(Brief) venture into print design

I just completed my first print design. Not that I expect this to be my bread and butter, it was a natural extension of a presentation design project I did.

It struck me how simple and fast it is to design a brochure when you start with a good PowerPoint presentation. You have the right flow, you have the right visuals, you have the right visual language. When you start designing print from a blank sheet of paper, people argue and iterate forever to get the wording of the text right, to do the layout, and then, oh, we need a few illustrations as well.

Here are some of the things I had to do.

1. Teach yourself InDesign. Luckily it was not necessary for this small project extension, I had to go through this process to write my ebook
2. Print the PowerPoint as a press-quality Adobe PDF to get huge resolution images. If required, remove foot notes, page numbers and other clutter from slides.
3. Select the right charts from the deck. Out go the ones that describe the story flow, out go the huge-images-one-word slides, what you are left with are the diagrams, the flow charts, the data charts
4. When you place a chart crop out the titles, foot notes and other distractions
5. Go through an iterative process of writing text columns, moving images, re-formatting text until you are happy with the result

So my advice to brochure designers: start with a slide deck...

Bullet point punctuation

Bullet points can happen to the best of us. If they are short and to the point, there is no need to end them with a period or full stop.

MSFT updates Office 2011 for Mac

More details about Microsoft Office 2011 version 14.1.4 are here. PowerPoint is not explicitly mentioned, but it promises that it fixed Excel crashes (hopefully the ones that make my life miserable sometimes).

Screaming colors

I just re-designed my Twitter avatar with a dash of fluorescent paint to stand out in the noise of social media. It is interesting how computer screens work. A really bright color is not yellow or orange, but rather the ones that sit on the edges between 2 colors. Mine is in between yellow and green. It is as if our eyes are being teased by interfering light waves that are just a bit off in terms of wave length.

Other examples of interfering colors are on the border of pink and blue, or green and blue. I blogged earlier about how great classical painters manage to create rich colors through a combination of color mixing, patterns, texture.

Teaching slide design to teenagers

In a week from now I will be teaching 15/16 year olds about presentation design in Jerusalem.

MEET is an MIT-sponsored high-tech education initiative that aims to bring Israeli and Palestinian students closer together. Over the past years it has become a very prestigious program and only a small fraction of the applicants get in. Admitted students go through an intensive curriculum of programming and other IT-related subjects in addition to their regular high school commitments. A business idea pitch competition is part of the program, and I will be teaching, coaching, and judging the students.

I know that there are many teachers among the readers of this blog and would welcome suggestions on how I can adjust my content aimed at senior executives and startup CEOs to a younger audience.

You can find out more about MEET here.

Arial Black in caps

Arial is not as pretty as Helvetica. Arial Black in lower case looks really horrible. However, Arial Black in all-caps looks actually pretty good and is installed standard on most computers in the world. It only fits presentations with very few words on a slide.

Subtle reality distortion

Subtle reality distortion in Photoshop can give great results. One of my favorite uses is a black and white background with a small logo or item in color added into it. Here an image of another Idea Transplant truck on its way to a happy client with a little help of the Photoshop vanishing point filter.

A fresher look for the blog

I made some changes to the blog today:

• Re-installed the Disqus commenting engine (it works with the new Blogger template designer)
• Big and bold title (is it too in-your-face?) so the site looks better on mobile devices
• Cut the ugly share buttons, very few people used them and they were just an eye sore... (what do you think?)

Feedback is always appreciated.

Back to the 50s

I am reading up on the history of graphics design and typography and it struck me that non-professional PowerPoint presentation designers today have a similar tool set available to them as the analogue graphic design masters from the 30s to the 60s. Classic fonts, simple shapes, primitive/manual image manipulation tools.

Have a look at this poster by Joseph Muller-Brockmann (I cannot paste it here because of rights): basic fonts, basic shapes. The power of the design is solely created by proportions and shapes.

I stocked up on some more books for design inspiration.

Little (cultural) differences

More and more people understand the power of personal stories in presentation design. One of the easiest sources of stories are things you are passionate about. Many people are passionate about sports, and as a result, sport analogies often are used to give a more personal flavor to a presentation.

That is great, but only for a national audience. There are little cultural differences.

People in Europe have never seen the 2006 Super Bowl finale, and do not know who the coach of the New York Yankees is. And vice-versa, very few people in the U.S. will remember European sports stars.

If your presentation travels across borders, think of other ways to connect to your audience.

Make the small print really small

On the first day of my career at McKinsey we were told to put the sources of our analysis really prominently at the bottom of each chart. Even if the source of the data was yourself, simply put "Team analysis".

