The outrageous SlideShare title page

In a big conference hall your title page should contain some useful information for the audience that is walking in ("Is this the right session?"). When designing for online presentations platforms (such as SlideShare), they need to grab the attention of the site visitor without patience. Pretty much like the posters you used to put up for your events near the coffee machine in university.

Here is my coffee machine poster for a lecture I will be giving at the Technion in Haifa, Israel next week. In case you are in the neighbourhood...

The emperor's new presentation is boring!

Two useful approaches to evaluate your presentation:

1. Go in slide-sorter view to get a sense for how someone sitting in the back row will see your slides. If you can't follow them, they won't be able to either.
2. Ask your 4-year old daughter. Although she cannot grasp the content, her intuitive reaction to the images is honest feedback about how boring your presentation really is (or not).

The global "ban comic sans" movement

Weekend reading. Comic sans is a font that resembles hand writing. Released by Microsoft in 1994, it was made popular through its standard inclusion in its Windows and Internet Explorer software. Graphics designers (with the sympathy of the Vincent Connare, creator of the font) started a movement "ban comic sans" as early as 1999 to stop the font from taking over more and more print and screen space around us. An entertaining summary of the history of the font and the efforts to put the genie back in the bottle can be found in this WSJ article.

What do I think? I agree that a comic-style font is not suitable for every occasion. When I have to use one, I prefer picking a more extreme comic font, like boopee. The problem with comic sans is that it is now so common that it has become boring. The same with Times New Roman...

Comic Sans from Sam and Anita on Vimeo.

McKinsey on the McKinsey cost curve

A decade of strategy consulting work at McKinsey has not made me a big believer in standard frameworks. Most business problem require a tailor-made approach without the buzz words and generic statements you find in most airport business best sellers.

There is another problem with frameworks: a framework to solve a business problem is usually not the framework to communicate a business solution. Problem solving and presentation are two different things.

McKinsey's "enduring ideas" series periodically discusses one of the classic frameworks from the world of management consulting. This month it discussed the cost curve.

• On the vertical axis you show the cost per unit
• On the horizontal axis you line up the competitors in order of their production cost
• (Unusual) you change the width of the column to reflect the production capacity of a player
• Drawing a vertical line where capacity = demand shows you what the market price of the (commodity) product will be, and who is making money/who is not.

This framework is maybe an exception. A slightly modified column chart can serve both as a problem solving tool and a communication instrument. If there is incomplete information, 3 people can spend 2 months to develop it (running all the analysis), but once it is there, it shows what's going on in a (commodity) industry on one very insightful piece of paper (piece of PowerPoint slide). 

How to do a McKinsey-style source of change chart

Some numbers today. The source of change is a tool to explain the delta between two numbers in terms of its components. Assume you need to get the story below across in a crisp presentation.

The first thing is to understand what's going on. Get some more information until you have the full picture in a clear table.

Now let's do the analysis. This is the tricky part, the text below does not do a good job in explaining this, you can click the spreadsheet for a bigger and more visual explanation.

1. Calculate the profit in the "before" scenario using a formula that just uses inputs
2. Now stretch each of the variables that change to their "after" value, jot down the value, and return the value back to its original number
3. Repeat for all the variables and see what delta in profit you managed to explain.
4. Calculate what is left to explain, and allocate that to the individual values.

Finally put the values in a nice waterfall chart.

PowerPoint make-over artist tricks for newbies

Sometimes it is not possible to create that perfect presentation. For example, your boss landed a pile of slides (written by someone else) on your desk, to be sent out in the next 3 hours after some "fixes".

The presentation below provides some tools for dammage control. Especially useful for PowerPoint files that are intended for offline reading, rather than TED-style ballroom presentations.

PowerPoint make-over artist tricks for dummies

View more presentations from Jan Schultink.

• Use consistent colors. Even is the color scheme is not pretty, even is the color scheme is the standard PowerPoint one, recolor all objects with the same 2-3 colors, throughout the file
• Align and distribute, wherever you can. Make boxes the same size
• Wrap bullet points correctly (there are for sure too many bullet points in these type of last minute documents but not time to fix that now), cut words if you can 
• Un-stretch photos, select format/reset to regain the original image and re-size them by dragging the corners to keep the proportions intact
• Put all the titles in the same place using guides to prevent jumping titles. In the good old days, I used to hold a prinout of a document against the light to see whether everything is lined up
• Stay inside your guides so that all charts look aligned.

Good luck. By the way, you can find the "For Dummies" book cover generator here. The "For Dummies" series contains a lot of books related to presentation design and communications. Here is the full liston Amazon, here is one:

Visualizing 6 million Holocaust victims

It is Holocaust memorial day today in Israel. Sometimes it has hard to graps/visualize big numbers. I tried below. Let's not forget.

Remembering 6 million Holocaust victims

View more presentations from Jan Schultink.

They don't need to read it anyway

For some points you want to make in a presentation, it doesn't really matter whether the audience can read the content or not. Example: "here is my long list of scientific publications".

• The text was simply "3-D rotated" in PowerPoint (make sure to set the perspective to the maximum 120 degrees). 
• I left the text (that nobody will read) "bleeding" off the page to leave room for white space around the title line (that should be read)
• In my case I filled the text box with nice lorem ipsum, but these charts are most powerful when you use actual text (that nobody will read): my actual list of publications with ISBN numbers and publication dates for example

Everyone can draw - iconic graphics

Look around you and see how powerful simple graphical shapes can be. The ad below is an example (text below Chaplin: "It's the hat.").

A larger image can be found here on Ads of the World.

Designers and developers sitting in a tree...

This presentation was uploaded to SlideShare yesterday. Simple colors. Beautiful fonts. No stock images. OK, some bullet points, but nicely formated. A great example of a presentation that can stand on its own, without the presenter being present.

Designers & Developers Sitting in a Tree (Web09)

View more presentations from Dan Rubin.

More on picking the right presentation style for the right presentation occasion in a previous post.

Basic equations to visualize complex dependencies

A question like "What happened to sales last year?" sometimes requires a complex answer. "Well, it is a bit complicated: volume went down, but then prices went up, but as a result sales were up". A simplified mathematical equation can help you visualize this.

Sometime in the near future I will post here how to do a proper "sources of change" analysis.

Lovely charts with Lovely Charts

Computer network diagrams are hard to make in PowerPoint. Finding the icons, positioning boxes, connecting them. The web application Lovely Charts might be a good solution. Also for flow diagrams, organization charts etc.

If you are in to designing network diagrams in PowerPoint, be sure to visit the Cisco icon library.

Via Armano