Online tilt-shifting image manipulation tool

Tilt-shifting is a photographic technique that creates images with very narrow depth of field. It can be used to take real images and make them look like photographs of miniatures. The site tiltshiftmaker.com creates the effect for you. It works best with images with lots of detail on the foreground: houses, cars, people. An example from the tiltshiftmaker site, a town on the Amalfi coast in Italy.

Via GeenStijl

Typography basics: readability, legibility, and impact

I am reading an article in Layers Magazine with a good summary about the basics of typography:

• Readability: how easy is it to read a long block of text
• Legibility: how easy is it to recognize short bursts of text instantly
• Impact: what emotional reaction does a type face provoke

I often use all caps in PowerPoint. It was interesting to read that all caps forces the brain to read the word letter by letter before it can be recognized, while with regular type a word gets identified instantly.

Chart concept - bouncing ball

The best graphics design work is often the most simple one. Noisy Decent Graphics pointed to these beautiful Olympic posters designed by student Alan Clarke. (They were not adopted by the organizers of the Olympics though).

The bouncing ball in the tennis poster gave me inspiration for a concept that I can use in PowerPoint charts. Semi-transparent circles (with different levels of transparency) flying over the screen are great to show movement. Be sure to remember the law of reflection though,  :-).

Chart concept - look, they reinforce each other!

Sometimes two things go together hand in hand, they make each other stronger. Big interlocking wheels are a great way to show this in PowerPoint. Add some nice circular text and here you go. Resist the tempation to make them turn using an animation though...

Chart concept: slowing down

This cover of a PwC report is an example of an excellent use of images.

• You get the point instantly, even from a far distance, the concept is right
• Both the report cover and the image have lots of "white space"
• The image is a completely natural and real one, no artificial models, compositions
• There is a great sense of depth and perspective in the image, search "sheep + road" in a stock photography site and you get a whole bunch of very unexciting pictures
• The picture is cropped nicely, see the road running on the golden proportion
• The image colors blend in with those used in the report (blue highlights)

ColoRotate - new color design tool

Your colors scheme is the most important driver of your presentation's look and feel. Much more important than logos or other graphical elements on the page. Adobe's kuler is a popular example of an online tool that helps you pick colors (even from an image if you want to) and define a nice matching color scheme.

Recently, ColoRotate has been released. ColoRotate uses a 3 dimensional approach to picking colors wich it claims is closer to the natural way the brain processes colors. It relies less on the sliders that are common in kuler and other tools. Color schemes you create can be shared in an online community, similar to kuler.

I have played around with the tool a little bit and like it, but it requires a bit of studying and practice before you get the hang of playing with the 3D axes and their impact. This tool is likely to appeal most to graphical professionals.

Having said that, the web site contains a good introduction article to the art and science behind picking beautiful color schemes.

Make-over artist tip: don't underline words

Underlining words just doesn't look good. Especially not in headlines. Use a bold font instead, or italics inside body text to emphasize.

George and Martha and leveraging audience anticipation

Weekend reading. I was reading some stories of George and Martha this weekend to my children, and was reminded of a great blog post by Nancy Duarte about leveraging your audience's anticipation in your presentation. Let them do a bit of the work as well, rather than just sitting down while being spoon-fed with content.

The "slide" with the grinning George is a more powerful one than Martha walking away to get a towel while the information conveyed is the same.

The images are scans from this book. Recommended for any parent.

Oops, forgot to sanitize my speaker notes before emailing the presentation...

Speaker notes are a great tool to prepare a presentation. You can write out your thoughts in sentences, independent from the visual structure of your slide (sequential instead of parallel). In PowerPoint presenter view, you can display them on your own computer, while the audience only sees the clean slide.

Speaker notes are usually somewhat hidden. You can see them if you have the editing window open at the bottom of the slide edit screen, or when you print the notes pages. It is easy to forget that you've entered them.

Nonetheless, they are an integral part of the PPT file. You send the PPT, you send the notes. So be careful in case you use notes to add side comments like "note to self: do not bring up the poor 2008 performance! :-)". A sure guarantee that it will be brought up during the presentation. UPDATE: Akash Bhatia provides a wonderful solution in the comments. I have re-written my post below:

One solution could be to send a PDF version of your docoument. But there is a smart feature in PowerPoint 2007. Hit the Office button, select "prepare" and then click "inspect document". It lets you purge all kind of personal information from your presentation, including presenter notes. Make sure to save your file under a different name before saving.

Address your obvious weaknesses in investor presentations

Taking two more slides from my presentation about investor presentations.

There is no point in going on, and on, and on about something that is already common knowledge. Everyone assumes that online video will be a huge market. (Of course, we could be collectively wrong). Don't spend your valuable presentation time on this.

On the contrary, focus on your obvious weaknesses. Highlighting weaknesses does not mean shooting yourself in the foot by bringing up details that harm your investment case. Instead, think what questions any intelligent human being would have when listening to your story. There is no avoiding. If you don't address them, the questions will remain.

