Yesterday I spent hours trying to find the perfect analogy for a company that sell a complex storage technology. After a while I realized that while an analogy would be really good to describe one aspect of the story, it would be impossible to find one that covers all issues involved. The analogies become more complex than the technology itself.
Plan B: back to the drawing board and start explaining the technology itself with simple visuals, without analogies.
Borrowing frameworks
Consulting firms, market research companies, universities produce an endless amount of complex and sophisticated-looking frameworks. Often, I see people borrowing one, re-drawing it, or overwriting the labels with their own text. It is better than you don't.
- Frameworks are highly specific to a certain context, so they are unlikely to work when you borrow them for your own presentation
- Frameworks are great to solve problems, to discuss issues with a small audience who has worked with it before, but are incredibly poor at communicating to a large audience
Instead, sketch your own simple, specific, and relevant diagram on a piece of paper and replicate that in PowerPoint.
Bullet points and abs
I always preach that the look and feel of an investor presentation should match the brand identity of the company.
Abercombie & Fitch sticks to this principle. See the investor presentation here. The Footnote website comments:
Thank you Robert Lakin. Image by Abercombie & Fitch.
Abercombie & Fitch sticks to this principle. See the investor presentation here. The Footnote website comments:
We counted no fewer than 13 slides that featured shirtless dudes baring their pecs. That’s nearly 20% of the slides in the 67-slide deck. The PowerPoint was part of the company’s Investors Day earlier this week. The presentation seems to have gone well, judging by this brief WSJ article that notes that Abercrombie stock climbed over 8% on Tuesday, in part, it seems, based on the bullish projections made during the presentation. So there was some substance in between the eye-candy slides.On a more serious note, this investor presentation has some good and bad practices. The good:
- Muted formatting
- The use of maps to highlight global expansion
- The real images of the customer excitement in the stories
Things that could have been done better:
- Too many bullet points, the numbers would have looked even more impressive if they were put into data charts
- I like the big bold "$1.0bn" type text across the maps, just don't put financial data in red.
Clean up your mess
Daniel Higginbotham has set a little web site with a useful recap of some important design principles. He called it www.visualmess.com. Worth skimming through. Now that I get to think of it, I am actually in the cleaning business...
20 minutes is enough
TED presentations take a bit less than 20 minutes. If you have watched a few of these presentations, you will have noticed that this time is more than enough to get a complex idea across in your presentation.
Apparently, 20 minutes is also the average time a grown up can really focus his attention (source).
Add these two observations up and you realize that you need to design your presentation in such a way that the full pitch comes across in roughly this time. Anything more can be added as additional case studies examples, other plot variations. Possibly again in blocks of 10-20 minutes.
A few people with a lot more knowledge than I have about attention span and the brain are reading this blog, feel free to add your perspective.
Apparently, 20 minutes is also the average time a grown up can really focus his attention (source).
Add these two observations up and you realize that you need to design your presentation in such a way that the full pitch comes across in roughly this time. Anything more can be added as additional case studies examples, other plot variations. Possibly again in blocks of 10-20 minutes.
A few people with a lot more knowledge than I have about attention span and the brain are reading this blog, feel free to add your perspective.
It takes time to learn how to design well
Ira Glass, an American radio personality, makes an excellent point in this video: (aspiring) designers have great taste, but it will take a long time to get to a quality of work that matches it.
This resonates with me personally, as I find it hard to believe that it was me who designed some of these presentations sitting on my hard drive a few years ago. And I know that I will have the same reaction when I look back at today's work in a few years from now.
Ira says that most people do not make it past the dip, they quit. His message: hang in there and you will get there and good things will happen.
It is worth it to watch the entire 5 minute movie. Ira gives a case example where he shows how a rambling radio report he created 8 years ago (he was not even a beginner then) and how it can be replaced by one sentence that is natural, specific, and to the point. I am not a frequent radio listener, but I find that newspapers often apply this technique of an elaborate, dramatic article opening, taking forever to explain an issue in normal, human language.
Via Jason Kottke.
This resonates with me personally, as I find it hard to believe that it was me who designed some of these presentations sitting on my hard drive a few years ago. And I know that I will have the same reaction when I look back at today's work in a few years from now.
Ira says that most people do not make it past the dip, they quit. His message: hang in there and you will get there and good things will happen.
It is worth it to watch the entire 5 minute movie. Ira gives a case example where he shows how a rambling radio report he created 8 years ago (he was not even a beginner then) and how it can be replaced by one sentence that is natural, specific, and to the point. I am not a frequent radio listener, but I find that newspapers often apply this technique of an elaborate, dramatic article opening, taking forever to explain an issue in normal, human language.
Via Jason Kottke.
VMware acquires SlideRocket
VMware acquired in-the-cloud PowerPoint alternative SlideRocket. Up until now, VMware focused on virtualization infrastructure, it's software can be used to create multiple virtual computers on one hardware platform. Many of you might be running a Windows PC inside a Mac using this technology (VMware Fusion).
It is not completely clear what the strategic intent of VMware is. Will it try to go up one level from basic infrastructure and start offering cloud applications competing directly with Microsoft? Or does it want to use it for something else?
