Cropping a composition

The 2 photos from a birthday party below show what an impact cropping a good composition can have on the quality of your images. I used the iPad app Snapseed (affiliate link) to do the following:

1. Cut out the eating man, cut out the light/bright parts of the image at the top to focus on the boy in the foreground and the girl reaching fro the bubble in the back
2. Take out the color since the composition of the greens and the clothing of the kids does not really look interesting. The B&W image enhances the texture of the bubbles, leaves, and grass
3. Selective up the brightness around the faces of the boy, the girl, and the boy back to the left
4. Up the sharpness and structure of the image

The result is a transformation from a bland image to one that looks like a Matrix-style freezing in time. I am constrained here by the 455 pixel limitations of Blogger, the final image looks better at its proper resolution.

How to put video inside PDF

More and more of my presentations start to use video, and my preferred format for emailing/Dropboxing decks is PDF, so how do you insert a video in PDF? It is easy with Adobe Acrobat X:

1. Save your presentation (PowerPoint or Keynote) as a PDF without the video
2. Open the deck in Acrobat X and select tools at the top right
3. Select multimedia, select video, and draw where your video should go with the cross hairs
4. Select the video file, or insert a YouTube link (I went for the first option, the video size was below 10MB)
5. Select advanced options, and select use poster image from file to pick the right cover
6. Click done

The investment bankers of a recent client insisted on the traditional Executive Summary to send to potential investors. I used this video and a 3 column dense text layout to turn a boring bullet point list into a nice looking one page document meant for reading and watching.

Unfortunately, the video does not (yet) play on an iPad...

Subterranean Homesick Blues

What a brilliant presentation concept by Bob Dylan in this video of his song Subterranean Homesick Blues.

McClure on pitching VCs

The slides hurt the eyes, but the content is good. VC Dave McClure just posted an update of his deck with advice on how to pitch a VC.

How to Pitch a VC (or Angel)

View more presentations from Dave McClure

Creating cartoons with PowToon

PowToon aims to enable you to create cartoon-style, animated presentation and video clips without professional illustration and motion graphics software. I test drove the beta version.

When you look at many cartoon-style videos you see that they are actually not that complicated from a graphics point of view. Usually they involve a number of scenes (slides), they use static characters, basic entrance, exit, and emphasize animations and sometimes a cute hand that puts items on the slide, all accompanied by some simple music.



And this is what PowToon does. The edit interface looks Windows blue, it allows you to place items in a slide and specify the animations. In theory, PowerPoint or Keynote can do the same things, but it requires a deep understanding of the software, plus a library of characters.

There is definitely a market for a tool like PowToon. I do not envision these type of animations to be used in a stand-up presentation, but rather they could be useful to create demo videos on web pages, or presentations for emailing to prospects.

The basics of PowToon work great. I spent 10 minutes to stitch together this video based on a pre-defined template. PowToon is still in beta, and there are a number of features that I would recommend the team to incorporate:

• Invest in the object library, and make them look less clip-arty (the picto character has some resemblance to the 1990s screen bean), this could also be a good revenue model: premium illustrations
• Create the ability to export the presentation as a movie and embed them in a regular PowerPoint or Keynote file, this will make adoption in corporate environments a lot easier.
• Make it easy to embed presentation videos in sites (I am sure the team is working on this)
• Find a way to let the hand draw shapes and write text, so everyone will be able to make animations in the style of RSA Animate.

PowToon is also powering a market place for designers to offer custom-design services on the platform. I am looking forward to incorporating PowToon animations in my client work!


UPDATE: PowToon is extending 100 beta invites to readers of this blog: sign up here.

Pretty, but hard to understand

Infographics can be beautiful, but many times this comes at the expensive of clarity. This chart explaining the seasonality of fruit on Life Hacker is an example. The designer went for a circle concept because nature does not break up years between December and January. Still, this one would have been clearer with (fatter) horizontal bars.



Original design by Chasing Delicious.

"Cute" investor pitches, watch out

The other day I could a project inquiry. The current deck looked like an infographic, it was very nicely done: soft pastel colors, retro fonts, nice icons. Still, the company had difficulty finding traction with investors: where is the meat, where are the numbers, this looks like an ad.

Many VCs come out of the world of engineering or banking which has a certain quantitative, macho communication style to it. Even if your product positioning is “cute”, your investor presentation should probably a bit more testosteron-loaded.

In my previous life as a management consultant, I have spent many years inside consumer goods companies. Believe me, their management presentations do not look like the ads they put on TV for their products.

I am not saying that you should kill the cute slide deck (the world would be a lot more boring if that happened on a large scale), I just wanted to emphasize that if you decide to go with this style to be aware of your audience and compensate in some other way.

Even CEOs cannot wing it

Everyone would agree that Steve Jobs was a pretty good presenter. But he is said to have practiced two to three full time days before a major product launch speech. Two to three full time days! I bet if you put in that effort before your next presentation, you would be pretty close.

