If you work alone in a room (or are willing to use headphones) you can lighten up your design work with some nice music in the background. I have made a complete u-turn on this, starting off with requiring library-like silence to concentrate.
Not all music is suitable for work. Dominant lyrics, or tunes that stick in your head do not work. Music that is so slow that it puts you to sleep is also not ideal. Audio advertising make your office feel like a car repair shop. And the worst of all, repetition is annoying (“hey here is that same sone again for the fifth time”).
The repetition argument pretty much kills the traditional CD option, and even your personal iTunes library will be exhausted soon. Most of all, your personal music purchases of the past are unlikely to be suited for work music.
Internet streaming apps are the solution. Spotify is great, but it requires you to find the right (long) playlist that fits your work requirements. And that is difficult. Pandora is another solution. The genre or artist radio stations are good, but also here you run out of new music. After playing the cool jazz radio station for 2 days you start recognizing the songs.
So, the app I love is Songza. It has far less choice in terms of songs, but it has a treasure of playlists for any occasion you can think of, including work: acoustic, jazz, electronic. Unlike Pandora, the songs are curated by human experts rather than automatic algorithms.
Note that these services will not work in all countries around the world (unfortunately).
Which music services do you use?
Slides from my Munich talk
They are a bit out of context without the verbal explanation, but here are the slides I used during my presentation in Munich. I am trying out the platform of my client SalesCrunch as an alternative to SlideShare.
Paperless creativity - iPad calculators
I am continuing my experiment to create a completely paperless creative workflow to increase my mobility. Until now, I had to settle in my creative corner, have my pencils around, have my paper around, before I could get in the mood to do serious design work. I reviewed note taking apps here, now it is the turn of calculators.
Whenever I design a presentation, I almost always have a calculator open on my desk. I design all my data charts by hand, the old fashioned way, doing the final step completely analogue to make sure that resulting slide is really the very best to convey the specific message I want to get across. The calculator is used to calculate the % breakdowns, and to do the final check whether the whole thing adds up. Small calculation errors can distract the audience and undermine the credibility of your analytical work. (I she cannot get the numbers in the chart to add up, what about the underlying spreadsheets?)
So, over the past decades I have used the famous HP 12C as my sole calculator. First in hardware form, then as an app on my iPhone. Since spreadsheets arrived in the early 1990s, I have no need anymore for sophisticated NPV calculations on a calculator. I was simply used to the user interface of the machine, to such an extend that I replaced it for about EUR 100 with a new one a few years ago.
The iPhone HP 12C works, but is not perfectly convenient. I always fiddle with the landscape-only orientation, and the buttons are a bit too small to be convenient. So the iPad solves at the least the button size issue. Like note taking apps, there are an infinite amount of calculator apps available for the iPad (including the build in one).
I found only one that has an absolutely essential feature for the paperless creative workflow: a small electronic piece of paper to scribble notes. Hence, my preference goes out to Calculator HD for iPad. Just a shame that it does not have the Polish notation I got used to on my HP 12C...
A more serious shortcoming though is the inability to work with powers of ten in the basic note pad model. It is hard to tell those billions and millions apart. Does anyone have a better recommendation?
Whenever I design a presentation, I almost always have a calculator open on my desk. I design all my data charts by hand, the old fashioned way, doing the final step completely analogue to make sure that resulting slide is really the very best to convey the specific message I want to get across. The calculator is used to calculate the % breakdowns, and to do the final check whether the whole thing adds up. Small calculation errors can distract the audience and undermine the credibility of your analytical work. (I she cannot get the numbers in the chart to add up, what about the underlying spreadsheets?)
So, over the past decades I have used the famous HP 12C as my sole calculator. First in hardware form, then as an app on my iPhone. Since spreadsheets arrived in the early 1990s, I have no need anymore for sophisticated NPV calculations on a calculator. I was simply used to the user interface of the machine, to such an extend that I replaced it for about EUR 100 with a new one a few years ago.
