Slidedocs by Duarte

Nancy Duarte published her fourth book: Slidedocs, about how to design visual documents in PowerPoint (or Keynote) that are meant for reading rather than presenting.

She is on to something. Business communication is getting shorter and shorter, and the role of word processors that used to write long boring memos is taken over by presentation design software that is used to create more visual documents.

Slidedocs is a free download (it is actually a PowerPoint file) that talks you through an approach to make these documents better. Most useful might actually be the file itself, that can serve as a template for your next Slidedoc!

Become a great graphics designer

I am reading the book How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer (affiliate link) by Debbie Millman (picked up at Rizzoli in New York, a great place to find design books). The book comprises of a series of interviews with famous graphics designers. Here are some common themes in all the discussions.

• The process to getting to a good design is messy: you try, try, try, and then all of a sudden it happens (or not). Different from churning out analysis and data charts one after the other.
• The standard career path for a graphics designer (start at the bottom in a big studio) inhibits success later on. Multiple designers spoke about finding a career setup that frees you from a big corporate structure in your formative years (a financial challenge).
• You need to find time to do work away from the day-to-day pressure of a client. Again, this is a financial issue. Designers quoted lucky family situations and/or a large steady client as the enabler for creative freedom.
• Pro-bono work often brings out the best in a designer, since “the client who is not paying has no right to interfere with the work”
• Many designers are introverts, like to work by themselves, and stay in the front line of design work, i.e., they do not move into the management ranks.
• Almost every designer talks about art versus design. I think deep in their hearts they regret not having made it as an artist.

An interesting book with many abstract concepts, it will resonate with somehow who designs day in, day out.

Practical typography book

Here is a nice about typography: Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick. As the title says: very practical (Typography in 10 minutes, Summary of key rules), and in a nice format: simple HTML pages that look great on any device.

New book by Duarte

Nancy Duarte is probably the only person in the world that has managed to create a very large business in the presentation design market. As a result, she is a true authority on the subject because of here experience with designing presentations ranging from the high profile money-no-issue keynote presentations to the day-to-day high volume make-overs of slides for internal management meetings.

Her new book HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations is different from the previous two (Slide:ology and Resonate): it is far more practical. Out goes the glossy paper, the beautiful diagrams, the client case examples, and instead we have a highly useful list of tips and tricks that can help you make better presentations the moment you put the book down. Almost every paragraph starts with an action verb, a recommendation of something that you can do better.


The book covers a wide range of subjects related to presentation design, from analysing your audience to building an online social media following for your decks, but the core of the book is in story and slide design. Some new ideas that I got out of the book:

• Create two endings in your presentation, if you run out of time you can always stop at the first one
• Pick the right type of slide: walk-in slide, title slide, navigation slide, bullet slide, big word slide, quote slide, data slide, diagram slide, conceptual slide, video slide, walk out slide
• Ideas how to translate words into diagrams.

One point of disagreement, the book advocates using a 10% rule for executive summary slides, so a 50 slide deck needs 5 summary slides (5 minutes), and 45 appendix slides. Pretty much what we tried to do at McKinsey. I increasingly try to shorten that executive summary to one super short summary, and follow it to a slightly longer story that encapsulates the entire story, hoping to be able to hang on to senior management attention for maybe 10 or 15 minutes instead of 5 when the cross fire of questions begins and your slide presentation in the conference room basically ends.

So in short, if you are in doubt which of the 3 Duarte books you should start reading first, I suggest it is this highly practical one. A great and useful read.

Disclosure: links in this post to Amazon are affiliate links and I did receive a free copy of this book for review.

Book content requests?

I am in the middle of writing a book using Apple iBook creator platform, and hopefully it will see the light of day soon. Sorting out ISBNs and US tax numbers is almost more difficult than writing the book itself.

Other people have written extensively about why bullet points are a bad idea, my book will be a highly pragmatic and practical guide that helps you put a slide deck together that gets you funded, lands you a sale or delivers your Board approval.

