Switch off your parallel visual thinking - only rehearse out loud

You flick through the slides of your presentation on the way to the venue in the taxi. The slides look great, the story is perfectly clear.

Not anymore when you are on stage.

A live rehearsal is the only way to go. And not only to practice stance and eye contact (with the mirror in front of you).

You need to switch your brain from parallel to sequential processing. An image says more than a thousand words. If you look at your own slide it all fits together perfectly. That image, the diagram, those 2 words, the pressure of the 2 opposing arrows. For you (the slide designer), it triggers a complex set of thoughts in your brain. 

The audience does not have any of this. You need to translate that complex mental picture into a sequence of thoughts and sentences that allow your audience to get that same insight.

The only way to do that is to "switch off" your parallel visual thinking and start listening to your own sequential stream of words.

Weekend reading: Rene Margritte paintings and Photoshop images

I am browsing through an old (1979) book, Magritte: Ideas and Images, about the life of the Belgian painter Rene Margrite this weekend. What if he could have used Photoshop? Repetition of graphical elements, cut outs, projections. He was ahead of his time.

"Excuse my English" - slides that cannot stand on their own

I put the slides I used for a presentation on SlideShare despite that they actually do not stand on their own very well. 

One piece of feedback I got is that I should not apologize for speaking poor English on the first slide. Rather as a presenter, you should radiate confidence. Makes perfect sense. This is actually not what the slide with the Dutch soccer supporters was meant to say... I was apologizing for not speaking Hebrew.

In this context, the mismatch was harmless and even funny. In other situations it might not be.

I enjoyed receiving so much positive feedback on the SlideShare slides. Thank you very much. The benefits of sharing the slides far outweigh the drawbacks in this case.

Slides from my guest lecture at the Technion

Last night, I gave a guest lecture to the Eclub of the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel. We discussed presentation design in general, lessons for entrepreneurs wanting to pitch to venture capitalists for funding, and some PowerPoint makeover tricks. 

The slides are a perfect example of visuals that cannot stand on their own (without the presenter being present). Having said that, here they are:

Presentation lessons for entrepreneurs

View more presentations from Jan Schultink.

Keep your images real

Today, Photoshop can do a lot, but it is still hard to make that perfect photo composition. Today, the New York Times used this image in an article about research to improve concentration. Nice Photoshop work, but:

• The composition is good, but not perfect. Either do something that is 100% real, or completely not real (i.e., a photo cartoon)
• The image catches attention ("what is that scary device attached to this person's head?"), but does not immediately create the link to concentration. A real image would have been better (5 builders NOT looking away from their work as a woman passes by for example).

Keep your images real.

[Israel-only] I will be speaking tomorrow May 6 at the Technion in Haifa

If you are around Haifa tomorrow evening you are welcome to join my talk to the Technion Entrepreneurs Club. The discussion will be about improving presentations in general, with a specific focus on VC pitches for startups. Tell the gate that you are here for the "entrepreneurs event"

Technion Industrial Engineering Building Room 216 Wednesday May 6 18:30 Directions can be found in the "about" section of this site.

2009: the year of stock image fatigue

Today I am writing a speech for a group of university students, so I had the luxury of being able to"go all the way" with creativity, not having to worry about whether visual concepts would be appropriate for the audience.

Eighty slides later, I got tired of many of the images I used and cut back on a lot of them.

• Page after page of yet another stunningly beautiful image takes the attention away from the presenter and gives the audience the impression of reading a giant coffee table picture book
• There is only so many funny or shocking images an audience can absorb. One "pie in the face" can be funny, one aggressive guy might be OK, but not ten slides like these. People don't like to look at close-ups of spiders.
• Metaphors get forced: "I knew he would use that squashed orange to show that we are being squeezed by the competition."
• Cost: 80 pages with a few trial images per page start to add up.

What you can do to overcome stock image fatigue:

• (I passed level 0 already: cutting out the cheesy image)
• Have the courage to go even more minimalistic: use a few words on a beautiful background color (experiment with light and elegant fonts, short words with are extremely large fonts)
• Re-color stock images so they look more similar
• Use images that are similar in style, for example just "retro" black & white shots throughout your presentation
• Use real images from sources such as Flickr (check the license)

Chart make-over example, sorry Skype

I am preparing a speech and needed a case example for a chart make over. Sorry to be picking on Skype again... A great color scheme plus a chart I discussed before. I have nothing against Skype, this is just for educational purposes.

Here is a list of changes:

• Reduce the template to a logo at the bottom right of the page, eliminating all other distracting elements. I really like white space.
• Rigorous application of the corporate colors and fonts.
• Simple column chart without 3D
• No need for a vertical axis if you use data labels
• Re-wrote the headline
• Replaced the yellow star to give the text more connection to the numbers (still it would have been better to show the actual profit numbers)
• Smiling, I made a typo in the revenues of Q1 2008

The idea is to make the data as calm as possible. Also note that through consistent use of corporate colors there is no need for additional "house style" graphical elements on the pace. You can see from a mile's distance that this is a Skype chart.

How to transfer fonts from a PC to a Mac

Fonts, PowerPoint and multiple computers do not mix. I have begun to go down the font slide: beautiful results but increasing complexity. Once you're on it, there is no way back:

1. First level, just use one popular font, let's say Verdana (but it gets boring)
2. Second level, group items together and "paste as PNG" back (but it is so hard to edit)
3. Thid level, embed fonts with your PPT file

All was fine with level 3 untill I tried to use the PPT file on a Mac: disaster again. The "hardcore" solution:

For some reason, my Windows PC has far more fonts installed than my Mac. Font files are portable, they work on a PC and on a Mac. I simply copied all my PC font files and put them in a folder on my Mac desktop. If I need a font, I double click the relevant file, start PowerPoint over again and things are fixed.

Now where are these PC font files? Click "start", "run", type "%windir%\fonts" and they all show up. Select all, copy and paste them in a folder to be copied to the Mac. Done.

Learn from the Skype "how do we look guide"

A while ago I posted a fairly critical review of the abuse of the Skype PowerPoint template. The first sentence of my post however was: "Skype has a beautiful and very strong visual identity".

Spot on. Browse through this document with guidelines for creating documents in the "Skype look". You can learn from it even if you are not designing for Skype. Beautiful graphics. Nicely written to give you directions but leaving you enough creative room to make your own designs.

Skype- corporate identity_ how do we look

View more documents from Ayman Sarhan.

Gadget review: Logitech Presenter remote control

A remote control is an essential tool for any presenter. You do not have to go back to your computer all the time to look for the arrow keys to change the slide. This is especially important if you adopt a "Zen"-style presentation: lots and lots of images that change at a very high pace. I finally got one.

The Logitech 2.4 GHz Cordless Presenter does the job perfectly.

1. Minimalist design, only the keys you really need: slide up/down, volume, screen "F5" and a button to black out the screen to talk to your audience without the distraction of slides.)
2. The USB computer connection can be stored inside the device
3. It has a stop watch to keep track of time
4. It does (partly) work on the Mac (I run the latest Mac OS). Flipping through slides in both PowerPoint and Keynote, and changing volume is OK. The black screen and "F5" keys do not produce meaningful results (the opposite, they start inserting characters into your Keynote slides)

The device also has a built in laser pointer (although I am not a big fan of that nervously moving red dot on my slides).

Use images to tap into collective memory

You do not need to use data all the time to get a point across in your presentation. Sometimes a good image is enough to tap into our collective memory.

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