18 reasons why PowerPoint looks like PowerPoint

This question has been bugging me for years: why does PowerPoint look like PowerPoint and not like a well designed piece of graphics design work. The answer is obvious for poorly designed slides full of bullet points. But still, even when slides are designed by a professional designer (including me), they will not reach the professional and designer look of a good piece of print design.

I have not found the answer yet, but am getting closer (maybe). Especially after reading an enormous amount of books on graphics design and typography, and a renewed interest in graphics used in television productions (Fox is horrible, MTV is good). Here we go (written in random order):

1. PowerPoint presentations use over-used fonts. Arial, Verdana, Calibri, it just does not look as good as Helvetica or other print classics
2. Presentation design = filling Microsoft's default bullet template
3. PowerPoint presentations are stuck in between text and display sizes. An average presentation sentence is so short that we can put it in bigger characters than a text-size, but still too long to put it in an enormous display font. Fonts are not designed for this twilight zone. (Helvetica is an example)
4. Most good PowerPoint designers understand the concept of white space, and use it. However, we still tend to keep margins around the slide very small, making the whole composition look cramped.
5. It is tedious to change the leading(the vertical distance between lines of text) in PowerPoint, so we end up using the standard proportion that was designed for small font sizes (and too large for display font sizes)
6. Nobody really uses a consistent grid structure slide after slide
7. PowerPoint designers hardly break up a text string to play around with a sentence's typography. Lower part of the sentence, color part of the sentence, flip parts of the sentence. For example: if you want to visualize squeezed, you could pick a cliche stock image of a squished orange, or your could crush the typography of the word "squeezed" in between 2 forces.
8. Presentation designers pick images that are too powerful, overwhelming, creating a constant barrage of inconsistent visuals with too much going on. Look at a quality piece of print: calmer images, with consistent colors, more white space, more coherent.
9. We use too much color. Quality graphics design often has muted colors, with a few bright accents. Presentation designers cannot resist the urge to use the full spectrum of colors forcefully on every slide in the presentation
10. Presenting like Steve Jobs is making your presentation white on black
11. Images always have the standard rectangular shape, roughly the same as the screen aspect ratio. Why not use very narrow images, round ones? Something different
12. Presentation designers mostly use text size to emphasize what text is important, and what text is less. Subtle color differences that are so important in print graphics design are not used
13. Text sizes should always be the maximum possible. Cutting words is great, but why not use the extra space to create more white space on the slide, instead of filling it all up with a bigger text size?
14. Too much symmetry. Most objects are still centered in the page.
15. Not used to mixing fonts (partly because of the text/display size twilight zone). Good graphics design uses a few on a page to give interesting contrast. Presentation designers use one (usually).
16. The limitations of the 4:3 and 16:9 screen, we presentation designers have to do without the vertical dimension that a poster designer can leverage
17. The one-distance-has-to-fit-all situation. When you look at a poster you can view it from a distance and see the big characters and shapes, intrigued, you can come closer to read the details in the fine print. No such thing in PowerPoint. You sit where you sit, in a fixed distance from the screen.
18. Presentation designers always hold back and never go to the creative edge a poster designer would go. We have seen too many bar/column/pie charts, bullet point lists, boxes and arrows. It is hard to leave the classical slide compositions behind, and to come up with something daring and new (for 20 slides in the deck).

Continuing my journey into the world of graphics design.

What a great crowd image

Flickr is an unbelievable source of images. I came across this photo by Alex Kess. The texture and colors are amazing (the original on Flickr is much clearer than the image below).

UPDATE: PowerPoint 2011 crashing when entering slideshow mode

OK, more searching solved the issue, which can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975723 My toolbar folders were corrupt. Everything is working again without toolbar customization. But when I start modifying the toolbars again (I need a set of 20 buttons or so to be really fast an efficient in PowerPoint), the whole saga starts again. I will keep you posted about my experience with Microsoft PowerPoint 2011.

I have been battling with PowerPoint 2011 for the Mac for the past hour and it seems seriously flawed. When entering slideshow mode, it just crashes. Searching online for a solution reveals dozens of forum discussions about the same issue that are unresolved. Do not upgrade from Office 2008. Repeat, do not buy it, it is not stable yet!

Usually I am an early adopter of software and can live with a few bugs here and there. Not being able to go into slideshow mode kills the purpose of PowerPoint, this is a serious flaw.