The big issue with alternatives to PowerPoint is the installed base of corporate users that over the years has learned how to work with it. But maybe the extra financial power of VMware enables SlideRocket to get a shot at doing to PowerPoint what Microsoft Word did to WordPerfect?
It is not completely clear what the strategic intent of VMware is. Will it try to go up one level from basic infrastructure and start offering cloud applications competing directly with Microsoft? Or does it want to use it for something else?
The big issue with alternatives to PowerPoint is the installed base of corporate users that over the years has learned how to work with it. But maybe the extra financial power of VMware enables SlideRocket to get a shot at doing to PowerPoint what Microsoft Word did to WordPerfect?
I don't know
When pitching VCs it is better to say "I don't know" if you do not know the answer to a question than making something up that turns out to be wrong later. Management integrity is a more important investment criterion than having all facts readily accessible in your head.
Click-click
When I have not prepared a presentation well enough, and/or made last minute changes to the deck, I find myself skipping a slide during a live presentation. Click-click, when you see a difficult slide coming up in presenter view (more about PowerPoint presenter view here).
Where do you need to practice most?
The opening of the presentation, and not only because here you are likely to be a bit nervous at this stage of your talk. It is here, where you usually talk about yourself as an introduction. You know the content of this section very well (hey, it is about you) and you do not bother rehearsing. So you are on stage, you go blah, blah, blah, and a feeling starts creeping in. This section takes a long time. Is all this detail about me really interesting to the audience. How should I have told the story about myself in such a way that it sets up the rest of the presentation correctly? It is hard to talk about yourself, better practice it...
Visual mental placeholders. These are slides that are great to talk around in a one-on-one meeting. You probably have used them a lot. You know them inside out, and hence do not bother to practice them. But when you are on stage, you realize that you do not have a good sequential story in your mind to talk a larger audience through this slide.
Bad slides. You will discover them when you practice. DELETE.
Where do you need to practice most?
The opening of the presentation, and not only because here you are likely to be a bit nervous at this stage of your talk. It is here, where you usually talk about yourself as an introduction. You know the content of this section very well (hey, it is about you) and you do not bother rehearsing. So you are on stage, you go blah, blah, blah, and a feeling starts creeping in. This section takes a long time. Is all this detail about me really interesting to the audience. How should I have told the story about myself in such a way that it sets up the rest of the presentation correctly? It is hard to talk about yourself, better practice it...
Visual mental placeholders. These are slides that are great to talk around in a one-on-one meeting. You probably have used them a lot. You know them inside out, and hence do not bother to practice them. But when you are on stage, you realize that you do not have a good sequential story in your mind to talk a larger audience through this slide.
Bad slides. You will discover them when you practice. DELETE.
We need to cut slides!
Think about how a movie director cuts down a movie.
- She does not just chop a few scenes randomly
- She does not double the speed at which the movie runs.
- She does not use picture-in-picture to cram two scenes in one screen shot in parallel.
- She thinks in terms of time, not number of scenes. What can I do in 90 minutes?
- She thinks about plot lines, not scenes. Can we lose that flashback without impacting the story?
- She thinks about the overall story. Now that we cut a few plot lines, do we need to overhaul the whole story line?
Emailing presentations without verbal explanation
A presentation designed for a large audience with big images and few words cannot stand on its own without verbal explanation. Ideally, you would design two separate decks; one for the big audience, and one for emailing. But, constantly updating two presentations in parallel is time consuming and prone to errors. Here is a work-around.
Design your presentation for a 16:9 screen and add a text column on the left side. Put the full narrative of the slide in a tiny font. The email reader gets the full explanation of the chart. The big audience will see a blurry bar on the left of the slide, clearly distinct from the larger visual. You could go further and quickly delete the text bars a few seconds before you go on stage.
Not perfect, but good enough.
Design your presentation for a 16:9 screen and add a text column on the left side. Put the full narrative of the slide in a tiny font. The email reader gets the full explanation of the chart. The big audience will see a blurry bar on the left of the slide, clearly distinct from the larger visual. You could go further and quickly delete the text bars a few seconds before you go on stage.
Not perfect, but good enough.
The real market is for sales presentations
I have been designing an enormous amount of startup venture capital pitches over the years. The stakes are high, the story is often not clear, the founders are open to new forms of communication and so they are willing to invest in a good pitch deck. I enjoy these projects immensely, there is nothing more fun than taking an idea from 0 to a beautiful visualization.
It is a relatively small presentation design market though. The big change will be in the 1,000s of boring sales presentations that are used every day. Corporates burn millions of dollars on advertising, billboards, fluffy white papers, and conference booths, while sending the salesforce on the road with a low budget PowerPoint deck that is embarrassing to use. It is time to re-allocate some of that marketing budget and stop killing these great stories with bullet points.
It is a relatively small presentation design market though. The big change will be in the 1,000s of boring sales presentations that are used every day. Corporates burn millions of dollars on advertising, billboards, fluffy white papers, and conference booths, while sending the salesforce on the road with a low budget PowerPoint deck that is embarrassing to use. It is time to re-allocate some of that marketing budget and stop killing these great stories with bullet points.
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