Playing around with fonts in section separators

Sometimes a presentation is just a discussion of a series of beliefs or points. Each section of the presentation is devoted to one statement. Big-font section separators are followed with a few more charts adding detail and explanations. Why not play around with fonts a bit on these separators? A summary page could consist of PNG captures of the all the tracker pages in the presentation. In this way, it looks a bit more interesting than six bullet points.

Chart concept: size does not matter, numbers do

This ad uses a concept that can easily be replicated in presentation slides. Find a silhouette of let's say a shark, and fill it with small gold fish shapes and you're done.

I used something like this once to show how small individual components of an information security architecture can create a formidable defense against cyber crime if they coordinate their activities well.

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

Intimate 1 on 1's: the PowerPoint/napkin hybrid presentation

Seth Godin nailed the perfect format for a one-on-one presentation in a recent blog post.

• Full-blown PowerPoint presentations are overkill in an intimate coffee chat
• Taking an empty note pad and sketching the entire presentation from scratch while you are talking is definitely more intimate, but also high risk. (A bit like the concept used in the book "The back of the napkin"
• Seth's hybrid of a print out of PowerPoint slides with key numbers, circles, and marks missing is the perfect compromise. Hand-write the key missing pieces during the meeting. Your meeting partner will remember them better, and he can take a nice and personal "coloring book" home.

This type of presentation is ideal for short 15 minute coffee chats with venture capitalists where you try to pitch for a more in-depth meeting.

To make a hybrid napkin presentation, I suggest that you actually design all the slides, including the version with the comments and drawings put on them electronically so that the story flows logically and it is easy to prepare for the meeting. Just before your presentation, you decide which slides to print or not.

Book review - "A whole new Mind"

Slowly, I am catching up on reading presentation-related classics. This holiday I read through Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind.

The subtitle of the book: "why right-brainers will rule the future" is an overly simplistic summary of the main idea. The book's content is more nuanced. In the "conceptual age" 2 skills are essential:

• Solving problems in a way that nobody has ever done before
• Persuading other people, spreading ideas [here is where the link to presentation design comes in]

Why? In current society, supply of goods and ideas is overwhelming. In order to stand out you need to develop a unique edge. The only way to get this edge is through developing "right-brain" skills such as desgn and story telling. "Left-brain" skills such as accounting, diagnosing a patient, applying legal rules are repitive and can increasingly be automated or outsourced to countries with much lower labor cost. A whole new mind is a mind that has a combination of left-brain and right-brain skills.

Some additional thoughts:

• I think that people will have to learn the boring, repetitive left-brain skills in order to reach the next level of creativity. You need to read and write in order to write a book. You need to understand financial accounting in order to solve a strategy problem. You need to understand how large corporate structures work in order to deliver a presentation that convinces the Board. For example in the field of presentation, I think it is actually the entry of left-brainers into the field that was traditionally dominated by "creatives" that is causing the changes that we see now.
• There will always be a large number of repetitive left-brain jobs that will not be automated/outsourced, and unfortunately a large group of people that have to do them.
• It is hard for people to cut themselves free of left-brain corporate environments econcomically. Academia pay is poor. There are only so many spots available at companies such as Google that give their employees free time to work on whatever they want. Not everyone can build up skills that can be marketed in a freelance model profitably.
• The most successful engineers, accountants, lawyers, surgeons had the combination of left and right brain skills that Daniel is talking about.

In summary, and purely from the point of presentation design, Daniel Pink's book is not a standard reference book like the ones listed in the column on the right of this web site. However, it will open your eyes for a very important idea. It is essential reading for parents though: the biggest issue it raises is the one of the education system.

Another reason to buy the book is the wealth of recommendations for further reading that are spread throughout the story.

You can add Daniel Pink's blog to your RSS reader here.

Presentation lessons from cluttered French brasserie placemats

I just returned from a beautiful and relaxing family holiday in western France (apologies for limited posting and replies to comments). My 2 year old son's fondness of cars required us to venture to the car museum in Chatellerault. (About the only thing to see in this town).