This iBook format is wonderful, I can use text, slideshows, images, and interestingly videos which makes it easy to put software advice inside using a simple screen cast (software explanations are hard and very boring to put in text). And best of all, I can update the book with new content pretty much like apps update on your iPad, which allows me to ship early and improve content over time.

So, ultimately my book will be an iPad app that is open at your desk when you are putting your slides together at home, or in the office. The content is not frozen yet, so please let me know if there are specific issues I should cover, and I will see if I can incorporate them in the flow.

Most of your slides are a grid

In some presentation slides, the grid is obvious: a data table is an example. But also without the explicit lines of a table structure, you can recognize a grid in almost any composition you make. A diagram, the positioning of boxes on a slide, even a big picture with a few words of text. Recognize the grid structure, imagine the hidden lines and make sure everything lines up and is spaced out nicely. It will make for a much better slide composition.

If you are ready to dive in to hard core literature on the use of grids in graphics design, I can recommend the 1981 book Grid Systems (affiliate link) by Swiss graphics design master Josef Mueller-Brockmann (some of his poster design are in this Flickr set). The big issue for print designers is to juggle around text columns and images. Presentation slides are a bit different, but still the conceptual approach applies to them as well.

Visual memory

A year after discovering it, I finally got around to reading Moonwalking with Einstein (affiliate link), by Joshua Foer. A journalist gets fascinated by memory championships, and takes on the challenge to participate himself. On the way he explains how to train your memory, and puts memory in a historical context.

Why am I interested in these types of books? Presentations are all about helping people remember your story. We all know that forcing people to remember bullet points be repeating and repeating and repeating them does not work. The brain needs a visual story around which to store your message.



And it turns out that is exactly what memory champions do. They commit random numbers, names, facts, to rooms in virtual memory palaces in their brain. These palaces are often based on places the contestants know very well: a home, a school, a library. In these rooms, the objects are placed in the most outrageous (memorable) ways possible, including smells and sounds. After you put everything there, you can simply take a walk in your virtual memory palace and see all objects in front of you.

Scientists now think that the brain actually never forgets anything (capacity: 10-100TB). The problem is accessing the information. The brain needs an emotional stimulus (smell, visual) to unlock its memory. Slightly different than a indexed memory access of a computer. People think that we are so good at remembering places, locations, stories is survival: how to find a place with food, and then more importantly, how to find the way back home was a more useful skill in the stone age than remembering phone numbers.

With these techniques, you can teach yourself to remember thousands of unrelated items. And it just shows the power of the brain. Remembering is actually pretty simple when compared to the computing power it takes to coordinate hitting a baseball mid air.

Scientist think that forgetting is important for our mental well being. Just remembering everything is very stressful and distracting. That is the reason why some people with brain dammage can perform these extraordinary memory stunts.

The book gives interesting insight in our learning process. The brain is lazy and tries to put things in auto-pilot mode as soon as possible (driving a car for example). Once there, it does not consume a lot of energy, and does not cause distraction to do other tasks. Sometimes people experience this with learning. The cure to this is to move yourself outside the comfort zone, start trying, and most important of all make sure you are exposed to a direct feedback loop to tell your brain what worked, and what did not.

But what is the point of memorizing anything in the current time of abundant digital storage? The author argues that creativity in fact is future memory. You need to be able to provide sufficient hooks to stick new ideas, new insights to.

An interesting read.

Apple iBooks and presentations

Two main take-aways from the announcement by Apple yesterday about the new platform to design and publish interactive books for the iPad:

1. It removes the excuse that the lizard brain inside me used so far to stop me from writing a book: the thousands of dollars and months in training I would have to invest to port an InDesign document to a working iPad app. Here you go, I committed publicly.
2. This platform can be fantastic to write investor and sales pitch documents for one-on-one meetings or sending to a prospect before you meet face-to-face. The standard for the boring text “Executive Summary” just got raised in such a way that people might actually start to read them.

Book: The a-z of visual ideas

An A-Z of Visual Ideas: How to Solve Any Creative Brief (affiliate link) by John Ingledew, aims to help you solve visual creative deadlock. Organized in 26 sections following the letters of the alphabet, it introduces a number of concepts that you can use as the basis of your design. Examples: counter-intuition, eyes, juxtaposition, and zeitgeist.



