I realised that I hardly look back at my notes from a briefing meeting when designing a presentation. The big story is designed from memory, only for facts I need to revert to my scribbles.
I guess that your brain gets used to recording stories when you design presentations for a living. When I listen to someone (more important than seeing an existing presentation) I record the information by creating a story flow in my head that is more memorable than scribbles on paper.
Designing on a MacBook Pro
After a second hard disk crash (long live Dropbox) I decided to write off my 17" MacBook Pro, and upgrade to the new 15" one with a retina display.
Buying a new computer used to generate the same level of excitement people experience when upgrading their mobile phones today. Used to, because buying a new computer now mainly is buying a new utility. Re-install your apps, sync Dropbox, and things are pretty much business as usual (albeit a bit faster).
This 15" retina display though slowly lured me into something I have not done in years: sit in a sofa and do serious design work. The amount of screen my laptop covers is tiny compared to my Thunderbolt screen (you see this when dragging a laptop window across), but the incredible pixel density makes the whole experience wonderful.
Buying a new computer used to generate the same level of excitement people experience when upgrading their mobile phones today. Used to, because buying a new computer now mainly is buying a new utility. Re-install your apps, sync Dropbox, and things are pretty much business as usual (albeit a bit faster).
This 15" retina display though slowly lured me into something I have not done in years: sit in a sofa and do serious design work. The amount of screen my laptop covers is tiny compared to my Thunderbolt screen (you see this when dragging a laptop window across), but the incredible pixel density makes the whole experience wonderful.
But it is the same image?
Sometimes I get this question when using the same image multiple times in a presentation. I re-use it on purpose (not to save stock image costs, or for lack of inspiration). Throughout the presentation, an image can become a brand, or a logo, for a complex idea. Putting up the image again (either in full size, or a smaller icon) communicates that complex idea in a nano second.
On the way to average
I designed the chart below for a sales presentation for an asset manager who is about to go on a roadshow to pitch a new investment fund to potential distribution partners. Yes, you saw that right, I did use a reflection effect.
Demos are stories, not feature lists
A 20 minute presentation is usually to short to carry a live product demo. You might run into technical difficulties, and you are losing time/attention with banal product features such as logging in, etc.
In those cases it is better to use application screen shots, rather than the real thing. You can still point at your computer and say that there is a working prototype, and that you are more than willing to take people through in a separate, longer meeting.
The next level up is to crop/magnify the screen shots and focus only on those aspects you want the audience to see. Your Skype window, menu bars, and all other unnecessary screen real estate can be cut out.
Next level up: put big, bold, explanation arrows explaining what the user should see. Say that it is a really minimal UI, if it is minimal.
Now here is the big difference. Do not just structure your product demo alongside the feature list of your app. Instead, create a user story and let the app screens flow with the story. You can also include visual images that are not screen shots into this story board. Even better, link back to story elements you have used elsewhere in the presentation.
A product demo is a user story, not a list of features.
In those cases it is better to use application screen shots, rather than the real thing. You can still point at your computer and say that there is a working prototype, and that you are more than willing to take people through in a separate, longer meeting.
The next level up is to crop/magnify the screen shots and focus only on those aspects you want the audience to see. Your Skype window, menu bars, and all other unnecessary screen real estate can be cut out.
Next level up: put big, bold, explanation arrows explaining what the user should see. Say that it is a really minimal UI, if it is minimal.
Now here is the big difference. Do not just structure your product demo alongside the feature list of your app. Instead, create a user story and let the app screens flow with the story. You can also include visual images that are not screen shots into this story board. Even better, link back to story elements you have used elsewhere in the presentation.
A product demo is a user story, not a list of features.
Presentation design phases
Every presentation design effort goes through a similar process flow:
- Brainstorm of the content, sketching, scribbling
- Designing the big idea
- Creating the bulk of the content
- Small tweaks
You need to think about these phases when designing a presentation for a big deadline. Often, critical data for slides only becomes available at the very last minute. And most of the time, stakeholders only start to focus on the presentation in the last minute, and only when they see slides that are ready. The result: a lot of stress and sleepless nights. So what to do?
Early in the process, move from phase 1 to phase 2 and start crafting the critical slides that convey the most important ideas of your presentation, with imperfect data, maybe even without data at all. It forces senior management to get out of the blah blah blah zone, and gives specific input on the story line. When phase 2 is completed, nobody will be nervous anymore that the project might not come up with a good end result. Everyone is calm.
I find that a long-hand story board written in a word processor is equal to phase 1.5: people will react to it and give input, but when you turn that into slides, the whole thing can go upside down again. Push for phase 2 early, and do not get stuck in 2 pages of bullet points.