Practice means real practice: standing up, going through the slides first to last without interruption or a quick skip back when you make a mistake, you cannot do this on stage either. Make a video of yourself if you can. Put your screen where your monitor laptop will be (so you do not have to look back at your screen to see what slide is on).

It may sound counter–intuitive, but you actually need to know your story inside out to be really spontaneous. There is no such thing as “winging it”. Your audience will notice, you will use “uh” and “oh” all the time, the key lines will not come out the way they should, you will repeat yourself all the time.

And memorizing the talk line by line is not enough. If an actor has to go back to her memory for every line in the play, she will not have the mental energy to focus on the mood of her character. You need live and breathe your story. Then it will come out naturally, and you can improvise around your story line depending on the reaction of your audience.

The exception here might be webinars. Here, the audience cannot see you and you can probably get away with reading through a presentation line by line.

Many high profile public speakers are so good at what they do because they basically give the same speech with the same story over and over again (unlike Steve Jobs who had a new product to announce every six months or so). These people can go up the stage without any preparation at all, but it took them a dozens of performances to get there.

Sometimes it is hard to convince a really senior and experienced executive to rehearse a presentation in pretty much the same way a junior intern needs to do. The solution is to create a hidden, risk free environment. Convince her to do a run through once; the stuttering that will happen is usually enough motivation to do a few more. Or tell her about Steve Jobs’ rehearsal habits.

PowerPoint guides using xScope

One of the most annoying shortcomings of PowerPoint 2011 for Mac is the inability to lock drawing guides. An external app can solve the issue.

A guide is a thin blue line on your design canvas along which you can align slide objects. If you drag an object close to the line, the object snaps into place. In this way objects on multiple pages are positioned in exactly the right place. I use them to mark slide borders, and more importantly the vertical center of my drawing canvas when it does not coincide with the center of the screen.

It is very important that these drawing guides stay exactly in the right location, and this is the issue. As soon as your cursor comes anywhere near a drawing guide, PowerPoint will make moving the actual drawing the priority. So if you try to straighten out an object that is a little bit off and want to fixate it against the guide, PowerPoint moves the guide rather than moving or resizing the object.

xScope (affiliate link) is an app for Mac that allows you to draw screen guides independent of the underlying application. The good news: PowerPoint does not move your guides anymore. The bad news, objects do not snap, you have to make sure manually that they are perfectly aligned. One other comment, the app lets you decide where to draw lines and where not when you use 2 screens. xScope does not allow you to manage this on 3 screens.

The app costs $30 and this because the guide feature is part of a full set of tools for graphics designers: measurement rulers, crosshairs, iPhone mirroring, screen shots. Most of these features I actually do not use. As a professional presentation designer, the $30 was money well spent just to sort out the drawing guide issue, I guess for most other people it is not.

Does anyone know cheaper alternatives to solve PowerPoint 2011 screen guide locking?

The table as a grid

It can be a real pain to space out logos in a logo page nicely. My trick is to use a table with a really fine grey line between cells. It is easy to adjust the grid when you need to insert and/or delete columns and/or rows.

See here an earlier post on how to make great looking logo pages.

Tables can look good

Sometimes, you do not need a data chart at all, and nicely formatted table with rounded numbers might just be the best option to visualize your data. This is especially true for financial statements with lots of information, or in situations where one chart contains a lot of numbers with completely different orders of magnitude. Some quick improvements you can make to make a table look good:

• Space out rows and columns, the more of them are the same size, the calmer the table will look 
• Round up numbers to a reasonably precision, use a “,” to separate thousands Right-align numbers, make sure the decimal dot lines up 
• Right-align the first column with descriptive text, so it is as close as possible to the first column with numbers. 
• Use highly muted background colors, I usually pick the lightest grey that I can get, and draw the cell borders with a white line 
• If necessary reduce the font size, very big fonts with unnatural line breaks do not look very good in a table. 
• Enter data manually: yes typing in every single number by hand is often the only way to get the table to look exactly the way you want it to. Fifteen minutes that are well-spent

UPDATE: on request an example of a table layout I often use.

The real case study

Case studies in investor and sales presentations are most of the time hollow and fluffy quotes that were clearly the result of an email saying “Do you mind if I quote you saying that our solution is highly flexible and scalable?”.

Here are a few ways to make a case example real:

• Focus on one specific benefit, if you try to put your entire story in the mouth of your customer, you need 30 slides, not one
• Cut the fluff
• Be very specific, and very detailed, quantify if you can. 
• Add an image of your client to make things more authentic.

Case studies can be more than a simple quote of text. If you want to show that your system can be installed within 6 weeks, why not show a bar chart of your last 10 customer installations, with the exact time it took to install the system?

Tell a real customer story.