"So, you are trying to build a page rank-based search engine?" "Yes, exactly, you picked that up fast. Let me show you our cool technology and some pretty impressive first search results" Wrong answer.

Cut to the chase in investor presentations

Most of the slides in my presentation about VC pitch lessons do not stand on their own. In a series of blog posts I will take some of them and add the full long-hand description of what they express.

Tell what you are about in the very first slide of the presentation. VCs like to put in you a box. If you don't do it for them, they will spend the time guessing while you deliver your carefully crafted buildup of the story. People who are busy guessing, do not register other content.

Telling what you are about is not the same as running the entire presentation on the first slide, and repeat the same story on the other 20 slides in the deck. "We are an online book store". "Aah, now I know". No more explanation needed.

Explaining the revenue hockey stick in funding presentations

One of the last pages in every venture capitalist funding presentation is the "hockey stick" of revenues and profits shooting through the roof. VCs expect a bit of optimism from a startup, but at the same time want to do a reality check on these numbers.

I often use a company snapshot, a tree of the key factors that add up/multiply to the projected revenue figure. Make sure the factors are real things you can touch: people, visits, etc.  CORRECTION: Also make sure the tree adds up and calculates through, something that cannot be said about the example below.

"Cover ups" as an alternative to build ups

Sometimes you cannot avoid building up a busy data slide to take your audience through it step by step. In case of data-driven charts, it is tricky to create 3 independent graphs that are nicely aligned. I tend to create one big chart and use a white box to cover part of the information. Gradually I unveil more information by taking the white boxes off, instead of creating animations with new elements popping up. B.t.w. for those interested: the data above is the quarterly overview of VC investments in Israel, compiled in PwC's Money Tree report for Q4 2008.

We used to have something like this at McKinsey

Information Aesthetics is talking about visualization nostalgia. Hey, we used to have a ruler like this at McKinsey. I will continue to look for one, or a picture. They were blue, had boxes for bar/column charts and pie diagrams, and a few triangles and arrows. 

The bad thing is that all your charts sort of looked the same. The good news was that, because you were trained to use this ruler, you always tried to find a graphical way to present your information, hardly ever resorting to bullet points.

Venture capitalists won't read your business plan...

An article about new research in the NYT confirms what I have been saying for a long time: detailed 50+ page business plans are not helping you to get venture capitalist funding. A short PowerPoint presentation is one crucial element of a mix of sources investors use to size up an entrepreneur.

Filling shapes with pictures

This ad from Ads of the World sparked some ideas. One, the image bubble with the contrasting thought is an interesting concept that can be used in PowerPoint charts.

Two, I am not using the ability to fill shapes with pictures enough. It's easy. In format shape, go to fill, and choose texture or picture, and off you go. The effect is best used with irregular shapes (clouds, stars, etc.) rather than plain rectangles.

More proof that people do not absorb all visual information

It took me a while before I understood why this image is a huge Photoshop disaster. I will stay vague in order not to give it away. More evidence in favor of the "Zen-style" presentation. From an earlier post on Photoshop Disasters.

Please help complete this Squidoo page for presenters

Squidoo is a tool developed by marketing guru Seth Godin that makes it easy to create overview web pages, a so called lens. I created one for presenters and need your help to complete it.

My aim is to create a useful collection of tools and resources for presenters. It would be impossible for me to maintain on my own. Instead, I am using the "Plex" technology that allows visitors to add links and vote them up or down.

Feel free to add, or vote up-down, blogs, books, gadgets, online tools, or suggest other categories that you want to see on the lens. The voting is less important here than the actual listing.

Revenues that the site generates (if you click through an Amazon link for example) are donated to charity.

Please visit the lens here on www.squidoo.com/stickyslides.

Don't let stock photo sites do the brain storming for you

Everyone now knows how to get their hands on beautiful images. The next challenge to make your presentation stand out is to pick the right ones. I prefer to do the chart concept brainstorming myself, rather than relying on a stock image search engine to do it for me. We completed the project. Typing in "success" for "finish" will give you a stream of highly predictable and often cheesy images. "Man in suit raising his arms in victorious joy", "hiqh quality render of a character crossing the finish line". You/the human brain can do better than that. Think of the concept you want to make, all the way to the end. Then, search a highly specific (stock) image that goes with it. Armstrong waiving his hand on the moon, a bunch of empty, used coffee cups on a desk.

And remember, the right visual concept does not always involve an image.

Chart concept: you can't see what's under the surface

I often have to use a visual concept of the "tip of the ice berg", "things are different as they appear". The picture of an actual ice berg is the obvious choice to use. The Titanic archetype is deeply engrained in our collective memory.

These Sanyo ads show how you can use typography to do the same thing. The first image replaces the image of an ice berg with the actual words, but it gets really interesting when removing the link to the ice berg all together and start using giant text cut in half. Big enough that you can actually read both sentences (sort of) easily.

Not very friendly to audience members with dyslexia though.

Via Ads of the World.