Now the bulk of the sweat work is phase 3. There is no reason to postpone that to the last night, you can prepare 98% of most business presentations with incomplete data.
With these preparations you are just left with phase 4 at the very last moment in the project. These changes can be done on auto pilot with the creative brain asleep at 3AM in the night.
What I really want to say, is this
In many draft/briefing presentations I see, there is a page 1 that was inserted after the full presentation was finished. It contains the things the presenter really wants to say.
Do not feel guilty to discard almost the entire presentation (slides 2-50), take page 1 as a story board to build up the entire presentation from scratch, focussing just on the things you really want to say.
The three weeks of work you invested in page 2-50 where necessary to get you to write page 1, which you can now turn into a full presentation in less than a day, because the full picture is crystal clear, very different from where you were 3 weeks ago.
Do not feel guilty to discard almost the entire presentation (slides 2-50), take page 1 as a story board to build up the entire presentation from scratch, focussing just on the things you really want to say.
The three weeks of work you invested in page 2-50 where necessary to get you to write page 1, which you can now turn into a full presentation in less than a day, because the full picture is crystal clear, very different from where you were 3 weeks ago.
Leading
One of the typography elements I play with all the time is leading, the space between 2 lines of text. PowerPoint sets the leading standard to 1.0, or 100% of the typeface size. What leading looks good depends on:
- The typeface you use
- All caps, sentence caps or lower case
- And most importantly: the size of the font, bigger fonts need less leading
There is no general rule here, you need to fiddle and see what looks best. On a Mac, there is a button that controls the leading of your paragraph, see the screenshot below. It is one of the buttons I use most.
Designing a good logo page
Most sales presentations contain some logo page to show off your impressive client list. Make sure that the page looks impressive from a graphics point of view as well. An unstructured clutter of low-res logos makes an impression of an amateurish startup best to be avoided for serious business.
- Check whether you got the latest logo of a client (visit the home page)
- Use high resolution images
- Where possible, use the logo that has a white background
- Do not distort aspect ratios
- Make sure the logos are more or less the same size
- Distribute things evenly horizontally and vertically in a nice grid
- Keep the page simple: just logos
- If things look too busy, you can consider moving all the logos to black & white
The learning pyramid
I came across this image the other day, showing retention rates of students by delivery form. A lecture is the worst, teaching others is the best. I am not sure about the accuracy of the exact percentages, but there is something to the overall hierarchy presented here. And presentations are definitely somewhere high up there.
But we can learn from this pyramid to make our presentations better.
But we can learn from this pyramid to make our presentations better.
- Audiovisual: This will not be a shocking new insight: use visual material in your presentation, avoid text
- Demonstration: Keep things highly practical, use case examples that people can relate to
- Discussion: Easy to do in a small setting, but harder for large audiences. In sales presentations for example, this would mean improvising your entire sales pitch on the client specific situation.
How could you get to teaching others in a presentation?
Look serious
It is difficult for a startup to sell to a big company. Even if your solution is really innovative, large companies prefer to work with financially stable, large companies.
The look and feel of your sales presentation can add to that nervousness in the under belly of a big-corporate purchasing officer. Looks to avoid:
The look and feel of your sales presentation can add to that nervousness in the under belly of a big-corporate purchasing officer. Looks to avoid:
- Amateurish layouts with childish colours and water cooler fonts such as Comic Sans.
- Overly cute, touchy feely, retro look and feel, especially when selling in a male-dominated corporate culture (sorry).
Now we all know that the a slick visual deck full of stories and very little text will do great in these meetings (option 3), but, there is one surprising other option (4): the big corporate, lots of bullet points, serious, boring slide deck. Purely from a look and feel perspective, you will fit right in with all the other technology vendors, unlike option 1 or 2.
If you cannot pull off option 3, option 4 is still preferred over option 1 or 2.
16:9 layout
The 16:9 format was invited for movies not for presentation slides. Over the past 500 years, there is hardly any print work in a wide 16:9 format. Text that spans a wide column is hard to read, and most diagrams, paintings, visual concepts are more square than rectangular.
If you want to design slides in a 16:9 format you could consider breaking some of the slide design conventions. Examples: putting a multi-line slide header at the top left or even bottom left of your slide, saving up valuable vertical slide real estate. Or maybe even simpler: leave a lot of calming white space on the left and right of your slide.
If you want to design slides in a 16:9 format you could consider breaking some of the slide design conventions. Examples: putting a multi-line slide header at the top left or even bottom left of your slide, saving up valuable vertical slide real estate. Or maybe even simpler: leave a lot of calming white space on the left and right of your slide.
