared you start noticing there are huge differences when you do certain things during the day, and in what mood.

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That is a key question every investor is pondering while you click through the slides of your investor deck. But it might also go through the mind of a CEO of a big corporation who listens to the final results of a consulting project that talks about let’s say a major reorganisation.

There is often infinite amount of logic and data about how people should be grouped together, and when the the coin can fall right or left, it is probably the gut feel about you as a person that leads to the decision.

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