Turn Valentine's Day into Generosity Day

Sasha Dichter is the Director of Business Development (fund raising) for Acumen Fund,a global non-profit venture fund that invests in enterprises that fight poverty in the developing world. (Example: investing in a mosquito net manufacturer creates employment/income for a local community and fights malaria at the same time.)

He is building support for a great initiative: turn Valentine's Day into Generosity Day. The idea is that you say "yes" to anyone who asks for help for 24 hours. He himself went through an initiative like this, but kept going for a month, see a video below explaining what he learned form that.



If you are interested in the work that Acumen does, join the community of supporters all around the world. I know that this blog is read by many presentation designers, and doing presentation design work as a gift for a worthy cause is a great way to make a difference. A much better way actually than sending a check (see an earlier post about pro-bono presentation design).

(Disclosure: I help Acumen now and then with their fund raising presentations).

Can I use humor in an investor presentation?

Can I use humor in an investor presentation? (Well, the question applies to all serious presentations). I would be careful. Humor is a great ice breaker when it comes naturally, even in serious presentations such as a pitch to investors. However, making it come naturally is hard to plan. That rehearsal in front of your friends in the living room sofa is a different environment from the corporate conference room.

If you used a joke spontaneously in a previous presentation, you could try to use it again (i.e., program it), in another one if you feel that mood and energy in the room is right. But only then. And never put jokes in writing on slides or in images, you lose the option to pull them out at the last minute. Also, you do not control the digital after-life of the presentation file after the live presentation.

Hey, presentations don't look like this!

Client: "Hey, investor presentations don't look like this! I have seen many before. This one has too many slides, too many images, we need to fix this."

Me: "That's exactly the point"

New French presentation Bible

Recently, I received a review copy of  L'art des présentations Powerpoint, by Bernard Lebelle, a frequent commenter here on the blog. A very interesting book (obviously for those who can read French).

L'art des presentations PowerPoint

My first impressions:

• Besides the big presentation and speaking insights (often covered in many other books on the subject), this book is a treasure of smaller insights, many of them illustrated with a little diagram or a quick scribble. Almost like reading a constant flow of interesting blog posts. My French is probably not good enough to read this book from page 1 to 386, but the layout with the bite-size illustrated tips and tricks enables me to digest much of the content.
• It covers a broad range of subjects, all the way from speaking suggestions down to the basics of typography and detailed suggestions on how to use the PowerPoint software
• Bernard integrates concepts and ideas from many sources (books, web sites) with clear references to them for further reading.

Congratulations Bernard.

Fly through that circle!

The shape combine function in PowerPoint 2010 is great. Here is an example of how you can create text that seems to be flying through a circle. The key is the create 2 half circles and send one of them to the back. In earlier version of PowerPoint, this was very hard to do. (See a review of PowerPoint 2010 here).

Draw 2 circle shapes

Center them horizontally and vertically

Select the shapes, (inner last), shape subtract

Draw a rectangular shape

Same trick: select them both and do shape subtract

Copy and flip the half moon

Send the right half moon to the back and put some text

The sales presentation

Sales presentations have a specific setting. Often, the audience is relatively small. Most of the time you would have time to discuss and prepare the meeting in phone calls before hand. Where as in a VC pitch presentation the audience is probably constantly testing for reasons not to invest in you, someone sitting through a sales presentation would actually really want to buy something from you. Here are some observations (in no particular order) to help you design better sales presentations.

A good sales presentation does not always equal a slide deck Some sales meetings can be conducted without PowerPoint at all. An alternative is a meeting sketched out live on a white board. For example, you could run your client live through a calculation of the financial benefits of your product. It will be clear that although there are no PowerPoint slides involved, these type of presentations might actually require more preparation than regular slide shows.

Talk about the customer issue rather than yourself. Pages and pages about the history of your company, how many employees you have, where your offices are located, are all about your, and not about the issue your customer is struggling with. If you are a startup and you need to establish that you are a financially stable company, do so, but in (most) other cases do not bore your audience with talking about yourself.

Listen, listen, listen. Each customer has specific issues, and customers are very keen to explain them to you. Listen carefully in the phone calls leading up to the meeting. Listen in the meeting. Focus your sales presentation exactly on the customer. Look the audience in the eye and see whether you maintain the attention, there is still eye contact. Rigorously sticking to your script even when the customer signals (questions, interruptions, eye movement) she wants to take the discussion in a different direction is a sure recipe for a turn down.

