HTML5 and presentations

HTML5 is a major revision of the HTML language that powers web pages (Wikipedia link for the details). You can find an example of a presentation designed entirely in HTML5 here. Use the cursor left and right keys to navigate between slides. The presentation does not have a good design, but it gives a flavor of the capabilities of HTML5.

Could HTML5 become the default file format for all presentations, decoupling software that creates presentations, environments that display them, and sites that build a social infrastructure for sharing on the web?

• As file sizes become larger, and internet connections become always available, a "in the cloud" file format for presentations becomes more likely
• I expect the position of Microsoft PowerPoint to go down somewhat, as smaller niche presentation design tools make inroads (Prezi, etc.)
• New devices with touch interfaces will add a whole new dimension to animations in presentations, HTML5 seems very well suited to deal with those.

I am curious to hear the perspectives of readers which a stronger technical background than mine.

Thank you Eyal Sela for suggesting this link.

Your presentation is not a UN Security Council resolution

We have all been in meetings that went on and on about the exact wording of a phrase: legal contracts, mission statements, press releases, UN Security Council resolutions, and yes, also presentations. I am not arguing to be less precise when writing a presentation, but word smithing bullet points is not going to make your message clearer, the opposite is probably true.

• Everyone knows that bullet point slides make bad presentations. And the more text you cut, the less ability you have to get that exact nuance right.
• The details of text in a presentation do not register, what matters is the - partly improvised - story told by the presenter; and a good story does not include repeating memorized, carefully crafted sentences.
• Hollow mission statements (earlier post) are the ultimate example of the information asymmetry between the presenter and her audience. It took months to develop, it contains everything the company stands for, people have thought about every word and punctuation mark in it, and still: nobody understands it.

Photo by Flickr/gruban.

Google's latest investor presentation (part 1)

Quarterly results presentations are in the public domain, designed for an external audience. Below is the presentation that Google used to communicate the results for the first quarter.

These types of presentations are usually prepared under great time pressure, as there is very little time between the moment the accountants are producing the figures and the communication to the analyst community. Unfortunately, this impacts the quality of the presentation (form, not content).

I will use this presentation to provide some suggestions on how to improve corporate presentation design. Not that I am picking on Google (Skype was an earlier victim), this presentation is just a typical example of most analyst presentations I see.

Analyst presentations are slideocuments: they need to be packed with a lot of financial information and the audience (equity analysts), usually know the company and its financials very well and are keen to see this quarter's update of last quarter's figures that are already sitting in their spreadsheets. So, adding large images with huge font text is not really appropriate here. Also, I will forgive the use of bullet points in these documents. Still, the quality of the slideocument can be improved.

Let's look at the opening page. The one thing I like is the minimalist template that Google uses: a tiny logo at the bottom right of the page. Great.

Some improvement suggestions:

• Break it in two pages, one addressing the financials, one the operating highlights
• Use horizontal bar charts to highlight the growth rates year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter
• On the second slide, do not use bullets if you just need to make 1 point
• Try to make the sentences shorter

The way the operational headlines are written is fairly generic, and analysts might not pay attention to them as they are still internalizing the numbers that are written before. The key point that Google was trying to make (I think) is that despite the difficult climate growth is business as usual at Google. At would make that point in some big arrow to the left of the text.

More feedback to come in future posts.

Christoph Niemann and LEGO presentations

Christoph Niemann (web site) is a highly talented artist whose illustrations have appeared on magazine covers ranging from the New Yorker to Wired. He posts on a regular basis on his blog in the New York Times, where this set of cartoons based on Google maps caught my attention.

He recently published a new (board) book with snap shots of New York modeled in Lego bricks: I LEGO N.Y. (affiliate link). A sample image below.

Now here is a presentation challenge: construct your entire presentation in tiny Lego scenes, photograph them and paste them into PowerPoint. Not as crazy as it might sound.

UPDATE. One of my readers, Daniel Cabrera, used LEGO images to construct a presentation for a university project. In this case, the images were sourced from the web.

391 city workforce

View more presentations from DACabrera.

CNN-style lettering tape

A semi transparent overly is one way to keep text readable over busy images (previous post). CNN uses a different one: black and colorful bars behind white text. The length of the bar varies with the length of the text that it covers.

It is easy to recreate this effect in PowerPoint. Here an example with an image from one of my favorite boulevards in Paris (image credit to jfgornet). You can go further and imitate the retro lettering tape using stock images like this one.

OK, so what do you do exactly?

