SlideMagic Blog

The other day, one of my clients simply wanted to give up on explaining his concept to the typical 50% of people who “simply did not get it”.

In life there are many situations where you “give up” on certain people. Students who fail the entrance exam of a university, job applicants that did not make the cut, athletes who miss the qualifying threshold for the Olympics, contestants who did not make it to the next round of American Idol.

When presenting your company, you need to put the blame not on the audience, but on your presentation. Your targeted audience should understand your message. And that audience can differ: a presentation to a general audience, journalists, scientific experts can build on different levels of pre-existing knowledge and background.

Often, as a presenter you suffer from the curse of knowledge, you are so deep into your own story that you cannot possibly imagine how someone who is new to the subject cannot get it. Another reason for the disconnect is different types of reasoning/thinking of people. When people frown in disbelief, it might not be because that they did not understand what you are trying to say, they might have a valid different approach to evaluating your pitch that you have not yet covered in your presentation.

When you leave the room, your chosen audience of high school students or elite academics should understand your message. Whether they agree with it, that is a second challenge, but they understood where you are coming from.

That was an interesting effort. The subscription platform for SlideMagic has now been put in place. Given that many payment platforms are not available in Israel (a tiny end user market that is a low priority for most tech companies), I have incorporated in The Netherlands, and integrated a subscription payment platform, a subscription app, and a pricing app into my store platform. The result: you can now subscribe to SlideMagic, after which all prices in the template store drop to zero when you log in (no more discount codes to enter), and you manage all your address details, credit cards, invoices, (and yes cancel your subscription) from a panel that is integrated into my site.

It is incredible that in 2018, a 1-person operation can pull this of, a few years ago this would have required a very substantial development team.  I will continue to focus on developing the content of the SlideMagic store (which makes it unique versus the 1000s of cosmetics-only templates that are out there) while I monitor how the technology is holding up, keeping marketing efforts modest at the moment.

If you want you can still join the beta subscription program for $100 by going to the subscription page.

Cover image by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

Now and then I use an empty slide with small grasshopper at the bottom to visualise an underwhelming market response to a major announcement. The lonely chirping of a grasshopper is often used in the The Simpsons and other movies to represent an (awkward) silence.

Here is an example of a slide design that might be too simple to buy on my store (you can if you want), you can easily recreate it yourself, subscribers can simply snap it up at no cost. Cover image by Elegance Thika on Unsplash

I did not know this, but McKinsey has put its entire visual branding guidelines online. Beyond the usual instructions about fonts and colours, there are interesting documents about formatting exhibits and data charts. Most of it seems to be focused on print or web content, but overall it provides an interesting insight into template management of an organisation which basically produces presentations as its main product.

Reading out endless slides with endless lists of incoherent bullet points is the ultimate disaster presentation. But bullet points can happen to the best of us, and I admit that I am still designing bullet point slides here and there in my client work. But not all bullet point slides are born equal.

When to use bullet points. Bullet points are a list or a ranking of some sort. When a product has 3 features; it is fast, cheap, and beautiful, or an agenda has 5 discussion points, or a project plan has 4 steps, or you have 3 key priorities for next year, it does not make sense to spread each point out as a different slide. The message of the slide is: we have 3 competitive advantages, which is different from: 1) we are fast, 2) we are cheap, 3) we are beautiful.

A bullet point chart is often a set up for more elaboration to follow. We introduce the 3 points, then immediately click through to the next 3 slides that will take each of these points in turn.

When you know you should not use them. There are a number of pointers that tell you your bullet point slide does not express a message of a list or ranking, but rather it is a list of speaking points.

• The points are merely paragraphs in a story. And then this…, but that…, taking into account this…, we tried these…
• The points are not roughly the same length, bullet 2 is 3 sentences, bullet 5 is 2 words, the bullets are not similar
• Related to this, the bullet points start to become complicated sentences / stories in their own right, you are not able to understand them in a second.
• Again, related to this, you are in the wrong territory when your points take a lot of time to explain. Bullet one: “we are fast” followed by a 10 minute elaboration on acceleration times of competing vehicles with the “we are cheap” and “we are beautiful” still on the projector is the wrong slide for the message.
• Most of my bullet point slides have 3-5 points, with 5 already pushing it. If you need more, you are writing speaker notes, instead of designing a slide.

I recently answered this question on Quora about presenting to your own CEO. I think the “what if you had to present a prototype of the iPad to Steve Jobs” is a good mind set. Your presentation should be very good, but a different kind of good than a deck for an external audience. Very clear, brief, and action oriented. (Click this link if the Quora embed is not visible)

Cover image by Farrel Nobel on Unsplash

I came across this question on Quora: how to make your slides look elegant and “designy”?