Sell the problem rather than the solution. Showing that you can articulate/understand the customer's problem is much more effective in sales presentations than spending pages and pages on the benefits of your product. Once you have sold the problem, the customer is likely to buy your solution.

People buy on emotion, justify with facts. Pages of pages with quantified facts are in most cases not the swing factor in a buying decision. Rather, the decision to buy a product or service needs to feel right. I can trust this company, I can work with this person, I can identify with this brand. The real buying decision is emotional. Facts and data are for the justification after the decision is made. As such, your sales presentation should provide both. (Thank you Bert Decker for reminding me of this)

Be careful with attacks on the competition. There is always a temptation to lash out at the competition in your sales presentation. Be careful. First of all I suggest never write these things down in slides. Rather, address these issues verbally during your presentation. Secondly, make sure you got your facts right. If a customer is sitting through presentation of multiple suppliers, they might actually have more knowledge about your competitor's offering than you have. Comments without substantiation are an instant loss of credibility.

Avoid generic statements. People have been reading the same jargon of product benefits all over: cost effective, efficient, scalable, reduces churn, good ROI. If you use this language without a specific context or backup, it is highly likely that they will not register in the mind of your customer. Be specific. Use anecdotes. Present unexpected visuals.

Talk value instead of features. A customer sitting through a sales presentation is interested in the value your product or service brings, not in the list of features. Long feature lists are boring to listen to and not relevant for the purchasing decision. Talk value, and point to a detailed page in the appendix with all those great product features.

Show real images. Stock photography is artificial. Beautiful people and perfect settings working together perfectly. Why not show the real face of your company? A picture of the first shift at 6AM in the morning. A picture of the great people in your customer service department in the middle of the night. Your central London store that just recently opened? These are not images of the logo that is stuck to the front door of your head office. These are images of the real people that make up your organization.

Tell your story once. Repetition is not always good. Some sales presentations tell the story on the summary page at the opening, then repeat the story using the slides in the deck, and then wrap up the same story one more time with the final conclusion page. The introduction page of a sales presentation should be a teaser, promising a specific solution to a specific problem your customer has. The body tells the story. The final summary reminds your customer about the solution.

Presentation outlines should be visual

Everyone knows that it is important to think about the story and flow of your presentation before opening PowerPoint and start designing slides. Paper sketches are great, sticky notes are great. But there is one common approach that usually does not work: writing the story out long-hand in Word.

Long-hand text looks final. When you want to discuss it with a team of people, they start paying attention to wording, fine tuning messages. This is wasted energy at this stage in the process.

But more importantly, text is not visual. "Here we need an image of a man standing in the street holding his phone up in the air in despair". It is much more powerful to discuss the draft or first ideas of a visual presentation with - well - visuals!

As a result I often end up scribbling the first version of a presentation in PowerPoint. But in this case PowerPoint is not the slide design tool, rather a simple note pad to organize ideas.

Spend time on your weakness

A startup pitching to a giant:

• This will save you millions of cost!
• Your users are asking for it!
• We enable you to break into new markets!
• Your competitors already have something like this!

25 minutes later with 5 minutes left: "convinced?"

"Yeah sure, but we have a policy not to work with startups that might go bankrupt tomorrow..."

It is important to find out the major concern of the giant before pitching. When someone mumbles in a phone call that they have a policy not to work with startups, it is most likely not a side comment. Focus your pitch on this issue. Not explicitly, but in between the lines.

• Show your blue chip investor base
• Show the partnerships you have with very established players
• Show your positive cash flow
• Show your customer list
• Show them anything that might support the point

The real battle is here. Maybe it is a hard one to win, but at least you should try.

Sticky Slides becomes Idea Transplant

OK, I have re-branded. One more time the first blog header that I used back in the summer of 2008. (the details: Verdana font, and the standard Microsoft "Trek" color scheme). All the best Sticky Slides...

All links and RSS feeds should continue to work:
http://blog.ideatransplant.com
http://www.stickyslides.com
http://www.stickyslides.blogspot.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/stickyslides

Can your audience see it's PowerPoint?