Startups that are pitching to venture capitalists for funding often start off with a barrage of product benefits, the great qualifications of the team, and the remarkable patent that you secured for the entire world (well, excluding Japan, but that is not a really important market anyway, and we have a way around this black spot on the globe through working with a great distributor we know there who happened to be my room mate while I studied biology, molecular biology to be more precise, in Oxford).

Pause, rewind.

What is it that your company does? "Aah, now I understand more or less in what part of the world I am in." And your audience is ready to put the rest of your messages in context.

Invest in a group picture if you want people to invest in your company

The "team" pages in most investor pitch presentations and on most web sites are uninspiring. Some people have a picture, some have not. Some people wear a tie, others wear casual clothes. Some have a dark background, some light. Some pictures are taken from a distance, others are in close up. Some are cropped in 3:4, others manually.

Pictures and avatars are increasingly becoming your trade mark on the web. People do not have time to read names, and sometimes (in my case at least) most people are not able to pronounce it properly.

But why use individual pictures? The team and its ability to work together is one of the key assets an early startup has. At the next board meeting, get a good camera (or even better, a good photographer) in the room an take a group shot in a relaxed atmosphere. Stretch the image to a full page in PowerPoint and add arrows/name tags to point to these great people that are going to make this company a huge success.

Adding value to the value

Presentations use too many buzz words and empty phrases. Hugh MacLeod (gaping void) made a great cartoon about the abuse of "adding value", you can buy a print here (no commercial interest) or subscribe to his daily cartoons by email here.

CVs are coming to PowerPoint

The end of the standard CV or resume is near (Seth Godin post). The classic A4 CV full of woolly language/blurb is similar to the infamous "Executive Summary" of an investor pitch, or the 2-page "fact sheet" of a software product: people do not absorb any information from them.

Why not use a presentation to present yourself to a potential employer?.

• The number of pages is a useless restriction: it is the time it takes to digest them that counts. A 5 page presentation with attractive graphics provides more info and is faster to read than a dense A4 sheet.
• It makes you stand out. If the potential employer does not appreciate you deviating from the standard practice, it might not be the right place to work.
• Data charts and timelines enables you to visualize things that are hard to capture in writing: i.e., the length you stayed with one company versus another
• Images can convey passions and interests that are hard to capture in words

I wrote about using a PowerPoint presentation for an MBA application in an earlier post. My suggestions would be similar for a presentation CV. My own (slightly outdated) introduction presentation gives some examples of a graphical representation of a career timeline, and using data charts to quantify and visualize your experience.

Extreme close-up

An extreme close-up of a face can have a dramatic effect in a presentation. I used photographs of animals and people before (Miles Davis for example), but never a painting. What a great ad based on a painting by Renoir.

The ad encourages people to come visit an art museum (MASP in Sao Paolo). In case you have difficulty reading the text:

I saw paint turn into Impressionism. I saw Renoir painting me. I saw the disappointed banker who ordered me. I saw his disregard while throwing me into a dusty room. I saw years go by. I saw Europe finally acknowledge my value. I saw Brazil embrace me. I saw a new home. I saw that same home turn into the country’s most visited museum. But, having seen all that, there’s one thing I haven’t seen yet: you. Come. I wish to see you.

Two more examples on Ads of the World. If you are interested in art, try this book.

Dealing with ugly corporate templates

Corporate PowerPoint templates are often (in fact, most of the time) too busy and too cluttered for presentation design. Lots of graphics that is repeated on each page, big logos with reflections, legal disclaimers, huge page numbers, all of this eats valuable screen real estate. Depending on how strongly the corporate communication department insists, here are some work-arounds:

1. The most radical option: go into the slide master and take all the unnecessary stuff out. [view, slide master]. But then do something extra: go into [design, create new theme colors] and enter the exact RGB colors of your company's color scheme, a step that is often overlooked in corporate templates
   
2. Keep the front page, but design a presentation full of large images that you stretch across the page (including the cluttered graphical elements). "What, I did stick to the template, the images just did not fit in in any other way".
   
3. If 1 and 2 do not work, create a window inside a window: design your slides inside the frame that is left, using the correct corporate colors and ignoring the bullet point default template. If the window is consistent, the audience will slowly loose the attention for the clutter around your chart, in pretty much the same way as is the case in big conference halls with distracting sponsor logos around the projector screen.

Thank you Gonzalo Álvarez Marañón for suggesting this topic.

Un-stretch those images

Many presentation images are distorted: the proportion between height and width got confused somewhere along the way. It is easy to correct this. In PowerPoint 2007: right click the image, format picture, reset picture, and you got your original image back. Now hold the shift key while resizing your image and the proportions will be preserved.

Here is an earlier post with a more advantaged tutorial how to scale images to a full page without distortion.