Financial crisis explained in PowerPoint

A post on The Big Picture in February 2008 points to a "cartoonesk" PowerPoint presentation explaining the current crisis in the financial markets. We all should have listened to it...  There is no credit though for who created this file, also some explicit 4-letter words inside. (UPDATE, in slideshare an author is mentioned, not sure whether the person who uploaded it also created it)

Subprime Primer

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: subprime mortgages)

For those who want to know it all in detail in a classic presentation packed with dense facts, I embed another presentation. It is not written in Presentation Zen-style, but most of the data charts are designed correctly. Viewing in full-screen mode is essential.

Making Sense of the Mortgage Meltdown

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: kedrosky milken)

Update: Presentation Zen adds another explanation video here.

Seth Godin on PowerPoint magic

See his post here. I agree with all his suggestions, except for the one where he recommends to buy your own font. It might look great, but creates an incredible headache when sharing documents with others, or putting things on the web.

Slides that stick - now included in Alltop Speaking

Alltop is a "magazine rack" of high-quality, popular topics. I am proud to say that this blog has been included in the "Speaking" section. Go check it this page, since it includes feeds from many other interesting blogs in the area of presentation design and public speaking.

Goldmail - rich presentations in email

TechCrunch writes about Goldmail today: tool that allows you to create Flash animation of a media-rich presentation (including voice-over) that can be embedded easily in an email.

UPDATE: Please read the elaborate clarification by Tom Holownia, VP Marketing of GoldMail, in the comments.

What do consultants mean when they say "you're not MEESEE?"

MECE (pronounced "meesee") stands for mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Management consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc.) use it a lot. What does it mean? In simple language, a text is MECE where are no holes, no overlaps. For example, the following structure is not MECE:

• Prices ....
• Volume .....
• Revenues ....

Revenues is the result of prices x volume, there is an overlap in this list. Why does being MECE matter? If you want to analyze a problem, it is important that you get all the component structure of the problem right: you need to get them all on the radar screen, and there should not be any dependency between the components. For example if you concluded that "costs are not the issue" and close the analysis here, you don't want it to re-emerge somewhere else in your problem solving effort. Why does being MECE matter in PowerPoint presentations? If you want to tell the audience a story  you don't want to confuse them by bringing up points again in an unclear structure. The logic should be clear. Should you apply it blindly in your PowerPoint presentations? No. MECE stories can have the perfect logical structure, but can also be boring. For example, in order to be complete, you need to address the rest of the world aftering discussing the most exciting markets US and Asia, even when they are not relevant. Be MECE when designing a story line structure, then adjust to make your presentation interesting and compelling.

Free Cisco network icon library for PowerPoint

When helping startups to pitch for VCs, I often need to include a slide with a technical architecture in a presentation. These diagrams are complex to make. Cisco makes life a little bit easier by putting its entire icon set as a free download online (link). They are ready to be copied directly into PowerPoint. The images are not that pretty, but they are functional. A smart move by Cisco, many potential clients will use these icons to design their network requirements before entering the vendor selection process P.S. Technical diagrams that use these type of icons often end up in a handout, or the appendix section of a presentation. I will post my thoughts about technical architectures that need to play a central role in a pitch presentation later.

Pimp my poster - scientific conference billboards

I stumbled across this article in The Scientist today: life sciences scientist discussing posters that are used to present work in scientific conferences. It is worth a read, presentation design discussed from another angle. Also have a look in some of the links in the side bar with more related content. (Don't click around too much as after trying to access too many pages the site requires subscription). Some points that are made (some more serious than others):

• PowerPoint has killed the scientific conference poster, the program is not build for it, but people do not want to spend a lot of money on huge trial prints that in the end are not good
• Color-coordinating the clothing of the presenter with those of the presenter (scientifically proven) improves communcation effectiveness
• There is a bigger debate on the "death of the scientific paper" with ever increasing data sets and new presentation technologies available

(Image source on Flickr) The article does not provide a hot link to the Flickr group "Pimp my poster", you can find it here. I randomly clicked through some posters, here is an interesting one as an example of the sort of presentations scientists are preparing. I learned about a new set of communication challenges today.

