SlideMagic Blog

Here is a chart I usually use to present the result of a survey:

• Horizontal bar chart, stripped of all axis labels, data labels, etc.
• Consistent color coding to support the message you want to come out
• Text place holders for the survey’s conclusion, and the factual info: what question was asked, when it was asked etc.

Feel free to copy the design or download the chart from the SlideMagic template store.

Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

For my template store, I am working on a set of standard presentation story lines that can be matched up with template designs. I am going back in my client archive and see what sort of stories I end up using. Here is a very common flow that keeps on coming back in many situations:

1. Situation: something has not changed much for a long time
2. Inefficiency: this creates a missed opportunity: if only we could do this
3. Change: a recent innovation opens up the possibility to do this
4. Complication: but there is a problem why it cannot be used
5. Solution: enter our solution which takes away this roadblock

This is a slight elaboration of the Situation, Complication, Resolution, introduction story line introduced in the Pyramid Principle that I often used in writing documents at McKinsey.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Simple charts are often the best. I added a few slides to visualise a decision or a trade off the store: simple boxes, the same boxes over an image background, and a minimalist scale. With the latter, it is not the objective to make a photo realistic rendering of a scale, but rather give a subtle visual hint of which arguments win.

Feel free to copy the design, or download them from the template store

Looking back at more than 10 years of presentation design work, I noticed that my best decks are often the ones that were designed for very short time slots, usually pitch competitions where a speaker would have 5-10 minutes to give it all.

Why?

• These requests would often come after the client and I completed the “regular” presentation: I went through the process of getting to know the company in-depth, but, and this is important, I had given the content some rest, and when coming back to something after a couple of weeks, you often get an even better perspective on how to tell the story
• The all-or-nothing 5 minutes makes the client more confident to take visual risks: bolder, simpler slides
• The client would rehearse more (it is easy to run through a 5 minute story twenty times) and as a result would stumble on imperfect story flows more often

So maybe there is a natural evolution in presentations:

1. The internal strategy/board deck where you lay out your company’s ideas and make strategic decisions (management consultants stop here)
2. An attempt at a bullet point story line for a pitch (most pitch presentations stop here)
3. The properly designed company pitch deck (my projects often stop here)
4. The “let’s give it one more go deck”

Photo by Mitchell Hollander on Unsplash

The focus of my design work has shifted over the past years. The most important objective of my client’s presentations is to make a good impression as an attachment to a “cold email”. What is a good summary presentation that you can send ahead of a (possible follow up) meeting?

It is not a dense “Executive Summary”, one page of dense text (10 point font or less), full of buzz words and jargon. In fact, it might not be a summary at all. Investors say a huge number of deals each day, and don’t want to have to sit through a full presentation to understand what it is you are actually doing. The main purpose of that live presentation is to get an impression about you, the CEO, not to understand the business better. So in 2017,  your presentation needs to be able to stand on itself, convey the story without you being there to explain it. A teaser deck that creates interest is good, but it should not be so mysterious that the investor does not have an idea what you are doing.

Having said that, just attaching your full deck and hit “send” does not work either. I usually suggest to take certain bits out. These are usually the “admin bits” of the presentation, detailed financials, company milestones, go-to-market strategies. This is the more dry content that can be discussed after the investor has bought into the big idea. Also, some of this information might be confidential and not suited to be emailed out to investors you do not know very well (yet). So, the summary presentation is actually the full presentation with certain sections left out.

Looking back at recent client work, the V1.0 briefing decks I saw, here are some of the mistakes I encountered. Not a complete list, not in the right order, just some examples that came across my desk the past few weeks.

• Without even reading a single slide, some presentations have an incredibly dated look & feel: standard PowerPoint colors, old, low res, cliche images, even clip art. Look at a presentation you think look good, and simply copy the style elements with the colors of your logo and your presentation will dramatically improve, without changing one bit of its content. And by copying, I mean copying. Look at the positioning of titles and boxes, the amount of white space that is used. With an example design in front of you, your page should be able to look exactly the same, no excuses!
• You have gotten used to the strategy review slides that have been in all the decks since you started out a couple of months ago. The audience sees them for the first time. Charts you used to evaluate your strategy, and not charts that can be used to pitch investors or customers. These presentations look highly professional, are loaded with content, say all the rights things, but do not change heart and minds.
• Some presentations look too cute, minimalist infographics, icons, and cartoon characters. It is maybe nice and funny for a 1 minute product video, but people need to feel that there is a proper business behind this. If it fits your brand, it is fine to use the “cute” story as a sales presentation inside your investor deck, but the other slides should provide a bit more gravitas.
• There are presentations which take too long to get to the point. Endless series of charts with market backgrounds, often providing statistics for trends everybody pretty much agrees with. Cut to the chase earlier, and if required, put a quick placeholder slide to remind the audience of the market context you are working in
• Most of the time, I am not to strict with structure in a presentation (yes, I am an engineer who used to work for McKinsey). In 20 minutes, a story that flows nicely is more interesting that a highly structured presentation full of tracker pages and sections. Having said that, some companies actually need it. If you are a biotech with a significant portfolio of drugs in development, the audience need to stay on top of what we are actually talking about right now.
• Dwelling forever about your technology, or doing a very long product demo does not help, but the other extreme is equally worse: summarizing your product in 2 sentences. The audience need to “feel” what the current pain is, how brilliant your product is, and how clever the underlying technology is put together. Each individual case has a different balance of these 3 points.
• Certain businesses are basically apps. When the app is still in development, crafting a grand pitch deck might be overkill. Money could be better spent on some great-looking screen mock ups to explain investors or potential partners what it is you are actually doing. Graphics quality is not super important here, you can include 1-2 screens that show that your company is able to produce a good looking product. What is more important is the flow of the application demo you are showing. In these cases, designing the app experience, and designing the pitch deck can go hand in hand.