The iPhone HP 12C works, but is not perfectly convenient. I always fiddle with the landscape-only orientation, and the buttons are a bit too small to be convenient. So the iPad solves at the least the button size issue. Like note taking apps, there are an infinite amount of calculator apps available for the iPad (including the build in one).
I found only one that has an absolutely essential feature for the paperless creative workflow: a small electronic piece of paper to scribble notes. Hence, my preference goes out to Calculator HD for iPad. Just a shame that it does not have the Polish notation I got used to on my HP 12C...
A more serious shortcoming though is the inability to work with powers of ten in the basic note pad model. It is hard to tell those billions and millions apart. Does anyone have a better recommendation?
Smaller presentation, smaller budget?
I often get this question when discussing a new project with a client. Can we cut costs by cutting slides? For slide make-over, the answer is yes. Cost and the number of slides have a lineair relationship. For my bespoke presentation design work there is not that much correlation. Why? The hardest part of the presentation design work is coming up with the idea, the concept. Once you have got your head around that, it does not really matter if you need a few more slides or not. So, the answer you get for this question tells you something about the sort of designer you are talking to.
Review: iPad note taking
Handwritten notes are very important in presentation design. I use 2 kinds:
- A very small note book with a beautiful leather cover to take meeting notes
- The back pages of old print out for slide design (I take more pages out than I add, the pile is shrinking fast)
For writing I use my favorite pencil: the Lamy 2000 (review).
Let’s look at application 1 first: meeting notes
Although I love my luxury micro note book, there is a big problem with analogue note taking: finding stuff. Since you write sequentially, and often use poor handwriting, it is hard to access notes that are part of a specific project (I can have more than 10 things going on at the same time).
Digital note taking on an iPad can solve this: simply create a note book for every project.
The key problem is the iPad-hand interface. Steve Jobs always was against using a styles, he correctly reminded us that we have 10 of them already. That is true for navigation, but not for writing large pieces of text (fast). The biggest problem is seeing what you do. Big fingers are getting in the way of your eyes, leading to illegible scribbles. And after a while you get tired of holding your finger straight. So there is no escaping from a style.
An iPad stylus needs to have a fat tip with a soft surface, mirroring the texture of a human finger. The resulting line can still be highly thin though, getting drawn at the center of impact of the soft tip. To show this effect, see fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld sketch drawings live on stage during the LeWeb 2011 conference in Paris last year (skip to 19:50).
At the moment, I am using the Cosmonaut, but I think it is too fat for my personal taste, and I do not like the plastic/rubber grip. I am curious to find one that enables you to see what you write using glass, but it comes at a price according to these iPad stylus reviews.
Back to the iPad apps. I installed and tried a bunch of them: Notability, Notes Plus, Note Taker HD, and Penultimate. Penultimate is by far the simplest one, and that is exactly the reason I like it best.
First of all the hand writing works best (at least for a left-handed person writing with a Cosmonaut. Other apps use a combination of text typing and handwriting, or have more sophisticated interfaces for handwriting (a magnifying glass that allows you to write big, but the words get stored smaller). But I think this is not the point of handwriting notes: you scribble, you draw, you write, you sketch. Hand writing is fast because it is visual, not organized, and you can use your own short cuts and abbreviations. Adding a cluttered user interface full of advanced features misses the point.
It is amusing to see that handwriting on the iPad makes you go back to that handwriting style you learned as a six-year old, when the teacher made sure you did not have to lift the pen from the paper in a word. I half-forgot how to use that technique.
The other thing to get used to is that as you write in very big fonts on your iPad, people sitting around you are likely to be able to read your notes (if your hand-writing is decent). So your note-taking privacy is pretty much gone, no more comments about how boring the meeting is...
Penultimate misses a lot of features that I do not need, but it should put in one: the ability to create folders and organize notebooks. Also, I wonder how much storage all these notes will take up. I am not sure whether each page gets stored as a full HD PNG image, these will be especially large for the new iPad retina display. And finally, it would be nice to be able to at least read my notes on my iPhone without having to go through Dropbox.