It is written more with advertising or poster design in mind, but still it can help you broaden your creative mind with the concepts provided in the book, or by encouraging to think out of the (visual) box yourself.

Lessons from Vidal Sassoon

I am continuing my quest through the long tail of Netflix design movies and stumbled on this one: Vidal Sassoon the Movie (affiliate link) about the famous hairdresser. In itself, his story is very interesting, growing up poor in an orphanage, and becoming a global celebrity.

For me, there were two things that I found especially interesting.

1. It took him 9 years to find his signature style that would change the way women looked (and thought of themselves) in the 60s. Design is hard work, even for the best and most talented among us.
2. He says that it is easy to see when something is wrong, but very hard to come up with something that is right.

This is exactly the case in slide design as well (at least for me). Learning to design is going through lots of your own failures, eliminating stuff that is not right, leaving you with the things that do. One way to accelerate the process is to plough through design books and absorb anything design around you. It increases the odds that you will bump into something that works.

Book review - The visual dictionary of typography

The Visual Dictionary of Typography (affiliate link) is a nice little book that explains 250 concepts in typography, each using a visual example. Dictionary is the wrong title, this is not a reference book, but rather something to browse through and explore. I stumbled on many terms that I have never heard of before. On the other hand, the book also contains some entries that are a bit forced: music for example.

Here are the entries for the letter V to give you an example of the contents:

• Vector
• Vernacular
• Vertical alignment
• Virgule

All in all a nice little book, I would get it in print rather than as an eBook.

New French presentation Bible

Recently, I received a review copy of  L'art des présentations Powerpoint, by Bernard Lebelle, a frequent commenter here on the blog. A very interesting book (obviously for those who can read French).

L'art des presentations PowerPoint

My first impressions:

• Besides the big presentation and speaking insights (often covered in many other books on the subject), this book is a treasure of smaller insights, many of them illustrated with a little diagram or a quick scribble. Almost like reading a constant flow of interesting blog posts. My French is probably not good enough to read this book from page 1 to 386, but the layout with the bite-size illustrated tips and tricks enables me to digest much of the content.
• It covers a broad range of subjects, all the way from speaking suggestions down to the basics of typography and detailed suggestions on how to use the PowerPoint software
• Bernard integrates concepts and ideas from many sources (books, web sites) with clear references to them for further reading.

Congratulations Bernard.

Book review - "Thinking with type"

Regular readers will have noticed that I am reading up on typography lately. Some basic understanding of typography can improve the quality of your presentation designs dramatically. The book Thinking with Type (affiliate link) by Ellen Lupton is one of the most useful ones I read so far. Clear explanations of all the basic concepts with great examples. It comes with great online resources on the Thinking with Type website, covering a lot of material of the book. (See the type crime section, and how I use the wrong quotation marks all the time on this blog).

Earlier reviews of typography books:

• Just my type, stories about the most important fonts and their designers, useful information, entertaining reading (and great dinner party stories).
• 20th century type, a more scientific overview of fonts and designers of the past century.
• 1000 fonts, just what the title says
• Design elements, a broader review of graphic design concepts
• Bibliographic, an overview of classic graphic design books

Going beyond the presentation screen borders

A long introduction to the post today. You can skip the plot sideline and go straight to the end if you want.

It seems that many visual artists that somehow documented the thoughts behind their work reach higher levels of fame. One example is Vincent van Gogh, who through the letters to his brother Theo gave us a lot of background on his art. Vincent van Gogh spent some time in this white house in the same street I grew up in the Dutch town of Hoogeveen, and it is striking to see how his descriptions of the place, the features and character of the people still applies today (except for that people there have moved on from living in huts). His subsequent transition from the cold/dark Netherlands to the bright Mediterranean is another interesting parallel I share with the painter.

Vincent Van Gogh, farm house in Hoogeveen

Recently, I have been reading a biography about Robert Irwin, an American artist starting off with expressionist paintings to move on to minimalist, large art installations. The book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (affiliate link) provides lots of his personal perspectives behind his own work, but more importantly about art in general. I have changed the way I like at art after reading it.

