First thoughts on the Apple iPad and presentations

Apple launched the iPad yesterday (watch Steve Jobs present here): a device positioned in between a smart phone and a laptop computer. The big differentiator is a very large screen and a user interface that can be manipulated using the touch of a finger, exactly the same way you interact with an iPhone.

Would could this new device mean for presentations? My first thoughts:

• The iPad runs the iPhone operating system, which means that you cannot simply port PC or Mac applications on it. Apple announced a version of iWorks (including Keynote) for the iPad, but for now it is impossible to run Microsoft PowerPoint on it.
• The devices seems like a great presentation tool for one-on-one meetings. A bright, big screen and an informal user interface enable a dialogue-style presentation.
• The need for an application like Prezi becomes more urgent. Prezi seems made for the iPad: easy zooming in and out of slides, and a non-linear way to move between slides. I have not seen the details of iWorks for iPad, but I assume that Apple is going down the track of creating a Prezi-style user interface for office productivity applications.
• It would be great if you could use a virtual marker during your iPad presentation: drawing circles to emphasize elements, adding comments, pretty much in the style of the napkin presentation I talked about a while ago.

I am very excited about the iPad. The geek reviews might have found technical imperfections (no multi-tasking for example), but the fundamental revolution is the big touch-based user interface that have brought computing in general and presentations specifically a bit closer to a natural human interaction.

Seth Godin's Linchpin: "the good guys can win"

This post will be slightly off-topic: Seth Godin published his latest book yesterday: Linchpin (affiliate link) and I think it is important that as many people as possible absorb the ideas that it contains.

Seth's books have evolved over the years. What started with insights about marketing (he is the one who opened up our eyes to the fact that anonymous spam email campaigns are not effective), is now moving into the area of leadership and in Linchpin even broader: what is the purpose of the time you spend day in, day out. 

If there is one unifying theme in all his books it would be: "the good guys can win" (came up with this while listening to Leonard Cohen's song "Everybody knows"). You can be successful by doing remarkable things, without a need to cheat, interrupt, or lie.

The book opens with a grim analysis of history. Over the past 100 years we have built a society (education, advertising) that trains people to be cogs: cheap, willing, replaceable, numb, insecure people that man the production lines and purchase the stuff that the factory churns out.

It is time to escape the trap and change. It's urgent. Not changing will get you fired, and/or bore you to death, and/or rob you of your dignity, and/or paralyze your abilities and talents as you live and work in constant fear. On top of that, all of us own so much stuff that we do not even know what to do with it anymore.

The linchpin is a small but critical part that holds the wheel in place. Seth wants us to become one. "Us", the target audience of the book seems to be today's army of middle managers filling cubicles in office towers around the world.

You can see that Seth is a blog writer, the book contains many smaller ideas that are bundled together in one book cover.

• Emotional labor creates art: work that touches people, changes them.You are not born with a talent for art, you do not have to be able to know how to draw to be an artist. If what you do changes people, it's art.
• Gifts are powerful and will pay back somehow. Be generous without running an ROI calculation in your head. If you want a copper plate with your name in return for your gift, you do not feel emotionally strong enough about it. It is probably better not to give at all in that case.
• The resistance is strong. Our "lizard" brain wants us to be safe, warm, and comfortable and tells us all the time to back away. One defense against the resistance is to "ship" at the time you set yourself, even if your product/idea/post is not 100% perfect.
• The Internet/social media can be powerful to connect with people and spread ideas, but when it teams up with the resistance it becomes a huge time waster. We feel connected Twittering away, but the clock is running as well: "what happened to your art when you were Tweeting?"
• Anger, anxiety, and a longing for revenge are destructive and time-wasting emotions deeply rooted in our lizard brain. Anxiety is very often used as a motivator in big corporates: do as I tell you or I will fire you. People under constant stress cannot perform. There is no art when you are running away from a tiger that's chasing you.
• There is no map, no manual about how to become a linchpin. And no, this is not about Seth being lazy and not giving us the solution, being a linchpin is the exact opposite of following a manual with standard procedures.
• It is hard to see clearly, especially when you are in the trenches doing routine cog work, spend time in useless meetings, busy reading 100s of Tweets or stressed out about the upcoming performance review
• Being a linchpin gives meaning to who you are and what you do, but will not necessarily turn you into a millionaire. But hey, we own already too much things anyway.

You can see that it took Seth a long time to write this book.

