Chart concept - Fog! But I can see clearly now....

You have a great new business tool that makes everything and anything completely transparent instantly. How to put this in a PowerPoint slide? In comes the fog concept.

The secret:

• Set a nice "Zen" image as the slide background (right-click the background, choose "Format Background" and select an image)
• Create some clouds from the "Insert Shapes" menu. Give the clouds a gradient fill ("Format Shape", "Fill", "Gradient Fill"), set the gradient type to "Radial", gradient stop 1 is 0% transparent white, stop 2 is 50% transparent
• Draw a big rectangular shape (or any shape in fact) and - here comes the trick - set its fill to "Slide Background Fill"

Testing acrobat.com in the cloud presentation tool

Acrobat.com is Adobe's software-as-a-service initiative and it went live recently. The presentation tool is still in beta but can be tested here.

I am making a (small) u-turn on all these in the cloud office tools. A recent shift to part-Mac/part-PC working has showed me that (unlike spreadsheets and databases) the learning curve for working with a new presentation is actually not that high. Let's whether either Adobe or Google docs can take on Microsoft's dominant position in office software. I am less optimistic about the changes of completely new startups trying to do the same thing. Especially given that Microsoft will come with its own in-the-cloud offering with a user interface that is very similar to the desk top version.

Do you think your mission statement is the best presentation opener?

I have rarely seen one that is. When people want to introduce themselves, they often feel an urge to justify their existence through a mission/vision statement. They think hard, carefully weigh every word, makes sure everything is in there (employees, customers, value, the environment) and out comes the all encompassing sentence. Why are there so very few mission statements and tag lines that mean something, let alone people can remember (man on the moon by the end of the decade; 10,000 songs in your pocket, we try harder, crush Reebok, etc.)?

• The curse of knowlege: the statements means a lot to the person who wrote it, but the boiled down summary sentence fails to convey the complex thoughts to a cold audience
• Generic, hollow language, buzz words in a sentence that is far too long (the attached is an example generated by the hilarious Automated Dilbert Mission Statement Generator, but it seems that they took down the link).
• Lack of credibility (a French bank claiming that it is the most customer service oriented institution on the planet will be greeted by laughter)

Mission statements can be great as a group exercise to think about your company, what you stand for and what you want to achieve. But unless you are working to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, they are hardly ever worth putting up as a slide if you only have 20 minutes to get your audience excited about your idea.

This blog post is one in a series in which I describe the full length "speaker notes" to the somewhat minimalist slides in my presentation about VC pitch presentations for entrepreneurs.

University text book killer = a good presentation + slideshare

A great blog post by Seth Godin on why university text books are a waste of time & money and are inherently out of date. There is a natural role for presentations here.

Is there anything better that a university lecturer can use to transfer an idea in an hour or 2? Putting it up on Slideshare for free afterwards gives the most return to the government education budget. A creative common license makes it easy for lecturers to borrow the best slides from each other. Over time constantly updated "crowd-sourced" education decks will emerge that beat any text book easily. Better teaching material, no cost.

Related: a post on the Duarte blog on how presentations could mark the end of the boring press release.

If you (might) need professinal paper prints - prepare beforehand

Handouts or regular hardcopies ("napkins") of a PowerPoint presentation come out OK on a laser printer, the device will shrink the slides to leave a white band around them.

Although less common now, sometimes a napkin-style hard copy is not enough. Especially investment bankers like to hand out high-quality prints of a presentation. If you haven't set up your presentation for this properly, you wil be faced with a lot of re-design work hours before your presentation. The image below (click for a larger picture) contains the essentials that can save time and stress.

Some more advice. All of this probably makes perfect sense to the graphics design professional working in Adobe InDesign, but PowerPoint "amateurs" (including me) have figured this out by experience (unfortunately).

• Dark background colors are high risk with professional printing
• Budget time for a printer disaster and a possible re-run
• In case of double-sided printing, remember that the punch holes will also appear at the bottom of the pages (leave more white space there as well)
• Think hard whether you need those print outs, instead of relaxing and preparing for that important presentation, you are going to be stressing around with printers, carrying kilos of paper, preventing yourself form making last-minute edits to slides.
• Heavier, or more expensive paper is not always better. Children's books are printed on cardboard to prevent pages from being torn out.
• A related point: the "dip" (to use a Seth Godin term) of print quality. Everyone appreciates a nice-looking laser-printed hand out. Everyone loves that "annual report-style" glossy brochure. If you're stuck in the middle (and as a PowerPoint amateur you are likely to be), the result might actually not look that good.

