Using hand drawn graphics in slides

Hand drawn graphics can work great together with images in slides. As an example, see these ads below. (I am not sure whether these ads do a good job in selling markers, they are great though in warning you to take care of your health).



It is possible to draw shapes using a mouse or a drawing pad in PowerPoint, but I always find it hard to replicate that marker effect. Instead, I scan in real hand writing using a scanner, and then kill the white background with the Photoshop color range filter.

1970s label font

The Impact label font by Tension Type can work great in a presentation design. It is open source, you can download it here at Dafont. It also comes in a white reverse version.

Sentences are useful sometimes

Back at McKinsey in the 1990s we would write a long-hand sentence, or a "lead" at the top of every slide (similar in length to today's 140-character Tweets. This sentence would give you the message of the chart and you could get the whole story by reading all the leads in a document, without looking at the exhibits below.

I am re-discovering the sentence recently.

1. In some presentation designs, I switch to a slide template with a 2 line title, creating space for longer sentences at the top of a slide.
2. Certain thoughts or concepts are just too complex to shorten to 2 bullets of 3 words each, so I am just writing them out.

White frames or not?

Most slides with images work best when you scale up the photograph until it bleeds of the page.



Making the image a bit smaller leaves a distracting white border around your slides that does not look good when projected on a big screen.



However, recently I started using a layout that is very often used in print advertising. An image which is more horizontally cut and more white space above and below the image. It is maybe not the best for large on-screen key note presentations, but it looks great for corporate decks that are discussed in a smaller setting.



This layout is often used in CD covers, see Similar to this album cover of a 1990s hit by Everything but the girl:

Sync narrative and visuals in web presentations

Online presentation sharing services such as SlideShare allow you to upload an audio track alongside your slides. You need to make sure that the narrative is exactly in sync with the visuals.

I have seen (heard) examples where the audio presenter starts talking about data or concepts that are not present on the visual in front of you. As a result, the brain starts to wander off, looking for missing pieces of information on the slide.

When talking to a live audience in person, you can draw the attention from the visual back to you. An exact sync is less important, and it is easy to fit in a slide story. During a short web presentation with audio, your audience is using the narrative as an explanation of the slides. Make sure they are lined up.

Sometimes, when you are short in time, that might actually mean inserting a slide with some quick (very short) bullets (did I just write that?) or a short sentence to support your side story. Something like: "Case example: 22% cost savings"

Making Gmail more Zen

We sit almost our entire day behind a screen, and most applications we run are an ugly collection of screen clutter. Clutter and distractions are creativity killers. Gmail is incredibly useful, but also incredibly ugly. Here is a partial solution, Ansel Santosa has designed minimalist Gmail a Chrome extension that let's you switch off unwanted features.

Font mix up that hurts the eye

Finally I spotted a newspaper ad of the store that I often drive by in the morning. A mix up of typography that hurts the eye. Here in Israel, many people might not notice since they are used to seeing a different character set all together.



Update: this company actually operates stores all around the world, with the same logo...

And then he started arguing with me!

You do not win over VCs by trying to prove your point by entering a debating contest (even if you are right). The two of you have to sit on a Board together. The VC needs to pick Board seats, the entrepreneur needs to pick battles.

Any designers out there who can help me out?

Over the past year, things have gotten increasingly busy for me. Two weeks ago for example, I landed new clients in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Milan, and Calgary. Of course, not every week is like this, but still.

I would like to experiment whether it is possible to scale my business without investing in people on the payroll and fixed office infrastructure, working with people on a project-by-project basis. As I look around me and see other designers present themselves, I realize that each and every one has their own specific strengths. I would be great to use that talent and bundle it into a great client proposition.

To start, I would like to get a better idea who is out there. If you are interested, do not post in the comments, but you can contact met at jan [at] ideatransplant [dot] com, put "iamadesigner" in the headline so my gmail filter catches you and specify what your specific strengths are, maybe link to some examples of your work, and (only if you want) give me a sense of the sort of commercial terms you usually work on.