Still, many presentation slides have very conspicous sources and foot notes at the bottom. It is a typographical eye sore. When you are standing up to present your slides, people are not interested in reading the small print.

I am not advocating to take the foot notes of all together. Readers who go through the deck afterwards might be interested in them. It is also very hard to keep a good book keeping of data sources, better to have them handy all the time (I do not have the discipline to keep on updating that page with all the sources in the back of the document). And finally, taking of the reference to a photographer in an image with a creative commons license is not good practice.

So instead, do the obvious. Make the font really small (you can overwrite the "8" as smallest font size in the PowerPoint drop-down menu and make it a 6). And give the font a color with low contrast with the background. In that way, you get the best of both worlds.

This might also be the way to handle your lawyer who insists to put “confidential” and other disclaimers on every slide of the deck. Page numbers can be treated the same way. Sometimes they need to be there, but only for people who stand with their nose against the screen.

9 out of 10

The Zynga IPO presentation made a statement that they created nine out of ten of the world's biggest social games. There are two issues with this statement.

First, this very powerful statistic is buried inside a series of bullets. For you the presenter, it is a totally obvious shortcut. For the audience that just gets to you know your story, it is simply too short to grasp in full. Instead, spend an entire chart on this one point. Show the ranking of the top 10 social games. It will take you almost exactly the same time to present, and this time, with the ranking visually in front of them, the audience will get it.

The second problem with nine out of ten is that you take up 90% of some category. It does not mean much to the audience. What makes it interesting and more understandable is to contrast the top 10 with the top 15 or top 20. Shows which very famous titles did not make it in the list. Often, a concept is defined by its opposite.

Hidden space wasters

File sizes in PowerPoint can quickly mushroom. We discussed PDF-ing and/or image compressing before to get the size of your files down.

But here are 2 additional inflators of file sizes that these techniques might not catch. The first one is logos. In order to get the sharpest logo images, you need to search for large logo images. So a typical logo page with 20 or so logos can become a huge consumer of space. But the resulting logo images are actually not that big, you can compress them further (to 96 dpi) than the other, larger images in your presentation. Make sure you uncheck the apply-to-all-images-in-this-presentation box when doing this.

Another space waster is your template. If you were guilty of Frankensteining a deck together from multiple presentations, changes are that your slide master contains duplicate copies of slide masters. Especially title pages with big images can add up. Go through your slides and the slide master to clean things up.

Music while working

Recently, I discovered the joys of playing music while working. I feared that it would distract me, but the opposite is true; I find that I am able to concentrate for longer stretches of time, with fewer temptations to check email or Twitter streams.

What sort of music works best for me? Jazz. Why? It is great as a background music that does not take over your mind. (I do not understand why they do not play more jazz in elevators). Pop music gets stuck in your head. Classical music has many repetitive patterns that do not work for me while designing.

I tend to switch on an Internet streaming music service to avoid listening to familiar music, and have the hassle of switching CDs every hour. (Poor store sales people who have to listen to the same track 15 times a day).

If you do not have the luxury of your own office, a good set of headphones might be a worthy investment.

What is your favorite music while working?

The Zynga IPO presentation

The Zynga IPO presentation is in the public domain, you can watch the video here. I watched the first 15 minutes of the presentation. Some comments.

Overall it is a pretty good presentation. The slides are organized, decently formated, the speakers are clear. And I guess this is what you have to do for a video-ed delivery about an investment opportunity that is aired for everyone to see on the Internet.

But what could be improved?

I think the presentation was taped with a tele-prompter as the only audience. The pace of speaking is constant. The result could have been better to put in a small live audience in the camera room, to make the delivery more real, more emotional.

Zynga must have many highly skilled graphics designers. I would shed the red border around the slides, get rid of the clouds in the title, but ad more game props and other graphics inside the slides to get the Zynga cartoon-like graphic style in the slides. The team slide with the cartoon characters and the logos of the previous employers is a good example.

The opening slide with the bullet points is an example how bullet do not stick. The slide gets put up. We look at the speaker, try to figure him out. We look at the background, the globe, the dog, start reading the points and note that the speaker is sticking exactly to the bullets. The content of the bullets does not sink in. The bullet slide could have been shortened and instead the opening shot could be focussed on just one message: we have Amazon in shopping, Google in search, Facebook in social, and now there will be Zynga in gaming for the next decade. If you want to invest in social gaming, there is no alternative but to invest in us.