If they can, maybe it is time to change the slide design and get rid of:

• Repeating graphics
• Titles in the same spot
• Page numbers
• "Confidential" on every page

Book review - "Thinking with type"

Regular readers will have noticed that I am reading up on typography lately. Some basic understanding of typography can improve the quality of your presentation designs dramatically. The book Thinking with Type (affiliate link) by Ellen Lupton is one of the most useful ones I read so far. Clear explanations of all the basic concepts with great examples. It comes with great online resources on the Thinking with Type website, covering a lot of material of the book. (See the type crime section, and how I use the wrong quotation marks all the time on this blog).

Earlier reviews of typography books:

• Just my type, stories about the most important fonts and their designers, useful information, entertaining reading (and great dinner party stories).
• 20th century type, a more scientific overview of fonts and designers of the past century.
• 1000 fonts, just what the title says
• Design elements, a broader review of graphic design concepts
• Bibliographic, an overview of classic graphic design books

Cheap hotel rooms!

It sounds great, but we discount it completely because we have heard and read it so many times. The same for text in presentations.

Even this Zen minimalist slide text (with a nice picture in the background) might not convince your audience:

IN SHORT, WE HELP YOU

• Acquire new customers

• Sell more to existing customers 

• Prevent customers from leaving

• Cut cost

These are the exact things big banks and mobile phone operators are worried about. But, every company pitching to them is putting these words on the summary slide. It does not stick anymore. They have heard it before.

Increase the signal to noise ratio. Instead, try reminding them on the final slide about the specifics of your company that create these benefits. Maybe a small icon-size thumbnail of an image you used before. It will make you stand out in the noise.

Going beyond the presentation screen borders

A long introduction to the post today. You can skip the plot sideline and go straight to the end if you want.

It seems that many visual artists that somehow documented the thoughts behind their work reach higher levels of fame. One example is Vincent van Gogh, who through the letters to his brother Theo gave us a lot of background on his art. Vincent van Gogh spent some time in this white house in the same street I grew up in the Dutch town of Hoogeveen, and it is striking to see how his descriptions of the place, the features and character of the people still applies today (except for that people there have moved on from living in huts). His subsequent transition from the cold/dark Netherlands to the bright Mediterranean is another interesting parallel I share with the painter.

Vincent Van Gogh, farm house in Hoogeveen

Recently, I have been reading a biography about Robert Irwin, an American artist starting off with expressionist paintings to move on to minimalist, large art installations. The book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (affiliate link) provides lots of his personal perspectives behind his own work, but more importantly about art in general. I have changed the way I like at art after reading it.

Irwin wonders why art ends with the frame of the painting. He wonders why art ends with the room the painting/installation is exhibited. Art and beauty is all around us, we just need to be able to perceive it.

"But paintings are like what you can barely make out through a keyhole compared with the richness of perception that's just waiting there in the world to be experienced all the time. [...] It's strange. With food, for instance, people seem to understand what's involved: you savor the taste rather than just feed the body. But people have a hard time understanding that it should be the same way with visual experience."

Popping the bubble and bringing us back to the world of presentations. What got me to write this long post introduction is the insight that you need to design an overall presentation experience that does not end with the borders of your screen. The background, the stage decor, the way you/the speaker appears, the light in the room, everything. Your presentation is a mini art installation maybe with a more banal subject than these great artists, but still it is an installation. Imagine what a video of your performance would look/sound like and design acoordingly. The TED presentations are a good example of this.

Poster design goodness

Some interesting visual concepts in a Core77 poster design competition. I borrowed the image by the winner Miryam Melkumyan, you can see all entries here.

Compare all fonts installed on your computer

A nice link tip from Gee Ranasinha: the site Wordmark.it shows you a text in any font that you have installed on your computer.

Sorry Degas...

One of the images in the slider of my Idea Transplant web site needed some extension. Here is how I re-used some components of Degas' original painting and make it fit in today's widescreen format. I hope he will forgive me.

Book review - "Just my type"

Most books about typography and graphics design are nicely illustrated reference books full of theory. Just My Type: A Book About Fonts (affiliate link) by Simon Garfield is different; through a number of stories and anecdotes you a get a wonderful introduction to the history of typography.

It is a great read: both informative and entertaining. A more extensive review of the book in the New York Times. I purchased the book for my Kindle/iPad to save delivery time and charges to Israel. If you live closer to Seattle, I would suggest you buy a paper version to get a better view of the font examples inside the book.