Small scenes showing big opportunities

Most startups pitching for VC money would pound the audience with billion dollar market forecasts produced by market research firms such as IDC or Gartner. They are important, but they do not touch the gut feel of an investor. Often, showing a small street scene without a single number in it, does the trick.

As an example, take online gambling, and let's go to Spain. Anyone who spend some time there has seen the numerous lottery stands scattered across the cities. What if all these people could get the same thrill of purchasing a lottery ticket on their mobile device, rather than standing (visibly annoyed) in a long line? The opportunity is staring you in the face, right in front of you. The VC is reminded of it every time he drives to the office, every day of the week.

If you are interested, a recent blog post by Seth Godin about why these people are not buying the ticket to win the big prize. Image credit to Paul and Jill.

Images from the past

The majority of stock images are boring, why not look for real ones? The Internet offers now some interesting ways to get your hands on images from the past, great to transfer your audience to a point back in history. Here are a few of my favorite sources:

The images used here:

• A 1960 Paris street scene by Roger Wollstadt
• An 1960s Old Mobile ad
• A 1961 cover of Time Magazine
• A 2000 home page of Duarte Design on The Way Back Machine

Creative commons images on Flickr, search by date

Vintage ads, watch out for copyright

Vintage magazine covers

Vintage websites (duarte.com ~2000)

Notice how you skip the introduction?

Have you noticed how, whenever you start reading an article with a promise in the headline "The 18 secrets to [x]", "Why is it that [y]", you usually skip the introduction and/or skim the text to find the answer the headline promised? Introductions usually repeat the headline and contain background information such as the bio of the speaker that we do not have time for. Not the interesting stuff the reader is looking for.

Your audience wants to do the same with your presentation, except, they cannot. Taking the clicker, fast forwarding and asking you to get to the point would be rude. Instead, they start checking email on their mobile device until it gets really interesting.

Detail of an image claimed by John McNab.

Slide idea - global expansion!

A startup has the master plan to spread out across the globe. A variant on the Universal globe

How to create this text effect in PowerPoint: select the text (in a narrow font if your text is long), go to format, text effect, "can down" (somewhere in the middle right). Go back to format, select glow, glow options and set a color (I picked black).

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