Learning from ancient folk stories

I was just reading some stories from Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales(affiliate link) to my kids and realized how much you can learn from them to create short anecdotes that fit inside your bigger presentation:

• Very short
• One to three simple (almost stereotypical) characters
• Something happens at turn 3. "On the 3rd day..."
• An unexpected twist at the end: "and this is why monkeys became so good at climbing trees"

These tales were designed to be remembered and passed on for generations. How long does your slide deck stick?

Two pies - too much

Pies are great to show relative sizes of surfaces, better than bars or columns. When it comes to comparing breakdowns on multiple dimensions though, the column chart cannot be beaten. See this example taken out of Haaretz this morning. What did I fix:

1. Two columns instead of two pies
2. Get rid of the 3D effects (earlier post)
3. Use consistent coloring for data series
4. Use consistent ordering for data series
5. First the chart with the number of households, then the chart with the breakdown of income

Chart concept - standing in the shadow

Some issues/people get all the attention, while others never get discussed. The chart below looks a bit like a child's drawing, but the point is to show how you can play with shadows to create the effect.

Fundraising dialogue going wrong

Highly amusing video of a fund raising discussion. In many pitch discussions, people talk at each other, but are not really listening, talking to each other. Created by ITHAYER.

Blending data and typography in a chart

What a nice chart by Mobile Analytics. Perfect blend of data, logos/icons, and typography.

Making cut outs using shape subtract in PowerPoint

The new shape subtract feature in PowerPoint 2010 (review) enables you to make shape cutouts in a more elegant way than before (see the old approach here). A step-by-step guide using a great image by Gregory Bastien.

The secret to great presentation design is...

The bar has been put higher and higher over the past years:

• Everyone is now able to put text and charts in PowerPoint and project them on a screen
• (Almost) everyone has discovered where to get beautiful page-filling images
• Many people have figured out how to clean up a messy data chart
• More and more people are learning to apply professional typography (PowerPoint gets a bit closer to Illustrator with every release) and coherent color schemes

What is left that is hard to do is the "art part". It can never be automated. Sequencing the right story, knowing what to cut, what to keep in, picking the right analogies, selecting the right images, picking the exact right data visualization option... 

Manually adjusting fonts

Sometimes it is necessary to adjust the characters in a sentence manually. Look at this image (with a deep quote) and see how letters line up vertically. Standard horizontal and vertical spacing in PowerPoint will not get you this effect. Put in the characters as individual text boxes and align them to get it just right...

Image via FFFFound

Hand-drawn figures in PowerPoint

Another excellent clip art manipulation on Tom's Rapid e-learning blog: how to create characters with a hand-drawn feel:

1. Select a cartoon-style clipart
2. Ungroup and strip out background elements
3. Copy and paste as PNG
4. Apply PowerPoint 2010's new pencil sketch filter (or use Photoshop's)
5. Increase brightness, soften contrast a bit.

Clutter-free web site screen dumps

Screen dumps are often used in VC pitch presentations; either to showcase the company itself, or to give examples of competitors in the market. These screen shots are often filled with excess visual details:

• The Windows title and scroll bars (sometimes with personal information such as instant messaging windows or the names of other web sites that are open on the screen)
• The menu navigation structure, login windows, banner ads that surround the core web site.

Cut this clutter to create a much calmer slide that allows you to focus on what feature/aspect you would like to highlight.

Animated GIFs

Usually, animated GIFs drive me crazy. The more subtle ones like this one could actually work in a presentation. If you copy and paste an animated GIF into your slide it will start to play if you switch to presentation mode. Via this isn't happiness.

The PowerPoint blur filter

PowerPoint is slowly adding features that have been standard in Photoshop for years. One useful one is the image blur filter to increase depth of field of your photos (earlier post). It adds some extra realism to this composite image trick (discussed earlier here and here)

1. Find an image for the foreground and use the PowerPoint format/remove-background function to get rid of the white background
2. Find a background (nice image of Cafe de Flore by DarkB4Dwan)
3. Combine the 2 images
4. Blur the background with (click the image, format, artistic effects, the right one in the 2nd row)

One other application is to repeat a blurred version of a busy chart for additional comments (see post here)

Using Adobe Illustator shapes in PowerPoint

PowerPoint 2010 has now incorporated some of the shape manipulation techniques that until now were the domain of Adobe Illustrator: union, combine, subtract, and intersect (read my earlier PowerPoint 2010 review here).

Until now, I never got into understanding Illustrator. Until now, because I (ironically) start to experiment with integrating more hand-drawn shapes into my presentations (I am even thinking of picking up my old highschool habit of drawing cartoons of people). Fonts are no issue (earlier post). The line/curve manipulations capabilities of Illustrator however are still far better than PowerPoint.