In short, Penultimate is my favorite for meeting notes.
Now about slide sketches (application 2). I will try over the coming weeks to use my note taking app. It has the advantage of a good eraser, so I do not need to use 5 sheets of paper for one slide design, and I can keep the designs organized.
A few months ago I reviewed the Wacom Inkling, a tool that enables you to store sketches made with a regular pen digitally. I voted with my feet, and I have not found myself using it very much. I guess the disconnect between drawing and seeing the actual result electronically makes it hard to integrate it into my workflow.
Do you have experience with handwriting and note taking apps?
The key problem is the iPad-hand interface. Steve Jobs always was against using a styles, he correctly reminded us that we have 10 of them already. That is true for navigation, but not for writing large pieces of text (fast). The biggest problem is seeing what you do. Big fingers are getting in the way of your eyes, leading to illegible scribbles. And after a while you get tired of holding your finger straight. So there is no escaping from a style.
An iPad stylus needs to have a fat tip with a soft surface, mirroring the texture of a human finger. The resulting line can still be highly thin though, getting drawn at the center of impact of the soft tip. To show this effect, see fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld sketch drawings live on stage during the LeWeb 2011 conference in Paris last year (skip to 19:50).
At the moment, I am using the Cosmonaut, but I think it is too fat for my personal taste, and I do not like the plastic/rubber grip. I am curious to find one that enables you to see what you write using glass, but it comes at a price according to these iPad stylus reviews.
Back to the iPad apps. I installed and tried a bunch of them: Notability, Notes Plus, Note Taker HD, and Penultimate. Penultimate is by far the simplest one, and that is exactly the reason I like it best.
First of all the hand writing works best (at least for a left-handed person writing with a Cosmonaut. Other apps use a combination of text typing and handwriting, or have more sophisticated interfaces for handwriting (a magnifying glass that allows you to write big, but the words get stored smaller). But I think this is not the point of handwriting notes: you scribble, you draw, you write, you sketch. Hand writing is fast because it is visual, not organized, and you can use your own short cuts and abbreviations. Adding a cluttered user interface full of advanced features misses the point.
It is amusing to see that handwriting on the iPad makes you go back to that handwriting style you learned as a six-year old, when the teacher made sure you did not have to lift the pen from the paper in a word. I half-forgot how to use that technique.
The other thing to get used to is that as you write in very big fonts on your iPad, people sitting around you are likely to be able to read your notes (if your hand-writing is decent). So your note-taking privacy is pretty much gone, no more comments about how boring the meeting is...
Penultimate misses a lot of features that I do not need, but it should put in one: the ability to create folders and organize notebooks. Also, I wonder how much storage all these notes will take up. I am not sure whether each page gets stored as a full HD PNG image, these will be especially large for the new iPad retina display. And finally, it would be nice to be able to at least read my notes on my iPhone without having to go through Dropbox.
In short, Penultimate is my favorite for meeting notes.
Now about slide sketches (application 2). I will try over the coming weeks to use my note taking app. It has the advantage of a good eraser, so I do not need to use 5 sheets of paper for one slide design, and I can keep the designs organized.
A few months ago I reviewed the Wacom Inkling, a tool that enables you to store sketches made with a regular pen digitally. I voted with my feet, and I have not found myself using it very much. I guess the disconnect between drawing and seeing the actual result electronically makes it hard to integrate it into my workflow.
Do you have experience with handwriting and note taking apps?
Tables as grids for logo pages
Organizing a messy page full of logos into an neat grid can be a pain. Most of the time, I use a simple PowerPoint table to do this. Figure out the required number of rows and columns, draw a table, reformat to a white background with very thin grey separator lines. Now you can plop in the logos in the right position, and best of all, if you have to insert/delete rows/columns, the grid gets adjusted in a second.
(An earlier post about designing good logo pages)
(An earlier post about designing good logo pages)
Video in a webinar?
