SlideMagic Blog

In my spare time I am (finally) making efforts to lay down musical tracks that were playing in my head for a long time. Part of the learning process is watching documentaries of musicians going over and over and over again until that mix is just perfectly right. (This skeleton in the studio image says it all). And these are the 1980s and 1990s, for many of today’s electronics musicians, it is all about polishing and mixing so it seems.

There is a parallel here in presentation design. Instead of editing the footnotes the night before the presentation, get a good night of sleep or do one more live rehearsal of your story. Time better spent.

Cover image by João Silas on Unsplash

An investor double-clicks an attachment, you make a first impression already which is totally disconnected from the idea you are trying to pitch:

• The slides have a reasonably professional feel: not the standard Microsoft Office template, not a 1990s bevel and gradient template, no times roman font, slide formats are more or less consistent throughout the presentation, images are not cheesy and/or stretched
• The slides have a grown up language, which shows that the author understands the audience: no padding with buzzwords, no 101 introductions to a subject that any VC is supposed to master, no presentation cliches (“in this ever faster changing world where we all have become digital nomads”)
• Early in the deck it is at least clear what you are doing
• The email addresses are not gmail, and the company domain has some sort of place holder in a consistent look & feel with the presentation. LinkedIn pages of founders are consistent and up to date.
• You are sending a PDF, not a PowerPoint document, and it fits in a 10MB file

These are examples of the digital equivalent of the first impression you get with a handshake. Your deck is compared to all other decks this VC has seen in her career in more or less a second. And she has developed the intuition, what sort of decks usually are associated with good deals, and which ones to avoid.

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In some cases, a stand up presentation is an emotional story telling performance that moves your audience to do something they did not know they wanted to do 60 minutes before.

However, not every presentation is like this. The majority of slides are presented in small conference rooms, the “trenches” of the economy, where middle management tries to get a decision agreed in the middle of opposing viewpoints, office politics, and interpersonal meeting dynamics.

In these meetings your deck is actually the agenda for that meeting. Make sure things get discussed, make sure people have the facts, make sure the right trade offs are presented, and make sure a decision is made in the end.

Think about this when putting your deck together. Which facts are obvious, which facts are disputed, what info is counter intuitive, what is likely to spark a big debate, what not, etc. etc.

The presenter is telling a story, but also orchestrating a number of humans.

Cover image by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

Cities are recycling their presentations to lure Amazon to put a new HQ there to pitches other candidates.

I see this many times, a company that needs to pull out all the stops to present at a major conference or pitch competition. Ideas and energy of that pitch are re-used numerous times in other presentations. It is often that wake up call to get your act together, take more creative risk to present your idea with “nothing to lose”.

There is a cost element to it as well. How can you get more return on that expensive video work? You need to try to find the balance between a personal and relevant pitch (rule #1 of sales presentations), and re-usable content. For videos, I usually request to have a clean version of the file without specific text banners or voice overs that cannot be separated. In that way you can re-use the assets for other projects.

Btw, these city pitches are very interesting. Here are 3 very different pitches. I think Detroit is the most inspiring. What do you think?

Cover image by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

A short summary of Mark Suster’s blog post where he argues that startups should send VCs the entire file, not a link:

• Tracking, tracing, monitoring, of who read what where and how long actually discourages people
• He likes to file his documents to come back to them later to look at development and self-destructing links to not allow that
• It adds friction to an already short 3 minute process
• (And I would add: do what the VC is used to, and most of them have been dealing with decks since the 1990s)

What is a good deck for sending? Well, one that does not contain confidential information: product pipelines, salaries, etc. Assume that your competition will read the slides sooner or later, and there should be no harm when this happens. I have seen it on the other side with my clients, they would forward me a deck of a competitor and we would actually not get any info out of it, but rather admire that powerful pitch that the others created. So, it might actually be a benefit if your competitors see your slides :-)

Cover image by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

When starting a new slide, most people think of what to write in it, then worry about composition which usually involves moving text boxes around so that everything still fits on one page.

Next time, start with the composition, then do the writing. Think how a few boxes and arrows can visualise common business concepts in a slide:

• Something is bigger than another
• Something is growing
• Torn between opposing forces
• Reinforcing loops
• Ideal fit or a mismatch
• Trade off
• Dead end
• A sequence

Put the shapes, align and distribute them, now add some text

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Often your manager will ask you to put some more “factoids” on the slide: small, vaguely relevant bits of information related to the topic that have no natural home on any specific slide in the deck. Read that description again, and think whether the audience really needs more of them.

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This tweet says it all:

Yes conference organisers want to 1) ensure that the presentations they offer are decent, 2) make sure the workflow of decks one after the other works on the conference desktop, but… most speakers will make changes to slides (especially the slide order) when they are rehearsing for the performance.

Suggested strategy:

• Ask for a rough draft, outline, or old presentation well in advance of the conference to eliminate potential issues in terms of presentation style and technicalities (fonts, etc.)
• Create a very credible deadline shortly before the conference for the actual slides.

Cover image by Curtis MacNewton on Unsplash

I am dusting of my coding skills that were pretty much put on hold in the early 1990s and have started to program macros to automate the mechanics of the template store: creating individual slides and thumbnails for PowerPoint and Keynote in different aspect ratios of these design.

Things in the Microsoft Office ecosystem run smoothly (“VBA”), for Mac, a lot less so. Applescript is a language that aims to automate pretty much everything you can do in Mac OS. It has been around for a very long time, but it is falling short.

At first sight, the language looks very friendly, almost human-like. And here is a problem: human language is ambiguous. It is incredibly hard to use it to program computers. When I look at example Applescript code, it looks very easy to adjust and re-use, but it is an incredibly pain to get it actually working and iron out the last bugs. Writing macro scripts will never be something that the average Apple user will do, so you might as well stick to a programming language that an engineer can work with.

The second problem is the what Applescript can actually do. As Apple put development of Mac OS on the back burner and gave priority to its iOS devices, the functional power of Applescript has been watered down. Old tutorials online show functionality that has been removed in later versions of Keynote.

Now, I am not saying that all esoteric features should be supported in a scripting language, but I am struggling to get the most obvious and basic one that anyone wants to use a Keynote script for: batch conversion of PowerPoint files into Keynote.

Most presentation drafts I receive from clients are a soup of different slide templates, with colours, fonts, and styles all mixed up. To clean things up takes so much time that in most cases, making a slide from scratch is faster.

The combination of PowerPoint’s architecture (going back to the 1990s) and large groups of people collaborating on documents is the toxic cocktail that causes all of this. My app and my template store are my first attempts to put an end to this.

In the absence of a permanent solution, here is what you can do to vaccinate yourself against the worst cases:

• Ask some one marketing communication to email you the original clean template, and see how it works. Likely, it does not. Delete master slides you do not need.
• Create a rectangular shape that you like: correct colours, correct font. Make sure the bullet points align when you drop to the next line. Right click the shape, and set as default
• Repeat the same for a plain text box.
• Now, every presentation that you create, either starts with this blank master totally empty, or you copy someone else’s presentation into this master.
• And share your clean template freely with anyone who is interested.

(Or, start with an empty SlideMagic template, download it here for free)

Cover image by Pascal Kahle on Unsplash