Here is how to move an Illustrator shape into PowerPoint, not just as an image, but as an editable vector object.

1. In Illustrator export your shape in an EMF format
2. In PowerPoint, select "insert picture" (a bit counter intuitive)
3. Right-click the object and un-group it. Say "yes" to the question whether you want to convert it

Converting is this simple. Unfortunately, understanding Illustrator is not...

Negative thoughts are creativity killers

I stumbled on this image this morning: such a true quote. Whenever I allow myself to get upset in a Tel Aviv traffic jam, or on the phone to the useless support desk of my ISP, I simply cannot get myself to design a good presentation. The rest of the day is best spent doing the monthly accounting.

Via Diego Zambrano.

PowerPoint fails as an internal management reporting tool

A situation probably familiar to many of you:

• Corporate conglomerate needs update from country business units
• Analyst creates PPT template with just headings: "key successes", "key issues", etc.
• Template gets sent out, "fill in by next Tuesday (please), our review meeting is Friday"
• Towards Thursday evening: pages and pages of dense slideuments start popping up in the inbox, (of course) not following the template, but Frankensteined (earlier post) from other presentations
• Analysts cuts and pastes an overview document together (Friday 3AM) and sends it up the hierarchy as a status update.

If your goals is to provide a 20 minute update on the status in the business units the analyst might as well write the slideument herself. The writing of the slides will not take the time, it's getting the information, and internalizing it. An alternative scenario:

• Analysts schedules 15 minute interviews with counter parts in the business units
• In a phone call, the real story comes out.
• Analysts write the summary slideument and sends it out for comments to the BUs
• Analyst incorporates the changes and is now ready to answer any question senior management might have on the situation in the business units

This approach works for high level qualitative updates. For detailed financial information, a proper management reporting system needs to be put in place. It is easy to analyse and compare financial data mechanically across business units, hardly any phone calls are needed. To take the finger on what else is going on in the business, the good old human interaction cannot be eliminated.

Where good ideas come from

I am joining in the viral marketing campaign of the new book Where good ideas come from by Steven Johnson (affiliate link)

Video of his TED talk published today:



Shorter video highlighting the idea in his book with a good use of cartoon-style drawing:

DON'T: Tell 'em what you will tell, tell 'em, tell 'em what you just told 'em

I often hear this advice to make sure something gets stuck in the audience brain: tell it 3 times. I disagree. This is the approach of the (poor) teacher asking a class to recite the alphabet over and over again. Here are some better approaches:

• Tell a story that stitches the elements of your message together
• Create a memorable visual to highlight the concept
• Give them something they will never forget (see Duarte's post)

Everything is better than boring your audience with saying the same thing three times.

The real photographer and the stock photographer

Clicking through some of the black and white images on this incredible page on Smashing Magazine shows you once more the difference between an average stock image and a photograph taken by an artist.

This image is by Andrzej Laskowski

The presentation designer's responsibility

Today's post on Seth Godin's blog made me think (probably his objective). Bluntly speaking, he argues that the marketer of cigarettes or the lawyer defending a criminal should take responsibility for her actions, or refuse to take on the challenge.

My profession is to help other people tell their stories in a more convincing way:

• to sell a product,
• get funding for a company, 
• close the IPO on the stock market,
• increase the company's share price,
• seal an important strategic partnership,
• secure a distribution franche,
• etc.

In most cases, I am 100% behind the story that I am writing. In very few cases, I stumble on something that is a "hard sell". Fortunately, I have never encountered an occasion that would trigger the debate Seth is talking about. He just convinced me that it should stay that way.

Clearing your head, once a year

Falling in love with an Israeli woman 15 years ago has put me in this slightly unusual situation today: experiencing Yom Kippur as a non-Jew in Tel Aviv. (Read more about Yom Kippur here.) While I do not have the religious tradition of this "holiday" and even think it can be dangerous for people not to drink for 25 hours in a 30C+ climate, there is something special about this day.
Everything comes to a complete stand still. No cars, no shopping, no noise, no polluting smells (see graph below, air pollution drops by a factor 100), no nothing. I live right on the sea shore just north of Tel Aviv, very close to the busiest highway crossing of Israel. It is magical to see human society grind to a halt, and you can almost feel the energy of a few million people near by reflecting on what contributions they have made over the past year.  The sun setting and the only sounds remaining are those of the sea, the wind, and the birds. This is not your average car-free day, it is really about letting nature taking back over.

As designers, we need more of these moments that enable us to get rid of the clutter in our minds.