Showing off your customers - building a logo page in PowerPoint (or something different)

Many of the startup clients I serve are keen to show off their customer list. Almost all of them do it using a page full of company logos scraped of web pages. Why do most of them look so bad?

• Different sizes
• Different colors
• Not evenly distributed over the page
• Not all images are of high quality

Some guide lines on how to let them look better, some of which are easy, some of which take more time:

1. Build a grid. Count the number of logos you need to put up. Build a nicely distributed x by y matrix of rectangular boxes that fits them all. Now all logos will look evenly spread.
2. Use a white background, or make at least the boxes (described above in 1.) white, most logos come on white
3. Use the "press toolkit" of a company to download the official logo
4. If not available, use Google Image search to find clean logos (not the ones with background graphics at the top loft corner of web pages), the bigger the size, the better (they look sharper when you shrink them)
5. If the logo is only available with a colored background, find the RGB color of it (in Paint, or another graphics program) and make the color of the box (described in 1.) exactly the same
6. Crop out any marketing slogans ("we try harder") etc. from the logo
7. To make the slide a bit more calm, you can take the color out of all the logos and replace them with a monochrome overlay consistent with your slide color scheme. The point is to show lots of logos, not neccesarily introduce a lot of colors to your slide.

Image credit: Stabilo Boss' web 2.0 logo page on Flickr. About the something different. Bigger companies can use another concept, describing where their products are used at any moment in time. Microsoft for example, could put an image of a busy Paris boulevard and put small arrows with a Microsoft logo inside and point it at stores, cafes, offices, someone talking into a mobile phone, etc. All to indicate that the company has millions of customers in all possible consumer and business segments.

Google images now with "photo-only" option

In the advanced search tab of Google Images you can now specify: all content, news content, faces, and photo content. Photo content is the new addition. You can strip put illustratations, logos etc. from your image search. (Thank you Lifehacker.) Although I purchase all my PowerPoint images from stock photography sites, I often use Google images to "brainstorm" a concept for an image. Off topic. The "faces" option might be the most interesting. We are heading for a world where images of people are getting automatically tagged, that means: all images available on the web. For fun, see MyHeritage that has developed technology to match your face with that of a celebrity. My face was matched to that of Formula I racer Alain Prost. I guess their technology will be put to more serious use soon.

Classic mis-communication cartoon

I like using comic cartoons in my presentations. This one is a classic about mis-communication in a (software development?) project. It can work well in presentations during corporate retreats. With a little creative cutting and pasting you can make an attractive slide sequence.

The (small) text under each image (click the image for a larger picture):

1. How the customer explained it
2. How the project leader understood it
3. How the analyst designed it
4. How the programmer wrote it
5. How the business consultant described it
6. How the project was documented
7. What operations installed
8. How the customer was billed
9. How it was supported
10. What the customer really needed

The Project Cartoon site has more variations and larger downloads of the cartoon. It is still not clear to me who owns the original copyright on this image.

I posted before about "serious" cartoons in presentations here.

Using real faces in PPT (+ Microsoft AutoCollage)

I like using images of people in my PowerPoint presentations.

• Faces create an emotional connection (especially on a title page that is open for a long time on the screen while the audience sits down)
• Faces allow the visualization of a consumer segment, an image says more than a 1,000 words (college education, mid-income, Hispanic, woman, suburbia, etc.)

Things to think about when picking images:

• Select images of "real people", not "artificial" models, cliche images, or cheesy compositions of which there 1,000s on stock image sites (hand shakes, applause, "business person in suit", call centre rep, etc.)
• Images isolated on a white (or black) background often blend in most easily into your template
• Often, I use a color overlay to take the natural image colors out and replace it with a color from my client's color scheme.

I used a free trial of Microsoft Research AutoCollage 2008 to show some examples of images of "real people" I used (click on the image for a larger picture). All images were purchased from iStockPhoto.

(B.t.w., why is Microsoft trying to sell this product with many free collage utilities available on the web?)

Chart concept - hand-written notes

A hand writing style can often be useful in slides describing inputs for product design, or a time line with milestones / todo lists (the latter always runs the risk of looking particularly boring). This slide was created using a stock image of mm-paper plus the standard PPT "sticky note" shape with a shading put in the back. The font is "Kristen" but it can be any informal looking one.