The big problem in webinars and web meetings is the upload bandwidth. If you are running the presentation live from your computer, then the speed at which attendees can download your high-res images, video, or animations is the speed of your upload connection which in most cases will not be much more than 1Mbps. Download speeds are much higher (I have gone up to 50Mbps recently).
The solution for this would be to upload the bandwidth-heavy content beforehand to a server, and only use your live upload connection for the audiotrack. Some web meeting solutions such as SalesCrunch (disclosure, a client) allow you to upload presentations beforehand. But video does not work (yet). Do any of you know a solution or a workaround that allows me to use video in a live webinar?
P.S. An earlier post about how I use an iPad to log in as a participant to monitor what my audience is seeing during a webinar.
The solution for this would be to upload the bandwidth-heavy content beforehand to a server, and only use your live upload connection for the audiotrack. Some web meeting solutions such as SalesCrunch (disclosure, a client) allow you to upload presentations beforehand. But video does not work (yet). Do any of you know a solution or a workaround that allows me to use video in a live webinar?
P.S. An earlier post about how I use an iPad to log in as a participant to monitor what my audience is seeing during a webinar.
Videos in PowerPoint / Keynote
Here is the easy way to embed a video in PowerPoint or Keynote:
- Simply drag the file into your slide, done.
- Resize the video so that it fits neatly on the slide.
- Play the video until you hit the scene that you want to use as your place holder image. Hit pause.
- In PowerPoint: choose format movie, poster frame, current frame.
- In Keynote: select the movie, go to the inspector, hit the far right Quicktime icon and slide the poster frame slider to the desired location.
There are more advanced control features available, but these basics should do for most users.
Hard stats on effective meetings
SalesCrunch (disclosure a client) is an online meeting platform that gives your real, hard statistics about how effective your meetings are: how many people pay attention, what % of your presentation is read, etc.
They analyzed the aggregate statistics of their entire client base and boiled the data down in an infographic. The key points will not surprise regular readers here: shorter meetings are better, shorter decks are better, and listening is better than doing all the talking. But for the first time, everything is backed up by hard data. Download the high-res version of the infographic here.
They analyzed the aggregate statistics of their entire client base and boiled the data down in an infographic. The key points will not surprise regular readers here: shorter meetings are better, shorter decks are better, and listening is better than doing all the talking. But for the first time, everything is backed up by hard data. Download the high-res version of the infographic here.
What is my client work?
For a client proposal, I had to go back over the past 12 months and see what is the sort of work I do. Here is a breakdown in number of projects (can still be different from hours spent). The majority of my work is in investor and business development presentations for the high-tech industry (including biotech and medical devices).
So what do you do?
This tweet by Michael Arrington says it all: investors are human, take it slowly and answer the very first thing what is on their mind: what is it that you are actually doing. You might have been working on this startup for months now, an investor hears about it for the very first time. You suffer from the Curse of Knowledge, and remember, an audience who is guessing what you do in the back of the mind is not paying attention to all the other things you want to say.
Michael tried reading the deck twice, most investors will not do that.
Just read an entire investor presentation, twice, carefully. No idea what this company wants to build or sell.Maybe sensors. We'll see.
— Michael Arrington (@arrington) March 21, 2012
Michael tried reading the deck twice, most investors will not do that.
Trees!
Photographs with a strong perspective are always the most interesting ones to use in a presentation. See the example below. Strong lines leading to a bright spot that almost makes you squint. When adding PowerPoint objects make sure to align them properly with the flow of the image.
In Munich next week
I will be heading to Munich (again) next week to speak at a conference about investor and sales presentations. Ping me if you want to say hi.
Image by Storm Crypt
Image by Storm Crypt
Everyone is a photographer
The wide-spread use of smartphones has given almost anyone a camera in their pocket, all the time. So it has become really easy to collect some great pictures for your company presentation, even at the last minute. You could take them yourself, or email a colleague in a remote office to go out on a photo shoot. The images you are likely to get are going to be far better than the shot of the corporate logo behind the reception desk.