Most investors will believe that the gaming market is big, that the mobile opportunity is huge. Some key advantages of Zynga are buried in the middle of the presentation. The difference with traditional revenue models depending on the opening weekend. The presentation uses terms like unmatched investment, infrastructure, platform, scalable, many times, but the meaning of it does not come across very well. (The key point is that Zynga built it, and no one will be able to catch up). Most important of all, the demo of a game itself comes in late. I guess is that many institutional investors actually never tried a Zynga game themselves. There is not better way than explaining social gaming by actually showing how it works.



Some extraordinary statistics are downplayed. The CEO puts up the 9 out of 10 social block busters were ours bullet points, but you only realize what it means when the more detailed chart comes up later. During a boring slide about the advertising revenue model, the COO talks about an amazing story of how gamers built 8 million Best Buy stores. The audience is reading how advertising is 5% of Zynga revenues.

In short, I tend to go against the investment banking practice of a highly structured investor pitch. Rather, I would keep the opening structure really short. Feed some really exciting facts in the form of small stories and case examples, focus on those elements of the pitch that the public might not be aware of, and bring back the structure and summary investor pitch later.

Thank you Wouter Deelman for pointing to this story.

If it is a text doc, treat it as text doc

Some PowerPoint documents are meant for reading, not for presenting. In many ways, PowerPoint is a more flexible tool to write text documents than a rigid word processor. It is easy to add graphs, shapes, text boxes.

If your document is a text document, treat it as such and do not try to turn it into an on-screen presentation. The resulting presentation will be something in between that is not good to present on screen, and not good to read on a monitor. It does definitely not look Zen, and the short bullet points in big fonts are too cryptic for someone to understand without explanation.

Instead have a look at what great document, brochure and newspaper designers do to make text readable. Smaller, lighter fonts for body text. Lots of white space around text blocks. Subtle use of colors. Subtle highlights of titles. Columns to avoid straining the eye across long lines.

Sometimes you can mix styles. A stunning image with a big headline that says that food shortage will be a major issue in 10 years from now. The next page is a restrained text page full of facts and information supporting your point.

There is nothing wrong with a text document in PowerPoint, as long as you admit that it is a text document.

Color theory can be boring

Nature or artists usually do not stick to color theory to create an interesting color scheme. Jazz bands really start to swing when the drummer goes slightly off beat. If you restrict yourself to complementary colors, your choices are limited and the look of your presentation resembles those of many others who use the same approach.

Instead, get inspired by art (try Art Authority) or a or a colorful sea creature, or a photograph (check out Steve McCurry's blog) and upload the image to a color extraction tool such as Adobe Kuler. It will make you work more original, plus it adds a little personal secret to your presentation, your favorite painter or that memorable place that is hidden in the slides somewhere.

Get decent team images

The other day I put a large picture of member of a management team in an investor presentation. “Hey, that one is much too large!” was the reaction of the client.

College year books and newspapers have programmed us to look for passport-sized images of people. Usually they have an inconsistent color and/or background, and people have an awkward starte into the lens of the photo booth.

You do not see images like this in well-designed magazines. Why not give your presentation that same look and feel. This is especially important if you email a presentation ahead of the actual live performance. The person opening the document might not know you and a big image might help establish a better connection.

So bigger images of management team members is one step. The next step up is to hire a good photographer and actually take a shot of the team working together. Preferably in a different pose than the ones we see in wedding family photos or football team shots.

Hard-to-find Excel 2011 shortcuts

I do not use many Excel keyboard shortcuts. But my switch from Windows to Mac OSX showed that I really was dependent on a few that were hard to find in my new software. Maybe you have the same issue.

• In Windows, I constantly used the Office 2010 (Windows) CTRL-MINUS and CTRL-PLUS to add/remove columns and rows. For some reason CTRL-PLUS does not work in Office 2011. To insert a row or column on the Mac, select it and hit CMD-I instead.
• I use the soft line break in an Excel cell a lot, on the PC it is ALT-ENTER, on the Mac it is ALT-CMD-ENTER.

Do you believe in your own hockey stick projection?

“Look, we have proof! Excel says that we will be a $50m company in year 5, the hockey stick revenue forecast shows it all!”

No investor will buy this story. She knows the forecast is ridiculously optimistic, but she can check 2 things:

1. Is there more logic to the $50m than a conservative 5% of a $1bn IDC market forecast? Have you thought about how your business works, and how to think about its revenue potential? If not, the investor should invest in a company that claims the other 95% of the $1bn.
2. Are you driven, motivated, determined enough to go after the $50m against all the odds?

In other words, do you believe it yourself (really)? That might be the sign an investor is looking for.