Lunch was in a local brasserie (not recommended). The placemat (click on the scan below for a larger image) reminded me of the slide sort sorter view of many poor PowerPoint presentations. Ads screaming for attention by using big, colorful and different fonts. With as much information crammed into it as possible.

Few got it right with some exceptions. The power of pictures does work in France as well. Many men will be drawn to the Le Pacha Club, fashion-conscious women might check out the Krys optician. I was disappointed with the interior design study institutue though (bottom right).

Visit my Squidoo lens - useful and donates to charity

More light summer posting. My Squidoo lens is filled with useful resources for presenters (blogs, books, presentater tools, videos). Have a look. Add more content. Vote existing content up or down. You can even buy some useful things, affiliate link proceeds are donated to charity.

Maximizing screen real estate in PowerPoint

Many people have 16:9 computer monitors by now. Most of the time, we still design slides in 4:3 or A4/letter mode. As a result, a lot of space is available on the left and right of the PowerPoint slide in editing mode.

PowerPoint, like most software, is designed for the 4:3 screen by adding the ribbon and status bars at the top and the bottom of the screen. A lot of screen real estate is wasted. Adobe does a better job, tool bars are positioned to the left and to the right of the work area.

I already moved my Windows bar to the side. Is there a way to do the same thing with the PowerPoint ribbon? I don't think so. A feature request for PowerPoint 2010.

Most of my "chart concepts" on Flickr

Apologies for the lighter post content during the summer break. I scraped images of the various examples slides I have been using on this blog over the past year and put them on Flickr as one set.

iStock photo free images expire

More light summer posting. I only recently discovered that the weekly iStockPhoto free images expire after a number of weeks. Do not forget to download them on a regular basis, and pick the very large size enabling you to zoom in dramatically if needed.

The fact that they are picked by iStock editors adds a nice bit of randomness to the stream of images. For example, here is last week's:

A scan of your business card as prsentation slide 1

Right at the start of a presentation I always create an opportunity for the speaker to introduce herself. What visual to use for this? Definitely not a boring bullet point summary of your CV. Put a personal image that describes something unique about yourself. It can be frivolous in an informal setting, and in more formal presentations, a scan of your business card ("so last century") can be a good background.

Apologies for blacking out spam-sensitive details.

Interior shadows to smoothen edges of images

If you are not a PhotoShop artist, and use PowerPoint to take out the background of an image instead, the edges of the remaining edges can look a bit ruffled. Sometimes applying an interior shadow to the image solves this problem. Sometimes, because it works brilliantly for some images, and not at all for others. You have to try.

To apply an interior shadow in PowerPoint 2007: click the image, go to format/shape effects/shadows/inner and pick the middle one of the options.

Reflections - if you really have to use them, use them right

I am not a big fan of the reflections that are used frequently in "web 2.0" logos and PowerPoint graphics. The fact that PowerPoint enables a feature does not mean that you have to use it. As an example see a logo that Visa uses to build a relationship with small business customers.

• Both logos would look much nicer/cleaner without the reflection
• In the left image the reflection is not correct, the 3D compartment of your brain tells you "something's not right here". I am sure it was not the intention of the designer to create a logo in the style of Escher.

Motion graphics - blending presentations and animated video

You should design a presentation for an online audience in a different way than those for a live audience. Software such as Adobe After Effects are bringing the graphical tools traditionally used in professional video animations within reach of everyone. As an example, see this recent video produced by Paul Durban: a teaser to get people to download an ebook created by the members of Seth Godin's triiibes community.

Two more examples of motion graphics:

A few observations:

• The text-only animations are very useful for high energy, very short commercials. The bombardment of animations can carry one message across. "This tribes ebook contains a lot of questions, what was that tinyurl again, let's back up". "Got you, women are an underused resource in the 3rd world, we should help them help themselves rather than relying on food aid". Software opens this genre up to the masses.
• The real master pieces are the ones that include images and artwork (like video number 3). I think these remain highly specialized projects almost similar to TV commercials that can only be executed by animation professionals.
• (Amateur) presentation designers can still learn from these techniques. See how they use fonts, spread messages over different slides and create subtle transitions between slides that are far different from the spectacularly animated PowerPoint effects.