- A group shot of the team replacing high school year book mug shots of the management team
- Your products on display in a store
- People having coffee at the annual sales rep gathering
- One of your (branded) trucks driving off full of product in the early morning
- The 1 liter bottle filling line in full swing
- A store front of your New Delhi shop
- A downtown billboard with an ad for your company on it (not the ad itself)
- A hazy shot of the rock concert you sponsored last year
Reinforcing loops
At McKinsey, we used to call this Business Dynamics, mapping reinforcing and opposing forces using arrows. The concept is borrowed from systems theory in mathematics and physics. These circles can make a great chart to show the main growth drivers behind your business.
The notorious US army spaghetti chart is a more complicated execution of the same principle. Contrary to many critical review, I actually liked it as a visualization of the incredibly complex situation over there.
The notorious US army spaghetti chart is a more complicated execution of the same principle. Contrary to many critical review, I actually liked it as a visualization of the incredibly complex situation over there.
PowerPoint for Mac color rendering
If you cannot get excited about color rendering in software, please skip this post.
There is something weird in the color rendering of Microsoft PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. First, text and shapes get treated differently. If you make the text and the background the same color, the text will appear different. At first it looks like to be designed on purpose. But the adjusted color is actually a bit off on the hue spectrum, creating color clashes. See the example below.
Maybe there is a problem inside the software though. Look at the screen shot below of a presentation in presenter mode. I copied 2 exactly the same slides and you can see that the preview of the second (identical) slide pulls the blue into same purple direction as the text in the previous example. There must be more than one color rendering engine inside PowerPoint.
PowerPoint 2010 for Windows does not suffer from this, and I hope that Microsoft will fix it in a subsequent update (even it was done on purpose). If I want my text to stand out on a background, I want to freedom to decide myself what colors to pick.
There is something weird in the color rendering of Microsoft PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. First, text and shapes get treated differently. If you make the text and the background the same color, the text will appear different. At first it looks like to be designed on purpose. But the adjusted color is actually a bit off on the hue spectrum, creating color clashes. See the example below.
Maybe there is a problem inside the software though. Look at the screen shot below of a presentation in presenter mode. I copied 2 exactly the same slides and you can see that the preview of the second (identical) slide pulls the blue into same purple direction as the text in the previous example. There must be more than one color rendering engine inside PowerPoint.
PowerPoint 2010 for Windows does not suffer from this, and I hope that Microsoft will fix it in a subsequent update (even it was done on purpose). If I want my text to stand out on a background, I want to freedom to decide myself what colors to pick.
Duarte launches Diagrammer
Nancy Duarte’s firm Duarte Design just launched an online market place for PowerPoint diagram templates: Diagrammer. You can select from a library of 4,000 diagrams that are ready to be included and edited into your own PowerPoint presentation. Each file costs $0.99.
I always found one of the best parts of Nancy’s first book Slide:ology (review of the book) to be the collection of diagram concepts. Now this collection has been digitized and automated.
There is one competitor to Diagrammer built right into PowerPoint, the smart objects. But somehow, smart objects never worked for me, they are awkward to edit and to fit into the look and feel of the overall presentation. Moreover, Diagrammer has a much more powerful classification method, helping you to zoom into the exact diagram you need (flow, 2D, 4 steps).
Diagrammer also competes with other template sites such as Slideshop. Slideshop has more elaborate graphics (not always a good thing) and a broader variety of slide types.
Diagrammer fills a clear need for diagrams in everyday, corporate, strategy-type presentations. One of the easiest ways to replace a bullet point chart is to shorten the bullets and put them each in boxes with a framework that shows the relationships between the elements. (Still, it might be hard to resist for many users to shrink the font sizes in each of the boxes and cram in some more text...)
