Book review - Design Elements

Recently, I have picked up a lot of books about graphics design and typography. Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual (affiliate link) is a book that takes all the basic principles of graphics design one by one. It is built around 20 reminders for designers. Reminders and not rules, because designers have the opportunity to break them (see the cover of the book with 2 paragraphs of text put on top of each other).

Most books about graphics design use an incredibly complex language to describe visual concepts. This books is no exception. Rather than try to translate the text into concepts, I skimmed the prose and focused on the many beautiful illustrations, images, examples, and their explanations.

Things that I was reminded of (not as a graphics designer, but as a designer of business presentations in PowerPoint):

• Think of which fonts you use (I am u-turning on earlier assertions that you should only use standard fonts in PowerPoint to avoid technology issues)
• Pay attention to the style consistency across pages in a presentation beyond just colors. Other things to watch are placement of objects, style of images, the way images are displayed, etc.
• Make sure your slide looks elegant, maybe even by reducing the font size somewhat and creating more white space around the slide. Margins do not have to be set at 0.4 inch all the time.
• Use color carefully, instead of "which color of the scheme have I not yet used on this slide"-type thinking, think about the distribution of light and dark, ask yourself where color is needed, and then pick the one that supports the slide message best.
• Try to incorporate rhythm in the design of a slide. 

A very interesting and useful book, a sharp contrast with the many "coffee table" books about graphics design with pages full of complex and sophisticated illustrations without something to learn from them.

(By the way, my refusal to use proper apostrophes and quotation marks in blog posts puts me firmly in the box of non-graphics designers according to the book)

Idea transplant logo poll

I am in the process of re-branding my professional site to idea transplant (what?!?) and would appreciate some input on logos. Here are a bunch I created. Which one works best? Or should I just stick with the words "idea transplant" in Helvetica Neue?

That perfect opening sentence

You think hard about that perfect opening sentence that encapsulates it all: what the company is about, what you sell, what customer problem you solve, when you were founded. You write it down, change it, discuss it with your team, edit it, and memorize it by heart.

Then you use it for a live audience: all key messages stashed in just 10 seconds of beautiful prose. All your audience has to do is register this, and they can basically skip the presentation. All that has to be said, has been said.

But hey, it did not stick?

While you were uttering your first sentence, the audience was looking at the woman in the picture of your opening slide (I want a jacket like that), trying to figure our your accent (Canada?), wondering when the next coffee break would be (11:15 on the agenda, but we are behind schedule). In short, all but pay attention to that perfect sentence.

Gear up your story slowly and give the audience time to familiarize themselves.

Image credit Markus Bollingmo.

Add slow-zoom to PowerPoint images

Many documentary films are in fact a series of still images with a very slow zoom effect applied to them. The brain does not really notice that it is not looking at live video footage. The example below is my attempt to take you to the start of a story in the streets of Paris.



So how do you create these?

1. Take an image and stretch it bigger than the PowerPoint canvas
2. Select the object and pick an emphasis animation: either grow/shrink, or a motion path
3. Set the effect option to very slow

In this case I used a "grow/shrink" with a 130% magnitude over 5 seconds.

Thank you Eole Wind for this beautiful image.

Speech on video? Think of the day after

If your speech is recorded on video, think about online viewing that will start the day after, and lasts forever, especially when you want to use the video for promoting your business for example. In your speech:

• Try to avoid talking about time-sensitive details (explicit reference to dates/places, jokes/references to items in the news, etc.
• Avoid "off-the-record" type remarks: things that are probably OK for the moment, for that audience, but can be harmful for an online audience. Revealing confidential strategic information will prevent you from posting the video online, jokes/remarks can backlash when taken out of their presentation contest.
• This might be a bit hard: trying to avoid references to previous speakers.

(Soft) launching Idea Transplant

I am in the process of re-branding my presentation and pitch business into idea transplant. I felt that this name reflects what I do, taking your idea, and making sure other people get it. "Getting it" is more than a simple registration in your audience's brain, a presentation's success equals people living and breathing your idea in their heart. Hence the slight medical twist of the brand. You can see the first version of the redesigned web site here, but I am still not done with finalizing logos and colors (suggestions are welcome).

Do not worry, I will keep the name Sticky Slides for this blog.

Lessons from the 2010 SlideShare presentation competiton

The winners are announced of the 2010 edition of the Slideshare World's Best Presentation Contest. Here are the #1, #2, and #3. Congratulations to each designer:

SMOKE - The Convenient Truth

View more presentations from Empowered Presentations, Honolulu, HI.

YOU SUCK AT POWERPOINT!

View more presentations from @JESSEDEE.

Social Media for Business

View more presentations from Presentation Advisors.

Some lessons we can learn from these presentations:

• Dare to use fonts beyond the standard ones (but make sure that it does not create problems)
• Select images with lots of white space
• Match image style, image color, font, font color on the same page
• Maintain a consistent graphical styles across slides
• Look at the people-flat-on-the-ground sequence in the smoke presentation to see how you can achieve cinematic effects in PowerPoint

Remember, these presentations are made for SlideShare/online viewing. In other contexts the style used would be somewhat different.

