My book is available!

I am very excited to announce that my book Pitch It! is available in the Apple iBook store! I am looking forward to receiving your feedback as early adopters (you can post them here, or send them to contact at ideatransplant dot com). The beauty of the iBook format is that I can update and change content based on your input, which will get pushed to your devices. The link to the iBook store is here:

Alanis Morissette

I attended a concert by Alanis Morissette the other day in Tel Aviv. A critic of the local Israeli newspaper Haaretz found she did not sing well, but despite that everyone in the audience loved her performance.



This presentation design blog is not the right place to go into technical artist reviews. What is interesting however, is to see how Alanis managed to win the crowd over simple by being her natural self. No professional crowd pleasing techniques, no real eye contact into the audience, just pacing back and forth staring in the distance left and right of the stage. She actually came across as shy.

The audience wants you to succeed, and preferably using your own natural style.

PowerPoint killer?

Now that my book is nearing completion I am switching attention to a much bigger side project, I might have the initial idea for software that can be a PowerPoint and Keynote killer. Many have tried before me, and all of them have more or less failed, so I need to be careful. I keep the idea under wraps for the moment (sorry), but what I can reveal are the fundamental flaws in slideware that I want to take out:

1. The bloated programs have their roots in 1980s mouse-based drawing software
2. Templates are technology- or graphics- rather than business content-driven

Things are very early at the moment, and I am trying to get a handle on the budget and timing aspects of a project and start to look into possible design partners (UI, backend). Let me know if you think that there are design studios out there that I should be aware of, especially those that have experience with visual/slide apps on desktop and mobile. You can send me a message via the contact field in my website.

I hope that this post will be the beginning of a solution for death by PowerPoint, rather than a note in the margin like Fermat’s last theorem...

Prevent PowerPoint from crashing

I have Microsoft Office software open on a Mac for 10 hours a day and while the program is very stable, there are a few occasions where it can crash. I have my theories why some of these happen, but even if they are just superstition, I would recommend anyone to set a very aggressive autosave window (5 minutes or less) and hit save before going into specific actions.

• If Dropbox (and probably Box as well) start syncing a file that you have open in PowerPoint you are at risk. Especially when they are large and saving takes more than a second. You can see the Dropbox icon moving when it is syncing, to be save cancel sync for the time that you are editing
• The same problem (and in a much bigger way) is Apple Time Machine backup. If Time Machine backs up a big PowerPoint file while you have it open you go down. Stop Time Machine backup, or install a utility that enables you to control when backups are happening. (There are many of them here, I have not tried these, so at your own risk)
• Rapid clicking and editing of data charts, open one, edit one, close one, change one. Excel might get confused, is waiting for some input from PowerPoint, who is waiting for input for Excel. Always hit save before and after major data chart manipulations.

In this ever changing world...

Please do not use that sentence in a presentation.

CEOs get used to slides

If you want to make a dramatic difference to the look of a presentation, do it early in the design process. After a number of iterations a senior executive gets used to the look and feel of a slide, even if it is not a pretty one. The CEO sees a placeholder (no longer a slide with content) as the back drop of which to tell the story. Changing the design of a placeholder her makes her feel she has to redesign her story from scratch.

2 great creative movies

Here are 2 movies I recently watched that talk about the revolution in the creative industry and how individuals can now deliver the work that a few years ago only could be done by big firms. This is also true for my own firm, where I often work alongside big PR or Investor Relations consultancies.

Indie Game: The Movie is about independent game developers realising their dream and incorporating some very personal stories in their work



PressPausePlay is a more general film covering a lot of creative disciplines

Face or no face?

It depends:

• To make an emotional point, or show a human connection to whatever you want to say, show the face (pick a stock image that is not fake, but shows a real person)
• To show a gesture or an object, it is better to crop the face out and zoom in on what you want to show

The same boring framework

Frameworks are great to structure information but incredibly boring to present, especially if you have to repeat them many times over.

“Over the next 30 minutes I will describe each of the 15 business units using this framework: challenges, opportunities, profit potential, next steps. Here is business unit 1. ”

Oh no! 14 more to go...

It is better to tell a specific story about each business unit, actually on purpose using a different approach to tell it. The 15 data tables can go to the appendix for bed time reading.

Announcing Pitch it!

I have been working steadily on my first book: “Pitch it!&rdq0u;, and I am reaching the final stages of editing. The book is written as an Apple iBook, which allows me to create a great-looking interactive document, rapidly, at the expensive of cutting people off that do not have iPads (sorry for now). I am planning to ship early, and using reader feedback to upgrade the book which will get pushed automatically to people who purchased the older version. Stay tuned!

Join me for a G+ Hang Out

I am glad to speak live about startup investor pitches in a Google Hangout organised by the Google Developer community in Israel. The event is this Wednesday 14:00-14:30 Israel time. I think up to 9 people can join the interactive conversation, but Google will live stream the event so other people can follow it “on mute”

Details of the event can be found here.

Give your eyes a break

When someone emails you a PowerPoint presentation, PowerPoint remembers the screen size that was last used. If that version was created on a small laptop, the slides will show up as tiny rectangles on a big desktop monitor.

All the time I see people making edits to presentations in tiny tiles. Why not give your eyes a break and scale up the slide to fit the page? Getting rid of toolbars, the speaker notes field, and reducing the outline on the left will deliver some more screen real estate.