Congratulations to Duarte with the launch of Diagrammer, it shows that they have an open mind to innovate presentation design. It is impossible for bespoke presentation design (like the service I provide) to free the world of poor presentations. Self-service technology might get us there eventually.
I always found one of the best parts of Nancy’s first book Slide:ology (review of the book) to be the collection of diagram concepts. Now this collection has been digitized and automated.
There is one competitor to Diagrammer built right into PowerPoint, the smart objects. But somehow, smart objects never worked for me, they are awkward to edit and to fit into the look and feel of the overall presentation. Moreover, Diagrammer has a much more powerful classification method, helping you to zoom into the exact diagram you need (flow, 2D, 4 steps).
Diagrammer also competes with other template sites such as Slideshop. Slideshop has more elaborate graphics (not always a good thing) and a broader variety of slide types.
Diagrammer fills a clear need for diagrams in everyday, corporate, strategy-type presentations. One of the easiest ways to replace a bullet point chart is to shorten the bullets and put them each in boxes with a framework that shows the relationships between the elements. (Still, it might be hard to resist for many users to shrink the font sizes in each of the boxes and cram in some more text...)
Congratulations to Duarte with the launch of Diagrammer, it shows that they have an open mind to innovate presentation design. It is impossible for bespoke presentation design (like the service I provide) to free the world of poor presentations. Self-service technology might get us there eventually.
Liberated from the email attachment
Clients that run conservative IT infrastructures (usually the larger enterprises) still have a cap of around 10MB on the size of an email attachment. As presentations contain more images, file sizes are getting increasingly larger. Over the past years I have been cropping and compressing to keep file sizes in check, but I think we have finally reached the time to get rid of the email attachment as the preferred way to send files across.
Solutions such as Dropbox provide a very convenient alternative to the email attachment, send a download link to a file, or sync a file both on your hard drive and the hard drive of your colleague.
Now that 10MB is no longer an issue, we can go to 100MB and beyond and this introduces incredible design freedom.
Solutions such as Dropbox provide a very convenient alternative to the email attachment, send a download link to a file, or sync a file both on your hard drive and the hard drive of your colleague.
Now that 10MB is no longer an issue, we can go to 100MB and beyond and this introduces incredible design freedom.
- Put images in at full HD resolution, keep the areas that you cropped out to change a slide design in the future, and have the option to produce very high-grade print material from your working document. There is no need anymore to do destructive compression to your source file. With new devices such as the new iPad with retina screen resolutions going to more than 2000 pixels this becomes essential. A 700 pixel image will look OK on a crappy VGA overhead projector, but will look fuzzy and unprofessional on a tablet
- Embed HD videos right into the presentation file. No more linking, saving files in the same directory and worrying about whether things work. Over the past months I have become convinced of the power of short 30 second videos in presentations. You could even start replacing background stills of a landscape with a looping video that show a gentle breeze going through the tree tops with some birds flying by.
Last week I delivered my first 64MB presentation to a client and I am sure that record will not hold long.
iPad: Keynote tipping point?
I am continuing my research in mobile presentation platforms, with very useful input from you guys.
Until now, the Keynote versus PowerPoint battle has been a feature debate. While Keynote has some better features in some instances, they are unlikely to be enough to switch people over who just invested years in getting to grips with one user interface.
Mobile devices might change that.
There are two types of presentation decks. The everyday presentation is a PowerPoint file that is used in corporates to make business decisions; it is not really meant for presentation, rather it is a more visual substitute for a word processor. The second one is the key company pitch, sales, or fund raising presentation. You use it all the time. You perfect it all the time with small changes. You use it in different settings, mostly for audiences outside the company.
I would argue that by now, it is better to have that crucial presentation in Keynote than in PowerPoint. Why? Mobile devices, and the integration of PowerPoint with iPads is non-existent, while by now Keynote has pretty decent mobile apps.
Pulling out a laptop in a coffee shop to go through a deck is unnatural. Flipping on your iPad is not. An iPad could also be a powerful replacement of the PC + clicker combination that we use for conference room, or even on-stage presentations.