• It bundles different ideas. Some passages are clearly written at the height of the economic crisis last year (linchpins don't get fired, be a linchpin to hold on to your seat).
• The language is much more deep and abstract than in Seth's other books. Many sentences require re-reading. One explanation is that they come from a set of ideas collected in a note book over a longer period of time.

Now for some connections to presentation design and public speaking:

• Fear of public speaking is a prime example of the resistance and the lizard brain teaming up
• Presentation design is the ultimate act of making people see clearly
• Public speaking is a rewarding opportunity to touch and change people

Measurements that people can visualize

Mathematics has given us the ability to perform complex calculations, reducing real world quantities to simple numbers and variables that can be manipulated without interpreting what they actually mean.

In your presentations, try to go back to the stage of a child before the first mathematics class. Describe measurements and quantities in a way that they can be visualized, internalized.

Recently, one of my presentations covered agricultural land yields in emerging markets. Rather than using abstract hectares and tons, I decided to use the soccer field analogy. It is easy to re-calculate figures from tons per hectare, to tons per soccer field, and maybe even going further: truck loads per soccer field.

You can even use the visual of the soccer field:

Maintain one vanishing point when rotating 3D PowerPoint objects

3D effects can add impact to a PowerPoint slide if used at the appropriate occasion.

• 3D for the sake of 3D adds complexity: the slide becomes harder to understand, the only thing you showed is that you know where to find advanced formating buttons of PowerPoint. 3D data charts are a good example of this
• 3D adds value if you need to convey distance: I use 3D for what it actually is, a way to add a third dimension to your slide, to show depth.. (Notice in the previous post I linked to that you often do not need to use sophisticated 3D effects to create depth, colors or differences in size can do the trick equally well).

Here is an important thing to remember when using 3D rotations in PowerPoint: rotate a composition of objects as a group, rather than a collection of individual objects. Grouping them preserves one vanishing point in your slide composition. An example:

Chart makeover - a new huge supermarket is coming to the neighborhood!

Sometimes a reader emails me with a question about a chart makeover. It is hard for me to free up the time for personal 1-on-1 answers, but if I can discuss them here for the benefit of everyone, it is a good deal. So here we go, I am obviously removing any reference to the specifics of the situation.

This case example is about supermarkets. There is a plan to open a new one, one that will be far bigger in floor space than all the surrounding super markets. This floor space will be the main competitive differentiator.

Before

Because of confidentiality I cannot post the actual image, so I will describe it (apologies for the bullet points):

• A copy of a Google map with all the grocery stores in a 2km area marked with red circles
• Each red circle (store) is connected to a descriptive label at the edge of the map.
• In the middle of the map, a bit green circle where the new store will be opened.
• At the bottom is a sentence explaining that "Our surrounding competition are mostly supermarkets which are severely space constrained, we can use this fact to our advantage"

My suggestions

Ideally you want to break up this chart into at least 2 charts with different messages:

1. A Google map with competing stores and the new stores marked. If possible, get rid of all other clutter on the map: parking lots, bus stations, etc. etc. Make it as clean as possible. The key message: "yes, we are going to open another store in a catchment that is already full of competitors".
2. To make the "our store is bigger" point, you have multiple options, depending on data and images that you have available:
• Two horizontal bar charts with with an entry for each of the 20 or so stores, and your new store: bar chart one: distance to your store, bar chart 2 estimated floor space
• Image(s) of a "typical" competitor store, maybe even spread out over multiple pages, and then a computer generated image of your new super store
• Google street view images of each of the 20 competing stores (so people get a real sense of how small and amateurish they are).
3. The big question people will ask is whether there is another big food store in the neighborhood, maybe at 2.1 km away. Maybe you need to include a map of the entire city and plot the locations of mega stores to complete the picture.

SpiderPic - price comparison shopping is coming to stock images

By now everyone knows that using professional images in your presentation is far better than ripping images from Google image search or clipart: higher quality photographs, isolated subjects on a white background, detailed search capabilities including required colors or available white space for type, and last but not least: no copy right infringement issues.

With the increase in popularity of stock images also came a backlash: many photographs were so cliche and/or over-used that designers increasingly start to look at other image sources with creative common licenses (I like Flickr a lot).

Price is another issue. Online stock image sites used to charge around $1 for each image. At that price you could afford to buy volumes and volumes of images, try them and discard them if they were not appropriate. Prices have gone up significantly recently, requiring a change in the creative process: design your presentation with low-resolution comps and only buy your images at the very last stage of the project.

Technology is about to put new power in the hands of stock image buyers. Many stock image sites contain the exact same image, but offer them at different prices. Differences in price are the result of general pricing policies (driven by the strength of the brand of the stock image site) or sophisticated dynamic pricing algorithms, setting image prices based on the number of downloads/views (more popular images become more expensive).

