Experimenting with "real" textures

While I am getting a bit tired of stock images (first only the cliche ones, and now actually almost every image that is not real), I find new inspiration in textures of real-world materials (there are lots of these on stock image sites). See the ad below for the folding bike (via Ads of the World).

Do not forget to compress your images before saving. High-resolution textures can consume a lot of disk space on your computer and as an email attachment.

"Healthcare Napkins" wins SlideShare 2009 Best Presentation Contest

Dan Roam has won SlideShare's 2009 Best Presentation Contest with a napkin-style presentation about the U.S. healthcare reform plans. A good choice I think. The bar is rising. The idea of how to make beautiful presentations using large and stunning images has spread. Next challenge: how to use visual communication to get incredibly complex subject matters across. Congratulations Dan.

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

A related post: my review of Dan Roam's book: The Back of the Napkin.

Book review - Yes! 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive

The book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is the "sequel" to Influence (earlier review here). Building on the approach of Influence, the book discusses 50 techniques to influence people's behavior. A psychological science experiment is the basis for each technique: the results are discussed and general lessons are drawn out.

As both books are similar, so is my review. The research case examples are great, the generic lessons are sometimes a bit dry. It could have been left up to the reader how to use the findings. There is a lot of overlap with techniques presented in the first book, if you do not have tim to read both, I would recommend reading Influence, since it takes you through the process of thinking about psychology in a more fundamental way when trying to persuade others.

Reading this book once again confirms the potential for visual communication. A lot of these psychological experiments involve people allocated in groups (test group, control group) and various changes in the experiment. Putting the outcomes in simple tables or graphs would have made it much easier to understand the outcome. Now, the reader is left to plough through the text and construct the visual picture in his/her head. Some of the 50 techniques in the book are more powerful than others, some are more relevant to the field of presentations than others. A few here:

• Create a bond with a group. "The majority of people who stay in this hotel room re-use their towels"
• Create scarcity: "If operators are busy, try calling again"
• Very relevant for presentations: watch out for data that can backfire. "22 million single women did not vote". "Hmmm, that's a lot, maybe I shouldn't either?"
• Create 2 extreme options around the desired outcome: people usually buy the middle-priced wine bottles in a restaurant. (Useful when presenting strategic options to your Board)
• Big threats don't work, people block them out. "Smoking kills". You need to complement the threat and provide an easy, step-by-step action plan to solve the problem.
• Hand-written post-it notes as a message really work. Thing about adding that personal touch to your presentation slides (by using selective hand-writing fonts for example)
• Get people to write down a goal at the beginning or the end of the presentation, it dramatically increases the probability that they will act
• Ask people whether they would be willing to do something later on. If they respond, they are actually more likely to do it themselves in the future.

Just a few teasers to get a sense of the sort of things discussed. If you are interested in psychological techniques to influence people, but Influence and Yes! are recommended books.

The author Robert Cialdini has a site with some more information.

Disclosure: links to Amazon in this review are affiliate links and I earn a small commission on purchases made through them.

If you need arrows to point at what's really important...

...on your slide, you might as well re-design the entire slide just around that message.

This image of kites with red arrows highlighting random elements of a city landscape reminded me of dense bullet point slides with last-minute arrows added to make sure that the audience does not forget to get the point...

Details on this art installation here on the Core 77 design blog. See one of my earlier posts on a similar subject.

Leonard Cohen building up audience participation

Songwriter / poet Leonard Cohen gave a concert in Tel Aviv a few days ago. In "Tower of Song" he kept the audience craving for The Answer (to all mysteries of life) for almost 2 minutes. The audience got really excited, the backing vocals had to work hard... Listen to the entire song, or skip through to 6:00. No, no spoiler here. The video below is not the Tel Aviv concert, but a different performance in the same tour.

The presentation lesson. Many communication philosophies such as Barbera Minto's Pyramid Principle (used by McKinsey) advocate to present your conclusion first, then provide backup and logic. Very efficient, at every single point in time, the audience knows the key message of the presentation. Sometimes humor, suspense, drama and good story telling might actually do a better job in getting a message across though. Highly structured presentations are not always the most memorable ones.

Filling charaters with an image (redux)

This ad (via Ads of the World) reminded me of an earlier post showing that you can also achieve this effect in PowerPoint (2007). It only works with huge, huge characters. The ones I used in my original post are actually not big enough.

Screen bean nostalgia...

A number of good things have happened in presentation design over the past few years. Yesterday, I came across one of these screen beans that used to feature prominently in many corporate presentations in the 1990s. I am very glad people are not using them anymore. (But I must admit that deep in my heart there is a bit of screen bean nostalgia...).

There is a modern reincarnation of the screen bean character though. A small cartoon with a text balloon placed on the border of a slide. He/she often makes a side comment that adds to the overall message. Garr Reynolds uses them very successfully, Google explains the technology behind the Chrome browser using comic characters, just to name a few.

Farewell my friend Mr. Screen Bean...

