Financial anchors
In financial presentations aimed at financial analysts you need to establish a financial framework, anchor before throwing in North American sales growth, leverage ratios, and the cash flow of last year. While a boring table with a top level profit and loss account and a balance sheet might not be the most exciting charts in the world, it prepares the accountants and bankers among us to digest the information in the slides that are coming.
Software needs design as well
I see many enterprise software application dashboards that look worse than the worst PowerPoint slides. My clients begin to ask me to give my input on them as well.
- People have not thought about what information is important, and what is not
- People have not thought about how to present the information: numbers are not rounded, column, bar, and pie charts are thrown in at random, colours are picked randomly
Consumer applications have gone through a big design revolution over the last couple of years, now is the turn for enterprise software.
The year in Kickstarter
Kickstarter has posted its 2013 overview here. What I like about it: done in HTML, adjusts for different screen widths, beautiful typography, and very nice use of video.
However, the opening slides with the stats are actually not that powerful. Rounding up numbers, using a simple data chart here and there, and maybe use maps would have driven the points home much stronger.
Still, it would be good if more people try to find a different format to publish their annual report.
However, the opening slides with the stats are actually not that powerful. Rounding up numbers, using a simple data chart here and there, and maybe use maps would have driven the points home much stronger.
Still, it would be good if more people try to find a different format to publish their annual report.
TL;DR or TB;DR?
Seth Godin notices how - because of information overload - we have stopped reading/absorbing things with the full nuances, referring to “TL;DR”: too long, did not read.
You as a presentation designer need fight against this behaviour as well. Dense boring slides do not get attention, instead people apply their mental models and think they already understand what you are gong to say.
The obvious approach to this is to design visually attractive slides to grab people’s attention. But visually striking images is only half the work. Your story itself need to have interesting and unexpected turning points as well. An unexpected fact, an unexpected contradiction.
People do not really think something is too long: they think something is too boring to read: TB;DR.
You as a presentation designer need fight against this behaviour as well. Dense boring slides do not get attention, instead people apply their mental models and think they already understand what you are gong to say.
The obvious approach to this is to design visually attractive slides to grab people’s attention. But visually striking images is only half the work. Your story itself need to have interesting and unexpected turning points as well. An unexpected fact, an unexpected contradiction.
People do not really think something is too long: they think something is too boring to read: TB;DR.
Explain when different
Your audience has mental models of businesses in their head. For example, if you are raising money for your own new venture capital fund, people expect to see that you only invest in companies with a clear competitive advantage, great management teams with track record, that you as an investor are hands on, that your investment team is great and that the carry is 20%. All venture capital pitch decks sound like that.
If your approach to the business is different than the mental model, you need to explain it carefully upfront, explain the pure mechanics of the situation, before launching into the more emotional part of the presentation (showing how great your team is, and how great the investment opportunity is).
Your different model might be completely obvious to you, it is unlikely to be the case with an audience who hears it for the first time. I you wait for it in the back of the presentation, your audience all of a sudden will be confused (“Wait a minute?”) and the questions/discussions you are going to get in the end are practical ones, not about the great investment opportunity, but how exactly your fund works.
If your approach to the business is different than the mental model, you need to explain it carefully upfront, explain the pure mechanics of the situation, before launching into the more emotional part of the presentation (showing how great your team is, and how great the investment opportunity is).
Your different model might be completely obvious to you, it is unlikely to be the case with an audience who hears it for the first time. I you wait for it in the back of the presentation, your audience all of a sudden will be confused (“Wait a minute?”) and the questions/discussions you are going to get in the end are practical ones, not about the great investment opportunity, but how exactly your fund works.
Some people do not mind
I had been discussing three versions of a presentation that uses custom fonts with a client, and every time I started the conversation with the question whether they installed the font. Three times, the answer was: “Not yet”.
I already feel uncomfortable when I see a small line break issue due to font compatibility on a slide. Other people can focus on the content of a slide, and consider fixing the fonts as a small todo at the end of a presentation.
I already feel uncomfortable when I see a small line break issue due to font compatibility on a slide. Other people can focus on the content of a slide, and consider fixing the fonts as a small todo at the end of a presentation.
Hidden megabytes
PowerPoint files can be very large, especially if you use high resolution images, or even videos. In the near future, all of us will have moved to a cloud-based storage solution, where we no longer email actual documents to each other, just a link. In the mean time, we need to try to keep our PowerPoint files below 10MB, the email architecture limit that was invented in the 1990s.
In the format pictures menu of PowerPoint is an option to compress images to save space, I usually go down to 150DPI. After compressing, always check what happened to the images in your presentation, the compression tool can do funny things (ruffle transparency borders, undo re-colouring, etc.)