Today, there are many tools to create 3D visuals: images, videos, evening 360 degree virtual reality simulations. Most of the time, these perfect 3D compositions are overkill for business presentations. But sometimes, 3D compositions can help communicate your message. I am thinking of “road ahead”, “obstacles” and other concepts that are common in business presentations.

PowerPoint which is aimed at non-professional designers, does not have very powerful 3D object manipulation features. If you try to use the few that are there (3D object rotation, adding depth to shapes, putting drop shadows), the result often don’t look realistic.

My PowerPoint 3D abilities more or less followed the 3D development of a child who learns to draw. First, no perspective, then adding the side view without making things vanish into an imaginary horizon, then acknowledging the horizon, but not being consistent about, until finally you get what is actually happening and being able to tell why what you draw somehow does not match reality.

Most of the time, I ignore the built-in PowerPoint 3D features. Instead, I use regular shapes which I put on the slide canvas with some help of temporary lines. You can have a look at the example below. Objects should more or less fit within the boundaries of the lines, and text should be resized accordingly.

So, two principles:

1. Only use 3D in PowerPoint when you actually need it to express a point. 3D for the sake of 3D does not make your charts look more fancy or clear
2. When using 3D, keep it simple, and pay more attention to the proportion and positioning of the objects than “sophisticated” 3D effects

Visual emphasis is important in graphics design: it creates a sense of hierarchy, what should be viewed first, and what are less important details. In many draft presentations I see, people use tiny variations in font size to create emphasis. For example, the first sentence of a text block might be in font size 16 rather than 14.

This approach does not work. The viewer will hardly notice the difference in font size, and worse, small differences in font size give the text block an unbalanced look when seen from a distance.

It would not be fair to blame the amateur designer for this though, the standard PowerPoint bullet point template has this font size hierarchy baked in.

So, what is a right way to do it?

• Try to avoid having to resort to this, make your text blocks short enough so they can stand on their own
• Use white space and location on the slide to differentiate headings from other text blocks
• For headings, pick other differentiators: bold, all caps, and use the style consistently through your presentation.
• Inside a text box: subtle use of bold and color (main text dark grey, emphasis black) works great
• Another don’t: underlining, on a computer screen it almost looks like a correction (or a hyperlink from the 1990s)
• For major headings (such as slide titles), it is perfectly fine to use font size as a tool, just make it a big size difference when compared to other text elements on your slide.

I am adding new slides almost every day. Here is slide show of some of the designs that are inside already. Let me know which sort of new additions you would like to see. At the moment I am focussing on 2 types of slides:

1. Super basic slides that every presentation needs, which are properly designed, and save you time when working on a tight deadline. Boxes are aligned, spaced out, it just works
2. Tricky slide compositions that not everyone can do: more complex data visualisations, diagrams with complex shapes, 3D effects, or slides that feature an appropriate background image

I am working with PowerPoint 2016 for Mac

PowerPoint can export your presentation as a series of images. Go to file, export, select PNG, and you can select just one slide, or the entire presentation to be exported. In the latter scenario, images will be saved in a newly created directory.

Probably a left over from earlier PowerPoint versions, the resolution of these images has always been poor when using the standard settings. In previous versions of PowerPoint, you could somehow change DPI (dots per inch), but it did not affect the output. There are also ways to hack registry system variables (on a Windows machine, not a mac). The results have always been unpredictable.

In the most recent version of PowerPoint on mac, you are presentation with a menu in which you can enter the desired slide dimensions. This dialog behaves strangely when entering extreme values has height or width, flipping the orientation of the slides.

For some reason, I get decent pictures both in 4:3 and wide screen aspect ratios when setting the width to 2998, and the height is calculated to 1686. I have tried to understand why, but failed to do so far. It is probably not worth breaking your head over it, just use these numbers.