One scenario. You sitting at the reception of a venture capitalist waiting to be picked up. On your iPhone you click through your slides to do a final mental rehearsal. Ah, a typo, a quick fix. You walk into the conference room and one of the VC partners is late. Instead of an on-screen presentation you tell your story verbally, while pointing at a key chart on your iPad when necessary. The second VC partner walks into the room, and immediately you Airplay the presentation onto the conference room screen. You quickly repeat the main points you made by picking off a few slides from your iPad (because of presenter mode, the audience does not see you browsing through tiles) and finish the discussion with the detailed financials, and the use of the funds that you are trying to raise.
I think it is important to have to crucial, all-important, pitch deck available on a phone, table, lap top to be prepared for any situation. And at the moment, only Keynote allows you do that.
Even for big corporates, this might still not be a reason to switch platform. But for the sales department, it could be a reason to invest in a Mac (or install Parallels on a PC) and equip the mobile sales force with iPads with the Keynote app installed on it.
Until now, the Keynote versus PowerPoint battle has been a feature debate. While Keynote has some better features in some instances, they are unlikely to be enough to switch people over who just invested years in getting to grips with one user interface.
Mobile devices might change that.
There are two types of presentation decks. The everyday presentation is a PowerPoint file that is used in corporates to make business decisions; it is not really meant for presentation, rather it is a more visual substitute for a word processor. The second one is the key company pitch, sales, or fund raising presentation. You use it all the time. You perfect it all the time with small changes. You use it in different settings, mostly for audiences outside the company.
I would argue that by now, it is better to have that crucial presentation in Keynote than in PowerPoint. Why? Mobile devices, and the integration of PowerPoint with iPads is non-existent, while by now Keynote has pretty decent mobile apps.
Pulling out a laptop in a coffee shop to go through a deck is unnatural. Flipping on your iPad is not. An iPad could also be a powerful replacement of the PC + clicker combination that we use for conference room, or even on-stage presentations.
One scenario. You sitting at the reception of a venture capitalist waiting to be picked up. On your iPhone you click through your slides to do a final mental rehearsal. Ah, a typo, a quick fix. You walk into the conference room and one of the VC partners is late. Instead of an on-screen presentation you tell your story verbally, while pointing at a key chart on your iPad when necessary. The second VC partner walks into the room, and immediately you Airplay the presentation onto the conference room screen. You quickly repeat the main points you made by picking off a few slides from your iPad (because of presenter mode, the audience does not see you browsing through tiles) and finish the discussion with the detailed financials, and the use of the funds that you are trying to raise.
I think it is important to have to crucial, all-important, pitch deck available on a phone, table, lap top to be prepared for any situation. And at the moment, only Keynote allows you do that.
Even for big corporates, this might still not be a reason to switch platform. But for the sales department, it could be a reason to invest in a Mac (or install Parallels on a PC) and equip the mobile sales force with iPads with the Keynote app installed on it.
Do not dilute your pitch
Usually, a pitch starts really great. When asked, out comes a short and to-the-point story about what you are about. Then we add more info on this, more info on that, until we have diluted our story so much that it sounds pretty much like any other company or fund in your market.
Use the fact that everyone in your industry is creating noise about why the market is so bit, how it is growing so fast. Trigger a recall of this information in the mind of your audience through simple charts. Focus the majority of the time and slides on that unusual story about why you are different than all the others.
Maybe it is good to record that very first pitch on video so you can go back to it in the middle of the design process. Part of the value of a professional presentation designer is sticking to the story that came across in the briefing.
Use the fact that everyone in your industry is creating noise about why the market is so bit, how it is growing so fast. Trigger a recall of this information in the mind of your audience through simple charts. Focus the majority of the time and slides on that unusual story about why you are different than all the others.
Maybe it is good to record that very first pitch on video so you can go back to it in the middle of the design process. Part of the value of a professional presentation designer is sticking to the story that came across in the briefing.
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