The big picture first
Doing the product spec slides of your sales presentation is relatively easy. The big picture, how you position yourself versus the competition is harder. It is tempting to start with the easy bits and worry about the difficult things later. Still, I suggest to take on the positioning first since all other slides will depend on it. Moreover, it is the overall product concept that you are selling, not the features of individual products.
Flattening a story
Business school books and consulting reports have a clear hierarchical structure. This is great for reading a document: you can skip what you do not need, and go right into then detail when you do need it more explanation.
In short stories, hierarchy can be boring, you sound like you are given a university lecture. I often flatten that hierarchy, making the presentation more sequential. Out go the slides with the 3-5 setup bullet points, and instead I just let the story flow. If I have to, I bring back the structure at the end of the presentation to sum things up.
This works great for 20 minute presentations, for marathon presentation days we might have to revert back to the business school rigour though. But there is a reason why marathon presentation sessions are so stimulating for the brain...
In short stories, hierarchy can be boring, you sound like you are given a university lecture. I often flatten that hierarchy, making the presentation more sequential. Out go the slides with the 3-5 setup bullet points, and instead I just let the story flow. If I have to, I bring back the structure at the end of the presentation to sum things up.
This works great for 20 minute presentations, for marathon presentation days we might have to revert back to the business school rigour though. But there is a reason why marathon presentation sessions are so stimulating for the brain...
Too much colour (2)
Following frequent requests after my previous post, I have included a picture here that shows the concept of the narrow coloured bar replacing a fully coloured slide object.
Too much color
Colours brighten up your slides and are a great way to group related items together: USA is green, Europe is blue, Asia is purple for example.
But applying bold colours to big text boxes makes your slides too busy and nervous. Instead, keep those text boxes light grey and add a very narrow colour box attached to it at the left side, almost like a fat line.
But applying bold colours to big text boxes makes your slides too busy and nervous. Instead, keep those text boxes light grey and add a very narrow colour box attached to it at the left side, almost like a fat line.
Uncovering
When you need a complex animation, it is often easier to uncover objects by removing a white box than build up a shape step by step, especially if the shape includes a data graph (columns, lines, bars).
Mess illustrates mess
“Hey, that chart looks very messy?”
“Yes, but that is what we want to show, right?”
“True.”
“Yes, but that is what we want to show, right?”
“True.”
Design for reading
The other day, a client needed a presentation meant for reading, something that would be sent out to the employees by email. So, we designed it for reading and used the fact that for an internal audience we could be a bit more radical with the format.
Here is the concept: a dark 16:9 background. Each chart has a big visual on the left side while the message of the chart is spelled out in full sentences in a relatively small font in a column on the right. Full sentences, because nobody will be around to explain what the abstract graph means. A narrow column in a small font because it is easier to read than a very wide sentence spanning an entire 16:9 screen.
Here is the concept: a dark 16:9 background. Each chart has a big visual on the left side while the message of the chart is spelled out in full sentences in a relatively small font in a column on the right. Full sentences, because nobody will be around to explain what the abstract graph means. A narrow column in a small font because it is easier to read than a very wide sentence spanning an entire 16:9 screen.
Use that style guide
If your company logo was designed by a professional designer chances are that somewhere in the bottom drawer of the marketing department you can find a complete graphical style guide that goes with it. Usually, it gets only used for commissioning other design work (brochures, web sites, etc.), and hardly any PowerPoint user knows of its existence.
Ask for a copy and use it to inspire your presentation design. See what colours the designer recommends, there might be more than present in the logo. See how pages are laid out. See what fonts and font colours are used. Lots of inspiration.
And yes, the section for the PowerPoint presentations in these style guides is usually pretty bad. Professional designers are not used to working in PowerPoint (an inferior product in their minds). Beautiful design work gets reduced to Arial, heavy top banners and watermarks. So, use the design inspiration of the first pages of the style guide to create your own PowerPoint template that fits it. Hopefully the marketing communications department lets you get away with it.
Ask for a copy and use it to inspire your presentation design. See what colours the designer recommends, there might be more than present in the logo. See how pages are laid out. See what fonts and font colours are used. Lots of inspiration.
And yes, the section for the PowerPoint presentations in these style guides is usually pretty bad. Professional designers are not used to working in PowerPoint (an inferior product in their minds). Beautiful design work gets reduced to Arial, heavy top banners and watermarks. So, use the design inspiration of the first pages of the style guide to create your own PowerPoint template that fits it. Hopefully the marketing communications department lets you get away with it.
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