Graphical inspiration via RSS feeds (and hard-to-read-typography)

There are many great creative web sites that you can add to your feed reader for a daily dose of graphical design inspiration, far away from the PowerPoint slide editing screen. One example is Behance showing projects in typography, graphics design, illustration, photography, and other design disciplines.

Today, "hard to read typography" by Simon Page is one of the items featured on the front page. Here is one example from the collection that is actually relatively readable.

A bit harder to read:

What's written here? Is "shapes" a helpful hint?

Chart concept - where do we go from here?

It is easy to make your own 3D road sign image, no need to buy a stock image, and you get the 3D text perfectly aligned. Click the image for a larger picture (with the settings in the "format shape" box).

VC pitch - don't skip the technology

Here is another slide from my "how to pitch to a VC" presentation explained in more detail. (The "Zen"-style slides do not stand on their own very well)

When people have limited time for a presentation they often start to cut "the meat" of the story. What's left after the trimming is a set of generic "summary slides" at such a high level of abstraction that they don't say very much anymore.

Venture capitalists do not have much time. Still, resist the temptation to skip the technology section when pitching your startup. This is the key asset you have. This is what makes you stand out from the competition. This is what makes VCs understand that there is a real business here, not just a set of PowerPoint slides.

How can you present a complex technology in very little time? Don't spend time on exhaustive architecture diagrams with layers of details and boring process flows. Instead make people understand why your technology is so unique and so hard to copy.

The deep dive is a good technique to do this. Take a few very specific examples, and dive all the way down into the detail to make your point. Show the complex code, show how long it took you to solve the issue, and show how it will take the competition double this time to imitate it. 

Remember, your audience is smart (and busy). Any scientist or engineer should be able to explain the technology solution to an intelligent layman in just a few words and a few images. There is no bigger offense to your audience (and a guaranteed VC turn-off) then to say "this might be a bit too complicated for you, I'll just skip it in this executive summary".

The Sword of Damocles - with a bit of shadow drama

I had to design some apocalyptic presentations lately (sign of the times) and the Sword of Damocles composition below gave me the opportunity to play around with PowerPoint shadows.

The standard shadings in PowerPoint are a bit blunt and boring. Go into the "format shape menu" and click the "shadow" box. Experiment with the settings to get something more interesting. Increasing the blur, and increasing the distance creates the illusion of a wall right behind the subject. Just what I needed.

When you apply shadings to compositions make sure to group all items together first to get one smooth shading of the entire shape instead of individual shadings for the individual components.

The venture capitalist will see you for 15 minutes now

Brad Feld, a well-known VC, wrote an interesting blog post about "Preparing for a first meeting with me". Short (Feld likes 15 minutes) 1-on-1 meetings with VCs are often a first step to more elaborate pitch presentations. I won't repeat the things Feld has written in his post [Feld-style efficiency: you can click the link yourself :-)], but there some interesting points hiding in the text that are not explicitly spelled out.

• Cut the small talk and the personal introductions. Get me excited about an idea, I am not (yet) interested in building a personal relationship
• Surprise me. I want to learn something new. Don't bore me with the obvious, I know it all already, I have seen it all before
• "Packaging" is irrelevant. I see through it. No need for slick visuals. I prefer sketches on napkins.

What sort of presentation/visuals to bring to these meetings? There is probably no right answer, but here is a suggestion:

• Take your full PowerPoint pitch deck as a basis and show on a laptop 5 "Zen-style" slides that highlight the problem you are solving. These can be presented in 3 minutes. Close your lap top.
• Bring with you print outs of selected other slides in your deck that can serve as a basis for your napkins. Print outs are great: you can present them in any order depending on the flow of the conversation. You can sketch and write on them. Good napkins to have as a backup are the competitive landscape (you're in the top right corner, different from anyone else), and a simple tree that explains your revenue model ("here's the magic of the numbers"). Ditch all other typical pitch deck slides (for the moment): revenue hockey stick, go-to-market strategies, team CVs etc. etc.

And now hope that you made it to a "proper" VC pitch in a next meeting.

Font information in a book's small print

Most books mention the fonts used in the small print on one of its first pages (together with the publisher info, ISBN, etc.). This a great way to discover new fonts, because a full book sample is so much better than a few characters of sample type on a computer screen. Children's books are my biggest source of inspiration.

The power of repeat - redux

Computers love to repeat things. You should use it in your PowerPoint presentations. Control-C / control-V the same object over and over, making sure that things are aligned and spaced properly. The resulting chart is both busy and calm at the same time. Possible applications:

• There are lots of these things arond 
• It's crowded
• We're different (2 out of the 234 sheep in this ad are different for example)

"Repeats" are sometimes used to compare values in infographics. I do not think that this is a good application of the technique. Use repeats to talk about one variable, use regular bar charts to compare things.

Via Ads of the World.