It is interesting to see how the Girl Effect video tries to make up for the lack of images: it constantly encourages you to imagine/visualize things ("No go ahead, really, imagine her") . See my review of the book Brain Rules, describing the difficulty the brain has with processing text.

Excel instead of PowerPoint as your presentation tool

Microsoft Office is a tightly integrated application suite. Inside Excel you can find pretty much the entire arsenal of PowerPoint drawing and charting tools.

For certain types of presentations, you should consider using Excel as the presentation tool instead of PowerPoint. Quarterly results presentations are an obvious candidate:

• Massive amounts of dense data, and a need to switch back and forth between graphs showing trends, and the actual data tables itself
• Time pressure; the numbers come in fresh from the accounting systems and need to go straight into the Board document, without sufficient time to analyze what actually is going on.
• Presentations that need to be updated all the time but basically look the same: quarterly results (again), market share movements. Every time the data arrives in the exactly the same format, with a column added. Lots of time is lost with copying and pasting data across. The result is usually ugly Excel tables featuring in a PowerPoint slide.
• Complex analysis that needs to be redone, i.e., a water fall chart explaining the difference between this quarter and last quarter's results. Very few know how to do this. Even fewer know how to visualize this in a PowerPoint graph. A smart Excel template can help.

Here is what an Excel presentation could look like. Charts are laid out on the left side, data is put in on the right side. It takes some time setting things up and making all the links work, but once you do, you got yourself a very powerful tool (click image for a larger picture).

The only drawback is that you end up presenting the charts inside Excel on the screen with all the menu bars visible. On the other hand, this allows you to move back and forth between charts and data quickly.

Some guidance on how to set things up:

• Once you have set the font sizes for the titles and subtitles, do not touch column and row sizes anymore. Do a print preview to see where the page breaks show up.
• Switch on "snap to grid" to get all the shapes and graphs nicely aligned. (Click an object, format tab, arrange, align, snap to grid)
• You can get to the PowerPoint objects by selecting "insert" and then "shapes"
• Fill you cells with white to get rid of the grid lines
• Lock cells after you are done with setting up the template
• After the automated steps are completed, review your Excel presentation manually to add comments and see whether everything makes sense

Fewer posts during the holiday season

A heads up. In the month of August I will be spending more time with my family, and less time at the computer. I hope everyone is having a great summer break.

Chart concept - standing out (from the crowd)

Every VC pitch presentation needs to talk about distinctiveness. There are many slick stand-out-from-the-crowd images for sale on stock image sites. This ad from Comex paints (via Frederick Samuel) triggered another idea. The comic character blending in the background is a nice setup page to introduce the problem. After this slide, you can talk about how you are making a difference in the market.

Does the multi-story-rock-star-presenter exist?

I was wondering this the other day. Many of the best presenters nurture one story year after year after year, and are getting better and better and better at it.

• Best-selling authors previewing their book
• CEOs pitching their company's products
• Gurus urging us to leave our cubicle to do what we are really passionate about
• TV evangelists trying to save our soul
• Presidential candidates preaching hope
• Social media experts telling us that luckily we are one of the few who really "get it"

Is there such a thing as the multi-story rock star presenter?

Osho greeted by sannyasins on one of his daily "drive-bys" in Rajneeshpuram, 1982. © 2003 Samvado Gunnar Kossatz

Neat source of color schemes: Color + Design blog

The Color + Design blog provides a constant stream of color schemes based on images, posters, fabrics, street art, to name a few. Add it to your RSS reader if you need color inspiration. One color scheme from today's post:

SlideShare kicks off the 2009 World's Best Presentation contest - some thoughts

The World's Best Presentation contests on SlideShare have become the closest thing we have to the annual world championship in presentation design: a lot of submissions, high-profile judges. This year's edition just kicked off (deadline September 8).

SlideShare World's Best Presentation Contest 2009

View more documents from Amit Ranjan.

