Injecting a designer's personal touch into a presentation

All presentations I design are used by others - not me

All presentations I design have a serious, professional subject

Still, I like to add a personal signature to my work. How can you do that within the constraints of the presentation other than the little reference in 8pt font on the last page?

As a designer you can steer the choice of visuals you use with things you are passionate about:

• When you need an urban street image: take one from Paris, even better Boulevard St. Germain, even better people sitting outside Cafe de Flore...
• When you need to express harmony use a black and white image of Miles Davis playing a away...
• When you need to visualize something agile and fast, take a bright yellow Mini car...
• When you need a newspaper cover, take one from a memorable date...
• The list can go on and on...

Picking a background color for a PowerPoint presentation

Some observations on setting the background color for your presentation:

• Whatever you choose, it should be a plain background without watermarks, logos or shapes. The audience is interested in the content of your slides, not the artwork in the background
• You have a choice of something dark, or something light. Different presentation settings, benefit from different background colors, see a previous post. (The 2 extremes: a big-audience-keynote is usually dark, a small meeting usually light)
• In principle, any dark or light color could work. But, watch out for light "pastel" colors that come out ugly on (poor) color printers or overhead projectors. Also think about working with stock images, there are plenty of images with white or black backgrounds that blend easily into the background, finding one with the perfect marine blue might be more challenging.
• Especially with dark backgrounds, it can be elegant to add a tiny gradient to the color, making the bottomo of the screen 1 shide lighter. You create an effect similar to the color of the sky after the sun just went down.

Visualizing your consumer and/or audience makes it real

Using a good image is the best way to describe something as complex as a consumer segment. Putting a page loaded with bullets: young, Asian, affluent, female, confident, well-educated on a piece of paper does not get the message across. A picture does the trick: hey, here she is!

Finding good, non-cheesy, non-artifical-model images is a challenge though.

Visualization of a person is helpful in another way: preparing your presentation. Putting up that picture of a "typical" CIO of a medium-sized company might put you in the right "mood" to fine tune that important sales presentation for 200 blade servers. The picture itself of course will never make it into the final presentation (it might if the audience has a sense of humer, but it is extremely high risk).

Our Asian consumer image was purchased on iStockPhoto.

Sometimes breaking PowerPoint rules can be a good thing

See this chart:

It breaks a number of rules. The most obvious one is the bar towering out of the chart frame. But hey, it helps make the point!

Original chart can be found on PHD Comics. I found it on Junk Charts

UPDATE: this chart does violate some other basic design rules that are better corrected, see an earlier post about cleaning up Excel/PowerPoint data charts.

Why SlideShare will turn into a major platform for spreading ideas

More and more I come to the realization how online presentation sharing tools such as SlideShare will become one of the main platforms to spread ideas.

• An image says more than a 1,000 words. Long pieces of text do not work for an impatient Internet audience suffering from information overload. Short blog or Twitter posts cannot capture complex concepts. LOOK AT THIS SHORT POST AND MANY PEOPLE WILL ALREADY DECIDE IT'S TOO LONG TO READ

• Images are a pain to manage in HTML, especially when you want to add text, shapes, etc. SlideShare makes it easy to put up a sequence of images. Slideshare makes it easy to embed, share this.

• Presentation Zen ideas about good presentation graphics are spreading into the mainstream: more and more people know how to leverage presentation software correctly

• SlideShare enables some remote "flow control". People click frantically, but follow the script better than when scrolling down a column of text only eye balling bold words, or abandoning a YouTube (or TED) video mid-way

Remember, a good SlideShare presentation is not the same as a presentation for a live audience. See my earlier post on Not all presentations are "Zen".

• A SlideShare audience is as impatient as any, but it does not sit in a room where it is impolite to walk away mid-presentation. Every slide should invite watching the next one.
• People watch SlideShare presentations on a very small screen, like sitting in the back of a huge conference room: large images, big fonts are even more important

• Animations (not a great idea anyhow) do not work (yet) in SlideShare
• No presenter. You cannot explain what's in the slides. They have to be crystal clear, messages have to be more explicit/spoon-fed than you would do in a live presentation

How people really use the iPhone - case example of presenting consumer research in PowerPoint

An interesting presentation on SlideShare, a consumer researh firm createwithcontext presents the research results about how people do use the Apple iPhone and its user interface:

How people really use the iPhone

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: development interaction)

Interesting on multiple levels:

• The content itself, how people use/get used to a new user interface (beyond the scope of this blog)
• The presentation of the results of the research: a series of screen shots with big arrows highlighting key messages. A format I often use to present screen shots of applications in PowerPoint.