Irwin wonders why art ends with the frame of the painting. He wonders why art ends with the room the painting/installation is exhibited. Art and beauty is all around us, we just need to be able to perceive it.

"But paintings are like what you can barely make out through a keyhole compared with the richness of perception that's just waiting there in the world to be experienced all the time. [...] It's strange. With food, for instance, people seem to understand what's involved: you savor the taste rather than just feed the body. But people have a hard time understanding that it should be the same way with visual experience."

Popping the bubble and bringing us back to the world of presentations. What got me to write this long post introduction is the insight that you need to design an overall presentation experience that does not end with the borders of your screen. The background, the stage decor, the way you/the speaker appears, the light in the room, everything. Your presentation is a mini art installation maybe with a more banal subject than these great artists, but still it is an installation. Imagine what a video of your performance would look/sound like and design acoordingly. The TED presentations are a good example of this.

Book review - "Just my type"

Most books about typography and graphics design are nicely illustrated reference books full of theory. Just My Type: A Book About Fonts (affiliate link) by Simon Garfield is different; through a number of stories and anecdotes you a get a wonderful introduction to the history of typography.

It is a great read: both informative and entertaining. A more extensive review of the book in the New York Times. I purchased the book for my Kindle/iPad to save delivery time and charges to Israel. If you live closer to Seattle, I would suggest you buy a paper version to get a better view of the font examples inside the book.

Book review: 20th-Century Type

The book Twentieth-Century Type (affiliate link) by Lewis Blackwell gives a history of type fonts developed in the last century. I found it useful because it puts all the names of the fonts that sit on your computer into a historical time line:

• Books copied by hand in the middle ages
• Metal setting: serif fonts
• Bauhaus aesthetic and sans serif type
• Photo setting, advertising, display fonts and using fonts as elements in abstract compositions
• Desktop publishing

Professional graphics design has made quantum leaps because of technology. I find a mirror of this in my own personal development in design from starting to experiment with typography in the time of WordPerfect to 2011 where I am getting interest in applying poster design concepts into PowerPoint.

U-turning on custom fonts

I used to recommend to stick to standard Windows fonts in order to avoid compatibility issues when presenting on other computers than your own. I am changing my mind, the risk of technical issues is still there, but the benefits of custom fonts is much greater.

Standard PC fonts (Times roman, Calibri, Arial, etc.) just do not look good. In dense body text, this is not such a big deal. But as PowerPoint slides get fewer and fewer text, their design start to look more like a poster with big headlines. And in posters, typography is a huge deal.

This post on the PowerPoint Ninja blog explains how to overcome compatibility issues by embedding your custom font inside the presentation. When you send it to someone else, she will see the correct font.

You can find your inspiration for fonts on one of the many fonts web sites, paying close attention to the small prints in books (they often mention which font was used) or through books like this one that I picked up in a Tel Aviv book store: 1000 Fonts (affiliate link).

Book review - Design Elements

Recently, I have picked up a lot of books about graphics design and typography. Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual (affiliate link) is a book that takes all the basic principles of graphics design one by one. It is built around 20 reminders for designers. Reminders and not rules, because designers have the opportunity to break them (see the cover of the book with 2 paragraphs of text put on top of each other).

Most books about graphics design use an incredibly complex language to describe visual concepts. This books is no exception. Rather than try to translate the text into concepts, I skimmed the prose and focused on the many beautiful illustrations, images, examples, and their explanations.

Things that I was reminded of (not as a graphics designer, but as a designer of business presentations in PowerPoint):

• Think of which fonts you use (I am u-turning on earlier assertions that you should only use standard fonts in PowerPoint to avoid technology issues)
• Pay attention to the style consistency across pages in a presentation beyond just colors. Other things to watch are placement of objects, style of images, the way images are displayed, etc.
• Make sure your slide looks elegant, maybe even by reducing the font size somewhat and creating more white space around the slide. Margins do not have to be set at 0.4 inch all the time.
• Use color carefully, instead of "which color of the scheme have I not yet used on this slide"-type thinking, think about the distribution of light and dark, ask yourself where color is needed, and then pick the one that supports the slide message best.
• Try to incorporate rhythm in the design of a slide. 

