SlideMagic Blog

I am usually not a big fan of illustrations that visualize data. Below is an example (with data from February 2022). The soldiers might as well have been represented by straight bar charts.

This article in the NYT though, was pretty effective. Representing unused office space with repetitions of well-known landmarks. People can instantly relate to, understand, and internalize the amount of space we are talking about.

(BTW, these illustrations are made by Kaylie Fairclough)

I like to play some music in my free time, here is a new synthesizer that was released this week. It sounds great, but I would have loved that they spent a bit more time on solving the grid puzzle of the knobs and buttons….

But hey, I am probably the only one worrying about this…

A good presentation has images that are consistent in style throughout the deck. Same color palate, same mood, same type of characters. This was very hard to achieve unless you make drastic design decisions: vintage black and white only, pop art cartoons only, impressionist paintings only (remember Ideatransplant ?), or cheesy stock images only.

AI can bring a solution here. Invest time in developing a standard prompt that generates the desired setting for your photo, then apply that same prompt consistently with small variations to get your snaps.

Databases of image prompts are starting to pop up (see a list here, writing this in May 2023) and this trend might well be the beginning of the end of stock image sites and even model agencies.

People are speed-reading emails. If you got someone willing to introduce you to someone else, and she says “send me an email that I can forward”, she is very likely to do just that, hit forward.

• Don’t expect much text editing, explaining, or pitching from your contact. Yes, she know your company. Yes, she knows what you want from the introduction. The person to whom it gets forwarded has little idea. Do the hard work for her.
• Writing the intro line for her (“I had a coffee yesterday with my good friend, and it struck me that the customer segment targeting positioning of their value proposition exactly matches or long-term vision for the business unit”), is likely going to have the line “See below, interested?” above it.
• You are pitching for the next interaction with the person you get introduced to, not the closing of the deal itself. On the one hand, this will make writing this email a lot simpler, on the other hand, it means that you have make it super personal and relevant, a standard pitch won’t do it.

Lawyers love to negotiate (and bill hours) by changing words and lines in linear text. This works perfectly for deals that are standard and very well understood. The price of a product, the distribution commission, the number of shares.

When the business or the business model is a bit unusual, things go wrong. The 2 parties, and their lawyers (that’s 4 entities) can easily get confused. People think they understand, but they do not.

The solution: negotiate based on a sketch or a slide layout and use an imaginative case example with some made up, but realistic numbers. It is easy to refer to the year 3 sales redistribution commission as “those $42k”. Everyone knows what you are talking about.

After all this, the deal can be put in writing.

I have been experimenting extensively with prompting ChatGPT for the use in presentations. In a sense, I am glad that I did not raise huge amounts of money a few years ago in order to build features that now more or less come out in a few minutes.

Still there is a difference in “hacking” some quick results in a demo and having a stable product that can be used in the front line of presentation design.

These features have all to do with the automatic generation of layouts and story lines. Further out in the future though, there might be other applications that can replace the slide deck as the central tool to pitch ideas.

Slides can be grouped in 4 categories:

1. Visualizations. A layout of data and/or elements with relationships that show something that is very hard to explain in linear text. Reading out all the columns of a data table is boring. Explaining the structure of DNA in words is impossible
2. Background graphics. A nice picture or a few words that fill up that giant screen on stage and makes the overall picture frame (you + slide) look a lot better
3. Trackers. A favorite of management consultants: some sort of table of contents that reassures you were we are in the overall story.
4. Transcripts. Bullet points mapping 1-on-1 what the speaker is saying.

Think about when to use which one for what.

Complex visualizations might not work as a dramatic background image when you reveal your product. Background graphics will not say much in a document that you email without explanation. Trackers don’t say anything. Transcripts are horrible on stage, but might work when emailing to someone (i.e., a text document).

You have a choice when naming the labels in a comparison chart. For example: “price: high” is the same as “cheap: no”. Make sure that all highs and lows, or yes’s and no’s are aligned in the same direction, i.e., things that are “good” all have the same word value associated with it. See the simple diagram below.

Getting the proportions on a slide right is tricky because it requires an intuition that is very hard to capture in a set of simple rules. An example below. I will have presentations where I center the diagram around the boxes of the 2x2, or other ones where I will center the diagram including its axis titles. Most people probably could not be bothered by this.

It is because of things like this (design is hard to capture in rules) that I think a ChatGPT-like algorithm for page layouts might have a big potential.

A reader pointed me to a pitch deck review of Honeycomb’s latest fund raising round. (See the post on TechCrunch). The deck itself can also be found and downloaded on SlideShare (which seems to have undergone a revamp).

The deck obviously worked, because the company managed to raise the $50m round. But I doubt that the slides in the deck were the key driver of this success. They slides look decent, but this is not stellar design. The purple branding seems a bit off from the corporate colors, some slides contain “white paper speak” that is typical in enterprise software, and the graphics between the slides are not completely consistent.

Honeycomb is a later-stage software company which can easily be x-rayed by investors who understand software: growth rates, CACs, etc. etc. It is the numbers (which are not in this deck but were shared in later-round due diligence discussions) that will reveal exactly where the company is going.

The important pitch is probably the “audio track” along side the slides: Honeycomb has managed to carve out a new software category that is/will become a key component of every enterprise’s IT budget. I am sure the CEO nails this in an in person presentation.

Always put other company’s pitch deck design and outlines in the context of your own company.