The bar is moving up. Everyone has learned where to find stunning images. Everyone has learned how to accomodate the fast-clicking online viewer by dragging charts out over multiple slides. Everyone has figured out how important the first page is in catching attention.

It is a shame that SlideShare did not set a subject for the contest, this would level the playing field. Part of the competition now is to find a compelling story, many presenation design gurus are probably in writer's block as we speak.

The winner will be selected based on a professional jury, votes, and on the distribution of the presentation in social networks. So part of the effort is to design the content, part of the work of a contestant is to run an election campaign.

In the next edition SlideShare should run a finale similar to American Idol, in which the finalists have to present their slides in front of an audience/video camera.

I hope the winner of the contest will be a presentation that touches people, and makes them change their behavior in some way or another. This is not neccesarily the presentation with the most beautiful pictures, motion typography or amazing professionally crafted cartoon characters and sketches.

Book review - "Brain Rules" for presenters

I finally got around reading Brain Rules by John Medina and can confirm that it is indeed essential reading. Not only for people interested in visual communication (the likely reader of this blog). But it is also likely to change some of your fundamental perspectives on life if you are a knowledge worker, a manager, a student, a teacher, a parent, or any combination of these.

The book has been reviewed extensively elsewhere, and a good web site covers its basic ideas centered around 12 rules. I will not repeat this, but rather dive in to some of the details that I marked on the pages because I found them interesting. Most of them (but not all) are related to visual communication. Here we go.

• Contrary to popular belief that (brain-related) things only go down after the age of 28 (millions of brain cells dying each day), the brain can renew. Just exercise and stay curious.
• Everyone's brain is wired differently, wiring gets decided early on in a person's life. Surgeons about to operate on a patient need to keep the subject conscious with exposed brains, while touching part of it to figure out what's inside. "Someone just touched my hand". This allocation might impact performance. "Don't let the superior temporal gyrus host your critical language area. Your verbal performance will statistically be quite poor".
• We don't register boring things, after 10 minutes of a continuous flow of densely packed information, our attention is close to zero. A presentation should have a break, or something to wake us up every 10 minutes (or better still, presentations should last 10 minutes).
• The first few moments of exposure to new information are the most important. Presenters should not waste it on boring generic overviews of their presentation, long-winded introductions of themselves. Leverage the fact that all brains in the audience are still switched on.
• Recalling an emotion at the moment we are fed information the first time greatly improves our ability to remember it. Dare to use creative tools. "Apologies for the ugly drawing of this huge orange turtle, but it walks about as fast as the typical decision making processes in our company". People will be talking orange turtles for the rest of the day.
• Vision trumps all other senses is almost a cliche (the 1000 words etc.). We know that images in presentations are important. But here is interesting bit: reading text is difficult. Decode the funny shapes, construct the sentence, understand its meaning... Bullet points and text books create too many processing layers between information and memory. But this gives also food for thought to reconsider some of the "big font/powerful quote" slides. "20% of kids are obese" combined with a huge picture of a fat kid walking out of a fast food outlet. Sounds powerful, but I think visualizing the 20% will do an even better job of getting message across.
• Vision is more than just registering an image. There are different parts of the brain that deal with color, motion, patterns. The brain is especially good at the latter. Use patterns, repetitions, in charts. Especially to visualize data.
• The brain fills in missing gaps in a visual picture. When you imagine something should be there, you see it. Drawings don't need to be perfect. Rely a bit on the audience's imagination.
• Meaning before details. We need to internalize what things mean before we can remember them. Out with the buzz words, out with the cliches. "Our new holistic security concept delivers scalable ROI that helps you stay competitive in an ever changing world".
• People need to sleep to function well. Poor sleep kills 20% of your brain power, that's about 2 hours worth of work for an average working day. Brains are build to deal with short-term stress ("help a tiger!") but cannot handle prolonged pressure. Manage your deadlines. A last minute, late night presentation iterations will for sure not deliver a brilliant end product. Our brain continues to chew on an idea in our sleep, give it time. These findings put into question the whole system on which corporate work environments are managed.