SpiderPic is a price comparison search engine for stock images and let's you decide from which source you want to buy the image. You key in the search term, the site presents the available options, and once you select a candidate it lists other sites that offer the image (and at what price for what resolution). Once you made your selection you are linked through to the relevant stock image site to complete the purchase transaction.

The site is currently in private beta, but the home page states that they are considering applications from people who want to give it a try.

How I wrote a recent presentation

I kept track of the phases of a recent presentation design project:

1. Quickly racing down an existing PPT, checking out the client's web site ("what is it that they do exactly"?)
2. Break
3. Listening to the full pitch via screen sharing software: PPT on screen, client on the phone. Asking naive questions all the time, jumping back and forth between slides and web sites, interrupting the presentation all the time (some people might get offended)
4. Jotting down all impressions immediately after that, to make sure that I do not lose the richness of the discussion (especially comments and ideas that do not appear on a slide)
5. BIG BREAK including a night of sleep
6. Putting together the template, setting fonts, colors, spending time on finding a perfect and beautiful image/graphic for the front page (yes, open up the slideware!). Thinking about a style of images, the style of presentation. Most people might embark on some analogue story boarding exercise here, but I find it useful do dive into the detail of color codes to get my mind focussed. 
7. Break
8. Start designing a few absolute killer charts that are instrumental in getting the story across without worrying where they exactly fit in the story. In VC pitch presentations, these are usually charts describing the pain that the world-without-this-great-invention is suffering. These will be the most important charts in the presentation.
9. BIG BREAK
10. Going analogue to design the overall story of the presentation on a piece of paper
11. Filling in the blanks with slides, starting on page 1 and working my way through to the end. Finishing each slide to final quality (i.e., I do not create quick PowerPoint dummies)
12. BIG BREAK
13. Look at the draft again, make some small changes and send it off to the client
14. Here is where the regular iteration process with the client starts. Feedback, correction, feedback, correction.

Looking back I notice a few things:

• Lots of mental breaks to give your mind a rest
• I usually look and study an existing PowerPoint, some people might be afraid to get influenced by seeing previous work. Personally, I do not suffer from this, presentations come out with hardly any resemblance to the original. 
• I actually open up PowerPoint relatively early in the process before going analogue, against the wisdom provided in most presentation design books
• The lack of structure despite my engineering background and 10 years of McKinsey

The above is a highly personal work approach, it does not mean it should work for every presentation designers. I just wanted to share a glimpse of how I work through the process from story idea to finished PowerPoint file.

Motion graphics going analogue

A cute video clip designed by David Pino full of analogue motion graphics: characters held up by wires and movement because of a camera actually changes location.

Found via Fubiz

"Be stupid" - DIESEL ad with motion graphics

A bit noisy, but nicely done.

Via Ads of the World

An unusual take on typographic color...

Typographic color is the apparent level of black (or color) that appears to you when looking at a block of text.

Matt Robinson engineered an interesting experiment to test it. Take low-cost, transparent ball points, use them to write the same text in different fonts on a a wall, and see how much ink is left in them afterwards. A quantification of typographic color use (and/or) waste of ink.

Courier comes out really environmentally friendly in this test. It might be true in terms of ink, but this is definitely not the case of you measure the amount of paper used.

I am a bit late to discover this via Ministry of Type.

Help, not enough white space in my image!

White space is a powerful element in slide design. An image with the subject in the center often does not leave enough space to let the slide breathe a bit. The following image sequence explain a work around. Basically, you stretch the background of the image without stretching and distorting the image subject itself. Flipping the cropped background makes sure that there is a smooth transition between original and stretched background.

Image via iStockPhoto.

Google Street View - a great source of presentation images

For those who do not know: Google Street View lets you look at images taken in the streets of more and more cities. You walk around, look up, down, sideways. Like Google Earth (see an earlier post about how to tilt Google Earth maps), this is a fantastic source of images for presentations.

• Images of landmarks that are much more natural and real than the ones you can find in stock image sites.
• The ability to take unusual photo angles, most stock images are taken looking straight ahead. 
• Ultra-local: if your presentation somehow is set in a certain location, go there!
• If your presentation is in the area of retail, urban planning, Street View is a great way to give examples of let's say Starbucks stores in a few different cities, in a few different formats
• People shots: doing a presentation about mobile phone use, youth fashion trends? Google Street View enables you to walk out in the streets of Paris and see what's going on.