Picking the correct logo

Many investor and sales presentations include logo pages. Improve the quality of these slides significantly by not picking the first image that pops up in Google image search:

1. Visit the company's web site to see what the latest logo of the company in question is, logos get updated frequently
2. Set the Google image search options to large format
3. Pick a correct, huge logo
4. Paste it in your presentation, reduce to the correct size, hit compress images

Companies with a good PR department have high-resolution images of their logos on the web site. Use them.

Leave some room for your chart title

The space allocated to the slide title in a PowerPoint template is constantly under threat:

• Corporate graphics eating up valuable screen real estate (earlier post)
• Huge and bold fonts (earlier post)

Please give the title some space:

• It is virtually impossible to win the battle against dense bullet point charts in big corporates. However, giving people some space to write the conclusion in the title of the chart might be one of the easiest ways to overcome this problem: read the title, ignore the chart content. A similar effect to how Twitter is educating people to write more concise email subject lines.
• I find a title that runs on 2 lines hard to read: if you do not give people space they will simply add a line, and maybe even another one.

Turning any image into concrete

Here is a simple trick to turn any image into concrete. As an example I took an iPad and turned it into an iSlate, but it might actually work better with other images (you can turn portraits into statues for example).

To do this in PowerPoint without the help of advanced image manipulation software you need to add a shape on top of the target image, fill the shape with an image of a concrete texture (available on any stock image site) and make that shape with the concrete texture semi-transparent.

Lighter shades for bright colors

PowerPoint 2010 gives you the option of a spectrum of different shades of the same color. This is great to design charts with a consistent color scheme.

However, if your template contains colors that are highly saturated, the suggested lighter shades of your color will be too bright to use as neutral color nuances. Here is how you can fix it. (Click on the image for a larger picture.).

• Create a new base color by reducing the saturation (in laymen's speak: make it more grey). 

1. Open the color in your color template (format shape/fill/solid fill/color/more colors)
2. Switch the color model from RGB (red, green, blue) to HSL (hue, saturation, luminance).
3. Reduce the (S)aturation value, while keeping all other variables the same.

• Use a lighter shade of this new base color instead and save this as a new color in your color template.

If you are interested in learning more about color theory, you can browse through some earlier posts on the subject of color or go straight to this one.

Message arrived - nobody understood it

My attention was drawn to this Vodafone ad that uses the NATO alphabet to say C-O-M-M-U-N-I-C-A-T-E  C-L-E-A-R-L-Y. An excellent example of the difference between delivering a message (i.e., writing your bullet points on a slide) and getting someone else to understand/internalize what it says.

I am not sure yet how to use it yet, but this NATO alphabet is a good thing to remember when thinking about chart concepts.

Via Ads of the World.

The audience wants you to succeed

Fear of public speaking often stems from the speaker thinking that the audience's main objective is to criticize her performance. The opposite is true: the audience wants you to succeed. First of all because of selfish motivations; nobody wants to be bored.

But there is an emotional driver as well. People (in the audience) do not like to subject themselves to an embarrassing situation. Watching this movie clip from the film "About a boy" creates that exact feeling in your stomach (I cannot embed it for some reason).

The book "Confessions of a public speaker" has a great section on public speaking anxiety. Seth Godin thinks that fear of public speaking is the a prime example of our lizard brain at work.

Browsing for books about design

The Internet and the place I live (Israel) have cut me off of those great large book stores where you can browse endlessly for books you did not know you missed.

Presentation blogs (this one included) often talk about the same limited set of books about public speaking and presentation design. Here is a list of design books compiled by graphic designer Jason Santa Maria full of titles that look really interesting.

Found via SwissMiss. Image credit Google LIFE, an excellent source of images for non-commercial use.

The entire Jobs' iPad speech in 180s: passion

Presenting is not a casual discussion, it is a performance. When you are not passionate about what you are presenting yourself, do not expect your audience to be. This short video compilation of Steve Jobs' iPad launch speech shows how he packed his talk with enthusiasm. Something to learn from, but also to make you smile.

You should follow this blog

Mark Suster is a venture capitalist (VC) who is quietly building one of the world's most-read blogs about entrepreneurship and VC investing. I suspect most people who read my blog subscribe to other blogs in areas such as (graphics) design and public speaking. Most of these blogs (including this one), are run by people who write presentations.
Mark's blog is different.

• Most of the time he sits in the audience listening to people trying to pitch a venture to him, but in an earlier stage in his career he was an entrepreneur himself sitting at the other side of the table (hence the name of his blog)
• He talks a lot about presentations and pitches, but these are mere tools to achieve a bigger goals: building a successful venture

I think anyone who is interested in presentation design should follow his blog. See his impressive list of posts about pitching to a VC. Or read his most recent post about not failing when presenting to large audiences. Full of great lessons for presenters and presentation designers, that are not only relevant in the world of VC fund raising.

Pitching to VCs is a great case example to learn about presentations in general:

• The stakes are incredibly high ($ millions)
• Each startup is a story that wants to change the world
• The story and ideas are highly personal (the entrepreneurs's "baby" is on the block, people are judging the idea, but mostly the presenter herself)
• The audience is not captive (in most corporate presentations, the audience is required to sit it through, because the boss says so, a VC will not waist her time to listen to a poor presentation)

Chart concept - word find

The concept of this ad for a dental care product can be very useful for a slide conveying "solution x helps you see the forest through the trees". It is a bit tedious to generate rows of random words, but the end result will be effective.

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

I discussed similar concepts earlier here and here.

"Why are TED presentations so polished?"

This question was asked by David Semaria on Mark Suster's excellent blog "Both sides of the table", a must read for anyone who needs to pitch to VCs.

Here is my take on the question why TED presentations are so "polished":

1. A tough pre-selection: you need an interesting story even before the PPT slideware is opened to create the presenation
2. A ruthless 18 minutes cutoff makes you practice
3. Peer pressure of a good speaker line up makes you practice
4. The "threat" of a global video audience makes you practice

You can argue that it can be hard to sometimes to meet point number 1. Number 2, 3 and 4 are all about practice, your presentation can benefit from it too. There is no excuse not to practice, practice, and practice.

Let your audience's brain fill in the missing pieces

Highly graphic and gruesome ads that should stop you from smoking or driving dangerously are not only not pleasant to look at, but also often fail to achieve their objective (according to books like "Influence").

This U.K. "wear your seat belt" ad shows that you can communicate these messages in a different way. I like the way it triggers the brain to fill in the missing pieces in an emotional way. (Books such as "Brain Rules" show that your mind is very good at this).

Watch the full 90 seconds of this ad, it is very powerful.

Via Ad Freak.