This confirms how I think consumer research results in general should be presented: real images of products, of store interiors, preferrably with direct quotes from the research. "There is a book here, does that mean you can read?", rather than "Focus group members did not understand the meaning of this book icon". Conclusions do not have to be spoon fed, but rather readers benefit from digesting the raw results as if they were sitting behind the mirror of the focus group themselves.

Double productivity - upgrade to a 24" (or more) monitor

The best hardware purchase decision I have made over the past year. Large computer monitors are not a toy or an executive perk anymore but a real boost of productivity.

• Easier to design PowerPoint slides with big images
• Space to open multiple applications and copy things across (Excel data into a PowerPoint bar chart)
• No need to print - easy to read facing pages of A4 (Word, PDF)
• No need to print - dozens of Excel columns open at the same time
• Building and debugging Excel models in 50% of the time
• Less strain on the eyes
• Faster Internet searches
• Faster search through hundreds of stock images
• Easier to design slides for the 16:9 screen

I got an Eizo 24", but Amazon stocks many more (referral program links).

I cannot believe that I actually built most of my Excel models at McKinsey on a 13" laptop screen.

Turning PowerPoint shapes into freeform objects

More PowerPoint "how to's" this weekend. ("how to's" - apostrophe abuse alert) A reminder on the PowerPoint Ninja blog today on how to transform built-in PowerPoint shapes into free form objects. Read detailed instructions here.

Drawing free-hand is a challenge. In order to keep some control on where to move corners of the shape I recommend using a drawing grid with a wide spacing (PowerPoint 2007):

1. Click the "Arrange" button in the home ribbon
2. Click "Align"
3. Click "Grid settings"
4. Click "Snap objects to grid"
5. Click "Display grid on screen"
6. In "Spacing" choose a large value

Copying PowerPoint objects and keeping alignment

Copying PowerPoint objects using CTRL-C / CTRL-V or "copy"/"paste" from the menu creates a new object to the bottom right of the original one. Often you want to copy objects horizontally, or vertically aligned. Here is how to do it:

1. Hold CTRL and SHIFT
2. Use the mouse to drag a copy of the object (movement is locked horizontally or vertically)
3. Release the mouse button

Thank you Titus Tielens (see his books on PowerPoint - in Dutch)

Animated ad - cartoons should be used more in PowerPoint

This is an ad for the Detroit Institute of Arts. It has an example of how animated cartoons can support presentations. I should look more into their use, especially for situations that are actually hard to explain in traditional slides: for example the benefits of the product of a new technology startup that is so early-stage that it does not yet have a product demo. More on cartoons in presentations in a post about Google Chrome. Via AdFreak.

TED - Tim Brown on creativity and play

Videos of presentations of the TED conference are released throughout the year. This one just got posted. Tim Brown is the CEO of the "innovation and design" firm Ideo (Prada store in New York). He talks about the (powerful) relationship between creativity and play. In the rush to the deadline, we very often forget that designing presentations is a creative process.

UPDATE: The McKinsey Quarterly has interviewed Tim Brown, read it here.

PowerPoint lessons from consumer advertising

I stumbled across this ad for a Mini. It contains useful lessons for designing a PowerPoint template.

• Consistent use of colors to create the look and feel rather than a huge corporate logo or banner on each page
• Balanced composition
• White (or in this case black) space
• Creative use of fonts and type setting

Not all presentations are "Zen" - different formats for different settings

Not all presentation settings are the same. A "Presentation Zen" slide show with stunning images and the incidental word on a slide is great for a keynote, but might be a bit too much to discuss last quarter's financial results. The 50 page deck with bullet point slides might be serve better as a printed business plan than the key communication tool for a 20 minute VC funding pitch. I have tried to describe 6 presentation scenarios and categorized them according to:

• Whether the  presenter is present or not
• The amount of detail/data inside the document

Here we go (click image for bigger picture):

1. The key note is the classical "Zen" presentation. Huge fonts, dark background, few words, large images.
2. The pitch is similar to the key note, with the difference that it might be shorter, and does contain some more data to answer questions from the much smaller audience.
3. The meeting presentation is probably done on a light background, and contains much more facts and details. Over-simplified slides with beautiful pictures do not work in the small conference room with people ready to go through raw material. McKinsey and other consulting firm's presentation often fit in this box.
4. The slideshare (or online) presentation is something relatively new. People see it typically in small windows, i.e., fonts should be big, pictures should be nice. The audience of this presentation is highly impatient, clicking rapidly to reach the end, and aboning your presentation if it is not interesting enough. No animations here.
5. The email attachment is similar to the key note presentatation with an important difference that it needs to stand on its own, titles need to explain the messages in the charts. Some animation could be used here (sparingly though). Detail is less than the handout.
6. The handout contains the full detail, the full text. It should be prepared on a white background (people will often print it) and use no animation (again, does not come out in print). For VC pitch situations, the good handout makes the business plan "brick" obsolete (hardly anyone reads these anyway).