I don’t really like the word “designy” but I understand what people mean by it. My answer to this question: copy something you like. Almost everybody can see good design when they see it, very few can create good design from a blank sheet of paper.

And, most people are very poor at copying. They want to make the slide look like the one from Steve Jobs or that 1960s Swiss graphics designer, and while the example is pretty simple (gradient black background with a certain font), they deviate from it. It is like telling a young kid to draw a house in 3D perspective, they don’t copy what they say (3D space perception is not really developed yet), but rather draw what they think they see. My advice, copy every design aspect: fonts, colours, white space, slide margins, the whole composition.

But in PowerPoint or business presentations in general, there is an extra problem: there are a number of different types of slides that are suited to different types of design. Sometimes you can use a big image, but sometimes you need a more traditional data slide, or yes, a list of 3 bullet points… And, consistency is very important in a well designed presentation. The slides all are visually related.

My solution to this problem: the framed slide. Even most of my image slides are framed in a white border. Some designers might think it is not very professional, but I find that it looks very good, and is very practical to cover a wide range of slides. When I can, I will drop in the occasional full-page image, or alternatively, I can play with the frame and have things “pop out” of it.

All my data charts have the same simple look and feel, inspired by the format that I started using on my first day as a McKinsey consultant.

They are different from the default PowerPoint data chart templates:

I have added the above 4 simple charts to the SlideMagic template store. You can set them as templates in your own PowerPoint applications (Mac screen shot, but I think Windows is exactly the same). Select the chart, click chart design, click *change chart design,*then go to the bottom of the menu and save the chart as a template. This methods is easier than sending you the actual template files and getting you to store them deep down in the computer’s file directories.

Repeat this process 4x for each of the slide designs in the file.

Now, the next time you insert a standard PowerPoint chart, you can instantly re-format it to look like a SlideMagic chart by selecting it, clicking slide design, then clicking change chart design again, and now you will see a new option, templates, from which you can pick the file you just saved.

You can download the default data chart templates from the store here.

Some blog readers have asked whether they could simply “buy all the slides” in the store. I resist selling a big PowerPoint file, because my ultimate objective for SlideMagic is to go to a subscription model for unlimited downloads with so many charts available, and new ones constantly being added that the service no longer becomes a place to buy slides, but rather is your personal inspiration chart search engine you open up for every new slide you create.

There are a few technical and legal hurdles I need to clear before I can implement a scalable subscription service (I actually need to incorporate outside of Israel to be able to use common software platforms). But I see some readers buying so many slides on my store already that they might not be that happy to start paying the subscription after having downloaded/paid for half the store already.

So this could be a temporary solution. I have created manually a $100 yearly subscription product on PayPal. After I receive payment, I will email you (manually) a discount code that will give you a 100% discount on any slide you purchase in the store which will stay valid for 1 year and gets renewed if you renew your subscription. The minimum value of this is “buying the whole store” for $100 (if you cancel the subscription in a year), but I hope it will be start of a longer relationship as I am expanding the product adding lots of more slides, bundles, and story line ideas, and maybe a closed community where we can talk presentations and you can request new designs that are missing in the store.

Tables can carry more data than a data chart and as a result can be less effective in a presentation. For some situations though, there is no point trying to avoid using a table in PowerPoint. For example, when investors want to see the quarterly numbers, they expect to see a table.

The way you format tables can make a huge difference in how your chart looks. When done well, a table can actually be an effective presentation slide. Have a look at the simple P&L table below.

A PowerPoint table to present a P&L

This might look like a super simple slide design (it is), but a lot of thought and little tweaks have gone into its design. Let’s take them one by one:

• Colours have been adjusted to your own colour template, not the standard PowerPoint colours
• Fonts have been matched to your current template (table can be stubborn sometimes and stick to Arial)
• Instead of dark lines around boxes, I used lines that match the background colour, making cells a light colour of grey to stand out (or dark, black if you use that background)
• Totals are bold, and a bit darker
• The row labels are right aligned
• The row labels are a bit darker than the cells
• The data cells are right aligned
• Numbers are rounded to the same amount of digits, so the dots line up
• There are not too many digits in the table, enough to convey the data, but not too much to make it cluttered. If the numbers get too big, switch to thousands or millions.
• There is a bit of inset in each cell, the text does not touch the edges
• All the rows have the same height
• All the data columns have the same width
• The column headings are centered
• The unit of measure is put at the top of the chart, not repeated inside the data values
• The table covers the entire frame of the presentation template
• Double check by hand/calculator: the numbers add up…