Visualizing 1 in 8,000

Bar and column charts are my favorite data visualization tools. I do not like pie charts, although they are in theory the best way to highlight relative proportions. Both of these graphs break down when you try to visualize very small proportions. In these cases I fall back on a technique that simply repeats the number of objects on a slide as done in the example below:

Note that especially for small proportions, it is very hard to internalize what things mean. "A 1.3% chance? That's seems OK. What, 1 in 76? That's a lot!." Tap "1/x" on your calculator to translate a probability into a "1 in" number. For example: 2% translates into 1/0.02=50, 1 in 50.

More information on the issue of maternal death here.

Next up: designing presentations to be viewed on mobile devices?

The mobile phone screen is becoming a mainstream outlet for content. Services such as SlideShare have become so popular to share presentations (=ideas) to mass audiences that presentation designers have begun to adjust their style to suit this type of viewers. What happens if you add these two trends up?

Swiss Miss pointed me towards a new iPhone app: iStoryTime, enabling kids to flick through narrated children's stories. (The same target segment as Story Bird). Animoto allows you to create beautiful animated videos on your iPhone, it is just another example of a visual language that is suitable for the small screen.

Squinting to read a blog RSS on your phone, scrolling left/right and up/down to understand the big picture of a web site, maybe there is another future for presentations here: the ideal format to spread an idea on a mobile device through a series of clicks.

The constraints are simple: a small screen, and no presenter is present to explain things. I wish we had these constraints in PC PowerPoint:

• "I better make sure these slides are clutter free and can easily be read from a distance"
• "I better make sure that people really, really understand what I am trying to say here; I won't be there to explain it"

That would do a lot of good to many presentations that are written as we speak.

Consistent shadow and gradient directions

When using drop shadows and gradients, pick an imaginary source of light to guide in which direction you want to put your shadows and/or gradients. And then: use them consistently on the slide and possibly throughout your presentation. Now that we are on the subject. I am not a big fan of these effects in general. In the example above, I emphasized them on purpose to illustrate the point of direction. Normally, I would use very subtle drop shadows only small chart elements that really need to stand out (example). Gradients, I use only to simulate a 3D effect.

Don't be a bleary-eyed presenter

Fred Wilson got it so right in a recent blog post: postponing the preparation of your presentation slides to the very last minute and showing up exhausted to the meeting does not pay off. Books such as Brain Rules provide scientific evidence that an exhausted brain is perfectly able to survive (i.e., run away from tigers that chase you), but not really good at coming up with great ideas anymore.

Get organized, finish the work in advance.

And if you are running out of time (these things happen), make the trade-off what would contribute most to a successful meeting:

1. Fine tuning those bullet points or re-shuffling the deck one more time
2. Showing up well-rested, energized and able to handle the most difficult questions confidently

Your call.

Chart concept - punching above our weight

OK, I admit, a previous chart concept on leverage might have been a bit hard to get for someone who forgot the physics of pulley systems that was discussed in highschool. This chart says the same thing, but simpler.

Beautiful motion graphics: "Did you know 4.0" video by Xplane

This video by Xplane (link to their blog with details) is making the rounds on the Internet. (Watch it in the original format on YouTube as blogger cuts off the right side of the wide screen video)

It's a beautiful example of kinetic type or motion graphics. Some comments.

• It is made with software available to everyone, the source files are here.
• There are some interesting visualization concepts, for example pie chart overlays abour 2:30 minutes into the video (thank you Steven Levy for pointing this out)
• Quotes are great to get one number across. Still I believe that comparing two numbers is not very powerful in 2 consecutive quotes. Rather the good old bar chart does a better job.
• The real artistic power in this presentation is the subtle use of informal cartoon drawing techniques, I style that I like.

Breaking that imaginary slide border

Pictures are not the only objects that you can have "bleeding" off the slide. Regular text boxes work as well. Especially beautiful over an image.

How many PowerPoint decks does it take to pitch to a VC?

This post was triggered by another excellent post by Mark Suster (Do you need a PowerPoint deck for a VC meeting? - spoiler: the answer is yes), and a meeting I had today with a client. There is an almost endless amount of different VC pitch settings, each single one requiring a different type of presentation deck (ideally).

Although I have a clear economic interest as a presentation designer to develop the VC pitch presentation of a startup in 10 completely different formats, I won't recommend that approach here. It is however good to be aware of these formats, and in most cases it is relatively simple to adjust your main pitch desk to the context of a specific meeting.

Here we go:

• The "page down presentation" gets emailed cold to a VC you do not know very well. Hopefully the attached PPT gets opened without you being there to explain and speed read using the PGDN key (probably not in presentation mode, so don't rely on animations). Don't assume that people will bother to read the body of the email (they might after having reached the last page of the deck). Since the reader spends little time on a page, each slide should contain little information (but you can use many slides). The presentation should focus on explaining the basic idea of your startup and the credibility of your team. All other stuff (detailed financials, etc.) can be discussed if you make to the next phase in the VC selection process.