The following colorful diagram makes an attempt to visualize the above. A bit busy, the main message is that things are different in each scenario.

Powerful billboards - The Economist filling a train station hall with an ostrich

We can always learn from outdoor billboards. This one's great. Huge but still elegant. Via adgoodness

The pocket projector is coming to an empty white wall near you

Pocket projectors are starting to ship. Two reviews posted within the last 24 hours: the 3M MPro 110 (around $475) and the Epoq EPP-HH01 ($229).

The reviewers' comments suggest that although the devices can be used, it is still early days. Light strength is still relatively weak and resolution is not optimal (especially for text). As a result you need a darkened room, put the device 1-2 meters from the wall to get an image of around 40-50cm.

It sounds like we need some patience for 2 things to happen:

1. These devices become powerful enough that they can project a bright, big image. Until then, the laptop screen might be better. Maybe a compromise could work. A projector that is as flat/small as a laptop, but not quite pocket size that does meet minimum projection quality requirements.
2. More interestingly, this technology is incorporated in a mobile phone, providing these devices with a big screen instantly. The first application will actually be a replacement of the mobile phone screen for let's say web browsing without the need for scroll bars, or viewing Microsoft Office documents for private use, or projecting the latest family pictures. Showing presentations to an external audience is still less obvious.

Stripping out the background color of an image in PowerPoint

Adobe Photoshop has professional tools to cut out objects from images. In many cases, setting a transparent color in PowerPoint will do.

In PowerPoint 2007:

1. Select the image
2. Go in the "Format" ribbon
3. Click "Recolor" all the way to the left
4. Choose "Set Transparent Color" at the bottom of the menu
5. Click the color that you want to be transparent

The cut out is not perfect and it works best with images with a sharp color contrast. I mostly use it when working with a stock image from iStockPhoto that is an isolated object on a white background. Making the white background transparent gives me more design freedom in PowerPoint.

Chart concept - stage curtains waiting to be opened

Although a bit cliche, I like using an image of a red stage curtain about to be opened. They give a sense of anticipation, look beautiful (nice warm colors, lots of detail), but at the same time focus all the attention on you, the speaker, since there is not that much to look at at the projector. I got the image below from iStockPhoto (referral program link), many other stock photography sites have many, many of them.

Makes sense, different startup phase - different VC pitch

An interesting post on Eric Ries' blog today: A hierarchy of pitches. Adjust the messages of your startup pitch depending on the stage your company is in. Makes sense.

My collection of startup VC pitch advice here.

Moving graphic equalizer in PowerPoint - fun but maybe not that useful

I needed a chart to visualize 3 quality levels I think a presentation can go through:

1. Your audience bothers to listen
2. Your audience understands what you are trying to say
3. Your audience follows up after leaving the room

Brainstorming some concepts, I ended up with that of a graphic equalizer beating away at higher intensity levels. Stock images failed, so here is the DIY approach in PowerPoint: 

• Create distributed rows of narrow rectangles
• Add green, orange and red colors
• Add a "flicker" animation on the last 2 bars of each row (going back and forth between grey and the accent color), 
• Set animation repeat to "until slide ends"
• Set animation speed to "very fast"

The still image does bring out the happily dancing bars very well though...

Rules (animations do not add anything) are there to be broken sometime. Still, this type of chart fits in a more frivolous presentation setting, and not in one where you let's say have to pitch your company to venture capitalists.

SlideRocket public launch - good enough to take PowerPoint into the cloud?

SlideRocket comes out of public beta today with some new features (TechCrunch post). Given increasingly heavy PowerPoint files (images, video), I think the only future solution for collaborative presentation design is an in-the-cloud model. Getting people to learn an new interface as an alternative to PowerPoint though is difficult. And, Google Docs, Microsoft's Azure, are some pretty heavy competitors to beat...