Maybe this is you (obviously not all of these need to apply):

• Someone who can clean up slides once the overall design has set
• Someone who is great at finding images to visualize a concept
• Someone who is a master at Adobe Illustrator
• Someone who is a master in Photoshop
• Someone who can transform a PowerPont presentation into beautiful motion graphics
• Someone who is an expert in data visualization
• Someone who is great at taping video interviews/presentations

I have no idea whether this freelance network model will work/happen, but if I do not reach out, it will for sure not happen. In the worst case, I will get a list of people I can refer work to that I cannot do myself, either because of a time constraint, or a mismatch in skills required.

Observations after Apple's keynote

Through a series of live bloggers and buffering live streams I managed to catch most of Apple's keynote yesterday (you can now watch the Apple keynote video here). The presentation covered a lot and dot all is relevant for presentation design. Here are some points that struck me.

• A move to more minimalist productivity applications. First Internet browsers started cutting screen clutter, now it is the turn of other applications. The new Lion operating system will have a standard full screen mode into it.
• A move away from the file system that was created in the 1980s, where you had to remember file names, locations, worry about saving frequently, and make sure not to overwrite versions. The iCloud syncing service will make files available on all connected devices. Lion seems to support a sophisticated version management system so you do no to saving your files with extension 1, 2, 3, etc. (does it only work in iWork or also in Microsoft Office?), and applications now remember how you left things when you closed them down.
• A move back to keyboard and touchpad short cuts. Back in the 1990s I would know almost all keyboard short cuts available. With the advent of the mouse, I forgot all of them, just using arrow keys and mouse clicks. That is changing again. More and more menu navigation is going through short cuts.

It was interesting to see how the whole presentation still worked well despite a reduced role of Steve Jobs. Good slide design, careful script writing, and practice-practice-practice turns everyone into a great presenter.

The 3 minute pitch

Last week I was presenting at a startup pitch competition at the Technion University in Haifa, Israel. After my talk, the contestants had 3 minute each to pitch their business idea. Some observations inspired by the evening, and not necessarily related to any of the contestants.

• Do not speak too fast. It is better to make sure the audience gets all you say, than cram in a 10 minute pitch in 3 minutes. OK, do not go the other extreme and speak so slowly that it becomes boring to listen to.
• Say what you are doing early on. Starting with a nice story and revealing your venture at 2:10 gives the audience 50 seconds to assess your business. While I always advocate to sell the problem, not the solution, sometimes you might have to cut the problem section short if you have just 3 minutes. "Gasoline prices are high", that is it, time to move on to what you want to do about it.
• Decide what is really important in a first pitch. Some details such as extensive elaborations on revenue models or team backgrounds can probably wait for your second 30 minute pitch.
• Do not bring up concerns that take a lot of time to explain, you want to keep the excitement and momentum going. Examples: complicated comparisons against the competition, or a defense why you picked a small market segment to start. Three minutes is not enough to present the results of a strategy consulting project.

The objective of 3 minute pitch is not to land the investment, it is to get an invitation to a 30 minute meeting.

Monet, poppies, and color rhythm

Nature and artists are still better at producing certain colors than computers. Look at the famous painting Poppies at Argenteuil by Monet. If you were the pick the blue green color and copy the RGB values into your PowerPoint presentation, the result would be dull. The rhythm of the brush strokes adds something.



In spring, there are many flower fields like these in Israel. The green blue color is created by the contrast between the top and the bottom of the leaves: grey green and yellow green. The wind moving the leaves creates the color effect. In an earlier post I discussed a painting by Jan van Eyck with a similar effect of alternating and interacting colors.

This painting is also a great example of how to create movement in a static image. The horizon and the diagonal line between the two ladies set the composition. Look how the red flowers are blurry dots of paint without much detail, and how they get incredibly big close to the front. Flowers in the wind never sit still, but rather we watch them go round, leaving a much bigger impression than the space they actually occupy.

This painting has multiple levels of experience, an almost impossible feature to recreate in a PowerPoint slide, but a reminder about what visuals ultimately are: pieces of emotional input. First you see a landscape, then you see things moving in the wind, hear the wind whistling, feel that spring sensation when you venture out of your cold house into the sun and sense your skin warming up from the outside. The bright red, blue green contrast, plus the movements of the children running down the hill might just remind you that life is all about those simple pleasures and moments of beauty.