A very interesting and useful book, a sharp contrast with the many "coffee table" books about graphics design with pages full of complex and sophisticated illustrations without something to learn from them.

(By the way, my refusal to use proper apostrophes and quotation marks in blog posts puts me firmly in the box of non-graphics designers according to the book)

Book review - "Resonate"

Anyone interested in presentation design will have heard about or bought Nancy Duarte's latest book: Resonate. I managed to read it over the weekend, here are my impressions.

While her previous book slide:ology was mostly about slide design, Resonate is about stories, stories that get your audience to change their perspective, and take action, do something, change something. It is actually the right order of learning how to become a good presentation designer: first acquire the skills to visualize a single concept in a chart, then focus on weaving those charts together to build a powerful story.

This is what I see happening around me. The current Slideshare presentation of the year competition shows that thousands of people have acquired the skill to make "stunning visuals" using images. But most story lines are still relatively simple: sequences of chars showing how big something is, or sequences of images that show emotions/feelings that we all recognize. Great movie directors or authors posses the art to take you along a more complex path  that will change you and the perspectives you have of the world. This is what Resonate is trying to get to.

Slide:ology is a reference book that I still use when designing slides, Resonate is different. It is a book with an idea, looking at the cover on the book shelf will remind you to check whether this is the best story line you could come up with

Large parts of the book are written using reverse engineering, analyzing great presentation and speeches and see why they had so much impact on their audiences. But on top of that, Nancy threw in her own presentation design experience, and embarked on a significant research effort in areas such as movie scrip writing and classic rhetoric. A few of the interesting points that were highlighted in the book (just random examples, not a MECE (what's this?) summary of the book's contents):

• Humility. The presentation is not about you, but about the audience, and audiences do not connect with arrogant speakers. Nancy is giving the example herself throughout the book, it is written in a very personal, understated style, admitting some personal mistakes, all of this given her impressive background in presentation design.
• Contrast keeps the audience interested: constantly move between the "what is now" to the "what could be". Change pace, change the type of slides, change, change, change to prevent boredom.
• Add emotion to the cold facts. Go back into your own memory to find your own stories to add a personal touch to your presentation
• Micro-segment the audience. Really understand who's in it. (I liked the observation that analytical audiences are suspicious).

Slide design you can learn/teach with a bunch of practical tricks to fix the basic mistakes. Story weaving is something different. Books such as Resonate remind us how important it is, and give use some idea where to get started, but story telling is impossible to "automate" using a prescribed process. It is an art.

All links to Amazon on this post are affiliate links.

Book review - "Bibliographic"

I stumbled on this book: Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books in a Tel Aviv book store the other day. The vast majority of recent books on graphics design are meant to be "eye candy", sitting on coffee tables without being read in detail. What a joy it is therefore to go back to older titles.

This book lists 100 important books on graphics design and typography. Each book is discussed, put in its historical context, and highlighted with an image of the cover and  a few page spreads.

It is striking to see how only a few decades ago, graphics and type still looked so basic. But equally important is the realization how the current overdose of computer-generated images and decorations detracts from the basic purpose of a poster or a slide: convey a message. When people just had type and basic shapes as design tool, it forced them to make the most of them. I find myself in a similar situation, armed with PowerPoint, fonts, images but without the graphic artillery of sophisticated Adobe Illustrator designs. Looking some of the designs from the 30s or 60s convinces me that I can do without this back up.

Some books discussed in the book are still in print, and I have added a few to my wishlist:

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition by Edward Tufte (yes, I have not read this book yet)
• Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface by Lars Mueller (maybe time to stock up on the DVD
  as well)
  
• Meggs' History of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs
  

Here is an extensive book review with a full list of the book titles inside by Swipe in Toronto (it is these type of specialist stores that I miss now and then here in Tel Aviv). Any more suggestions on typography and graphics design classics?

All links to Amazon in this post are affiliate links.