• The "napkin presentation". You got 15 minutes one-on-one with a VC. Take print outs of a few key slides with you. In a one-on-one you do not need a slide for every topic. The napkins come in handy when you want to explain ideas that require lots of facts. A big map with all competing technologies or competitors on a page, showing how you are different, is one example. There is no use for fluff such as a page with mission statements in this type of presentation.

• The "phone deck". You find yourself taking someone on the other side of the Atlantic, probably without the help of a remote screen sharing tool such as Go2Meeting or Dimdim. Here the slides should be reasonably dense (you can't ask someone to change the page every 2 seconds) and very organized. Let's talk about the problem, let's talk about the technology, let's talk about the management team, etc. Chances are that your audience is flicking back and forth through the deck while you are talking, and watching the occasional email coming in during the call.

• The "standup presentation" is needed when you find yourself presenting in a room facing the (entire) partner group. It is the classical deck that should be organized to address all standard issues of a pitch presentation. As per Mark's post, sometimes you don't need it, but the deck is always there to fall back on. Be prepared to deviate from the slide order as questions are fired at you.

• The "due diligence appendix". This is a large deck with lots of slides with lots of information to be read and digested carefully, probably without a presenter present. Market data, financial data, competitor data, etc. You don't need to invest heavily in the design of the slides, just make sure that the format is more or less consistent, and if you can, don't leave in numbers with a precision of 4 digits after the dot directly from your Excel sheet without rounding them.

Did I forget to mention one? Let me know.

Keeping titles readable over busy images

A simple gradient box behind an image title can make sure it stays readable, even if the background is very busy. Image under a CC license by maistora on Flickr.

Chart concept - why now?

Sometimes it just comes all together, right now. Everything falls in place. And investors better move fast to benefit from the opportunity before it's gone. A set of big simple arrows can visualize this.

Chart concept - leverage and pulleys

Smart companies leverage money and man power invested in them to do great things. How to visualize this?

One option is to go back to high school physics class and use a good old pulley system.

See a previous post about how to get circular text in PowerPoint.

Book review - "Influence - the psychology of persuasion"

The book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini was added to my Squidoo lens with presentation resources (thank you anonymous reader!). I finally managed to read it. The book aims to teach anyone who needs to influence other people (that includes presentation designers like me) to leverage learnings from the field of psychology.

Like most business classics, the real-life case examples are really valuable; the attempts to draw generic conclusions and insights from them somehow make less interesting reading (although they still are valuable). Just a few examples:

• A jeweller selling all his slow-moving inventory by accidentally doubling its consumer price
• Charities harassing people in airports by offering them a flower as a gift, and "forcing" them to contribute a few dollars to the cause
• Cults and mass suicides
• Normal people willing to give 220V electrical shocks to other people in the name of science
• How you can make sure that a crowd of bystanders actually helps you when you need them (spoiler: ask a very specific person to do a very specific thing, crowds usually think that help is already on its way)

The six principles discussed in the book (where possible I added lessons specifically for presentation design)

1. Do a favor, cash in later.
2. Get people to commit early on. Presentation use: have people write an objective down on a piece of paper as a group exercise, construct an argument in stages, have them buy into something small early on before the big idea comes later
3. Social proof, we do what we think others do. Watch out in presentations to make cases like "100m Americans have not signed up to donate blood". It might just backfire.
4. We say yes to people we like, we like people who are similar to us. Find a connection with your audience early in the presentation, even if it is a very weak one ("my nephew went to high school in Springfield")
5. Use authority. Establish your credibility early in the presentation, as specific as possible. OK: "I am a VC with firm x". Better: "I personally invested $300m in 35 early stage tech deals". Quote sources for the analysis and data you are using in your presentations
6. Scarcity, we like things that are hard to get

The first edition of the book was written in 1984 and despite some updates it is still a book that does not mention the word "Internet" in any of its 320 pages. Online user behaviour must provide an ocean of interesting case examples for psychologist to analyse that can add to the content of this book.

Also, the marketing philosophies are before concepts such as permission marketing introduced by Seth Godin. It's all about extracting that extra bit of money on a car deal, pushing people to sign to buy that fridge now, organize tupperware parties at which your friends feel embarrased not to buy anything. Sad marketing techniques.

In short interesting reading if you put the book in the context of the time it was written.

Storybird - collaborative story telling for familes and friends

More and more online presentation tools are popping up. A recent one is Story Bird. You select artwork from an artist and are offered a simple interface to weave images of your choice together into a story.

The service is targeted at family/children and works well. Narrowing down the degrees of freedom (artwork in a consistent style, simple page layout [image + big font text]) makes it easy to create and share professional looking stories. You can invite others to collaborate with you as well.

Maybe the biggest application of this service is in education? There is a business presentation version of this application possible as well. Replace the image bank with non-cheesy useful presentation images (you only need a few hundred to cover most business presentations) and you have an alternative template to the PowerPoint bullet points. "Ayne can make Presentation Zen-style presentations"). Cutting the available slideware tools to the minimum helps focus the presentation design amateur on the story.

My first creation can be found here.

Via Orli