You can do without that verbose business plan

Overhead: "We completed this extensive business plan for our startup 3 months ago. Check! It is a lot of work, but hey potential investors want it, so we churned it out."

Here is what investors really want:

1. A good visual presentation that helps them understand your business quickly 
2. A company that knows what it is doing, has a clear plan going forward
3. More detailed data/information after 1. has been digested

None of these require a long, text-loaded document. Text is the worst way to deliver 1., the exciting investor presentation. And text is not the best vehicle to deliver 2. and 3.

There is a reason why management consulting reports are written in PowerPoint, in a style that is somewhere in between the Steve-Job-style-keynote and the densely written marketing text book.

• Business issues/strategy can best be communicated/discussed using a visual language: it is about data, relationships, positioning, pros and cons, time lines. Diagrams (even poorly designed ones) do a much better job than a dense paragraph of text
• Things change all the time, and text is hard to change. Swapping the flow of a story, adding a piece of information, updating the market shares. "We did this business plan in September, but it is already out of date (December)." A document in PowerPoint is easy to change and update.
• PowerPoint document can be navigated quickly. It is easy to browse through sections, zoom in, zoom out.
• It is very hard/time-consuming to get the exact wording of something right, especially to agree something among a group of people with different styles. In PowerPoint you cut words, leaving less room for lengthy editorial discussions
• Most business documents are written in English, most people who write them are not native in this language. For a non-native speaker, it is hard to write a good proper long-hand text in 100% good English (native-speakers probably have spotted this in this blog). Most people can reach 80% correct English, and in PowerPoint you get away with it.

In short, save yourself the time of writing that verbose business plan.

Looming and blurring

Somehow, this big bulldozer looks scarier after a treatment with PowerPoint 2010's blur filter. If you do not have PowerPoint 2010 installed, you can find it in Photoshop as well. The second advantage is that a blurred image is more friendly to put text on.

Review: Slideboxx, a PowerPoint search engine

I have been testing Slideboxx over the past day (Windows-only). Slideboxx is a tool that crawls all PowerPoint files on your computer (it counted more than 5,000 on mine...) and stores visual thumbnails and keywords of all the slides in a searchable database. You type in a keyword, you get instantly served icons of matching slides with options to refine your search, find similar slides, and even "frankenstein" (what?) a new presentation from old slides.

First of all, there is a real need for a tool like this. The legacy Windows filing system based on file names and application icons is useless for visual files such as PowerPoint slides. I am now using Gmail to track down presentations ("where is that file I sent to [x] a month ago?") because a date, a keyword, and a person is a better clue to what I am looking for than a location on a hard disk.

There are more companies developing professional solutions to dig through data stored in enterprise networks, not just PowerPoint, but including spreadsheets, PDFs, databases, etc. BA Insight is one for example.

Back to Slideboxx. The software is easy to install, the interface is nice and clean, and the program is very powerful to dig up long-forgotten slides.

For someone with a lot of slides who makes presentations for one company, or related to one subject area, the tool makes a lot of sense, and could actually be a significant time saver.

For my 5,000+ files the search results are sometimes a bit too broad, I would love to have an option to narrow searches actually by a folder on a hard disk. Another approach would be to add generic presentation tags to all slides in a presentation. For example the company name on the front page of the deck, the name of the presenter, the subject of the presentation, the items of the agenda, each of these are relevant to all the slides in a presentation, while they might not be written down explicitly on each slide.

The ultimate feature would be to include more advanced image search into the algorithm. Most of my slides contain few words, which makes them hard to search. If this technology progresses you could even imagine auto-taggin image files (not PPT slides) on your hard disk with the key words that were used in slides that incorporate the image.

A work around could be a highly visual search process in which you put a lot more thumbnails on the screen (at the moment I have not found a way to change this) and have an option to click thumbnails rapidly "more like this", "less like this" to create a human-powered image browser.

All in all I think this is a useful tool for people with lots of PowerPoint files on their hard disk. If some of the points I made in this review are because I simply did not understand the software correctly yet (I have been using it for a day) I am happy to get corrected in the comments.

The art of writing diplomatic cables

In a background article on the leaked diplomatic cable archive, the NYT today discusses the "Ambassador's Cable Drafting Tips" by Richard E. Hoagland, the U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan. From the article:

• Pay attention to the first 5 words, they need to catch the reader's attention, they are the only thing diplomats see in the electronic cable queue
• Avoid flabby writing (see this too often in diplomacy)
• Incorporate story telling
• But: cute writing is never acceptable, only for toddlers, not for professionals...

Now someone needs to leak these cable drafting tips so we can all learn from it...

Story in flat images

Some images contain an entire story. While it is hard to match the effect of this photo in an everyday presentation, you should at least try to use cinematic effects in composition: suggest movement, create tension of something that is about to happen, but has not yet. The man who is about to open the door creates a much stronger visual, than the image 5 seconds later of him escaping the women's dressing room.

The original ad can be found here on Ads of the World. (By the way an example of an image that is grey, but not really grey)