The blunt photo composition

Technology allows you to create almost any photo composition. Professional use PhotoShop, but you can get some pretty good results in PowerPoint as well. As with many technology tools, the fact that they are available does not mean you have to use them. 

Photo compositions that are "blunt" are more likely to invite a laugh from your audience than help you make a serious point. My opinion. What do people think? (McCow taken from Ads of the World)

For some great Photoshop creative work check out FreakingNews.com. 

(This post-flood New York image by Mandrak)

A professional presentation does not mean a slick presentation

Seth Godin picked a T-shirt print provider based on a clean and professional looking web site and a straightforward pricing policy because it conveyed a sense of trust. There are lessons for presentation designers here.

It is good to invest in your presentation design. Over-doing the graphics though might give a negative return on investment:

• Highly complicated and sophisticated slide backgrounds
• Big graphical elements in the template, repeating on every page, leaving no space for the actual chart
• Drop shadows, bevels, glows, gradient fills, and reflections galore
• Professional, highly detailed, illustrations exported from Illustrator into PowerPoint
• Spectacular animations and slide transitions
• Beautiful, but too obvious/cheesy stock images

We can all imagine a slick sales person (cars, kitchens, insurance). Do we trust them?

How into insert an Adobe Shockwave Flash animation into PowerPoint

Maybe because Flash files are not a Microsoft format, integrating them into PowerPoint is a bit tricky. Here is how to do it. Make sure that the .SWF file is in the same directory as the PowerPoint file. Click on the images for a larger picture. When sending the presentation via email, it is best to ZIP the 2 files (PPTX and SWF) into one document. Still there is a high risk that the receiving party will not manage to see the Flash animation correctly. Do not use this for the critical slides in your deck. Thank you Karin Mazor for pointing this out to me.

Chart concept - Ahoy! Full steam ahead...

People are not using all the resources they have. Engines are running at half power. There is all this untapped potential out there. How to visualize this?

The engine room and a nice classical nautical engine control handle. You can use a standard PowerPoint "dougnut" chart (a pie chart but with a large hole in the middle) to create one.

Interesting, in the early days these handles would actually ring a bell in the engine room after which the people downstairs could adjust the power to the engine.

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.

Think of the 3rd dimension in stock images

99% of PowerPoint slides and 99% of stock images are 2 dimensional: showing an object or a shape on a flat background. When looking for your next stock image, try picking out those that add 3 dimensional depth.

The image of the flower field above (bought on iStockPhoto) is a good example. The whole point of the picture is the depth, not the objects in the photograph.

• Taken very close to the ground
• Focus close to the lens
• Lines that come together to disappear at the horizon

A good image to support something that goes on and on and on, or a new and untapped source of information that all of a sudden becomes available.

Logo repeats - bullet points in disguise

I often use a "logo repeat" technique to hammer home a set of interesting assets a company has, or a number of favorable forces that are helping a company. I must admit that these slides are bullet points in disguise, but the repetitive use of logos and other graphical elements make them powerful somehow.

The cobbler walks barefoot

You would expect Adobe, the publisher of many design software packages, to be pretty good at designing print advertising. Not always. Have a look at this image that was featured on Photoshop Disasters.

Especially Adobe should have spent more effort to get the reflections right (see the right box), make the box shots look more realistic, and use better typography. This image looks like a poor "Photoshop", not the best way to promote the Photoshop software.

Leaving the technicalities of the ad aside for the moment, there is a broader lesson here. This ad looks exactly like PowerPoint slides that many technology companies use to promote their product. They can do better.

• A lot of headlines competing for attention
• Box shots (software is not a breakfast cereal)
• "White paper language": spelling out the product benefits explicitly using very generic statements that do not get internalized by the audiece: "superior", "dynamic", "competitiveness", "scalable"

Use regular polygons to place objects on a slide

You can use geometrical concepts to get the perfect spacing of objects on your slide. Use the corners of regular polygons (all angles are the same, all sides have the same length) such as regular triangels (3), squares (4), regular pentagons (5) to position your objects with the aide of a few guides that you can remove later.

Note that you can draw regular polygons in PowerPoint by holding down the shift key to lock the aspect ratio of any shape you are drawing.