If your files are still big after compression, or even when you do not use any images at all, have a look in the slide master (view, slide master view). There might be templates for title pages and/or separators there with full-size images. These get saved with the entire presentation. You can delete the template slides if you do not need them.
In the format pictures menu of PowerPoint is an option to compress images to save space, I usually go down to 150DPI. After compressing, always check what happened to the images in your presentation, the compression tool can do funny things (ruffle transparency borders, undo re-colouring, etc.)
If your files are still big after compression, or even when you do not use any images at all, have a look in the slide master (view, slide master view). There might be templates for title pages and/or separators there with full-size images. These get saved with the entire presentation. You can delete the template slides if you do not need them.
The investment banker
Investment bankers use presentations that are documents for reading, they are even denser than the slides a management consultant typically produces. And whereas a management consultant usually can be convinced easily to change a presentation approach, investment bankers stick to their traditional approach. I have been thinking why this is the case, because I believe that a more visual presentation approach also works in the world of finance. Possible reasons:
- Finance is a conservative industry, and a different looking presentation might give the impression that you are not serious.
- Bankers are actually good sales people and do most of their sales pitches verbally, they put up the confusing and dense slide with all the facts, but when you listen to the audio track, the story is quite clear. The slides are for reading after the meeting, the presentation is for listening only
- Bankers work under very strict time pressure, so there is simply no other practical way than to produce a deck by writing bullet after bullet.
- Bankers usually do not get very deep in to the strategy of a company (like a management consultant does), a company is a company with sales, growth, margins, PE multiples, and leverage. As a result, the presentation will look more generic.
- Bankers are used to reading/interpreting financial ratios: a EV/adjusted EBITDA ratio of 6.8 instantly rings a bell. A less financially savvy audience might need more than a bullet point to be impressed by this.
In most of my projects with a conservative investment banker, I try to negotiate a highly visual summary deck that goes in front of the dense appendix. Over time, we iterate the summary deck more and more, and the appendix gets used less.
For very high profile events (i.e., big IPOs) I see that bankers start to invest in visual presentations, things are also starting to change in the world of finance.
"My story is more complicated"
A client told me the other day that she had seen many of my presentations, and thought they were really good, but all very simple. Her story would for sure be more complicated... It made me smile.
The joy of tables
Tables in PowerPoint are a great basis to set up a slide in PowerPoint. Everything is instantly lined up in a grid, it is easy to add and remove boxes (lines). I often use tables with a very light grey fill and fat white lines.
OS X - Windows compatibility
Now that the installed base of Macs is growing, especially outside the large enterprises, you need to take into account that your PowerPoint presentation is likely to be opened on both machines.
There are obvious differences to be aware of. The key one is fonts: there is a large set of fonts that are available on both operating systems, but very obvious ones are not always part of the overlap (Helvetica for example is not available on a standard Windwos machine, and Calibri gets only installed on a Mac once the user buys Microsoft Office).
But here are the less obvious ones. Even if you stick to standard fonts, there are still tiny differences in how both operating systems insert line breaks. Watch out especially for tight text in boxes.
Also, there is an annoying difference in the way PowerPoint for Mac colors text and shapes. You pick the same colour for both, but they look different. A design can look perfect on a Windows machine, but off on a Mac.
There is no quick solution to all of this. Installing a second virtual machine on your computer might be a bit overkill. I guess there is no alternative but to ask a friend or the recipient of the presentation to send back a quick PDF file to double check, especially for important presentations that will be presented on screen (as opposed to a document meant for reading).
There are obvious differences to be aware of. The key one is fonts: there is a large set of fonts that are available on both operating systems, but very obvious ones are not always part of the overlap (Helvetica for example is not available on a standard Windwos machine, and Calibri gets only installed on a Mac once the user buys Microsoft Office).
But here are the less obvious ones. Even if you stick to standard fonts, there are still tiny differences in how both operating systems insert line breaks. Watch out especially for tight text in boxes.
Also, there is an annoying difference in the way PowerPoint for Mac colors text and shapes. You pick the same colour for both, but they look different. A design can look perfect on a Windows machine, but off on a Mac.
There is no quick solution to all of this. Installing a second virtual machine on your computer might be a bit overkill. I guess there is no alternative but to ask a friend or the recipient of the presentation to send back a quick PDF file to double check, especially for important presentations that will be presented on screen (as opposed to a document meant for reading).
2013 graphs of the year
With the food for thought in the 2013 graphs of the year on Wonkblog I take the opportunity to wish you all the very best for 2014!
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