Why is this a big deal?

“Our solution is flexible!”

To you and all the other industry insiders it is perfectly obvious why being flexible matters. For everyone else, including potential investors, it is not clear what flexible means, and why it is a big deal.

Explaining the problem is often more convincing than explaining the solution.

Add a face to an endorsement

The common way to present people that endorse you is a bullet point list of names and titles. Make that much more powerful by changing that to a mosaic of faces. Avoid the uniform conference-speaker-headshot-gallery, rather:

• Use different image formats (B&W-color, suit-jeans, etc.)
• Use a different aspect ratio than the 3:2 passport picture (landscape for example)
• Use action shots (people presenting standing on stage)

Now this makes for a much more dynamic visualisation of the people who support you.

Selling without slides

When pitching to a new client, you often carry a deck of slides with you to cover your uncertainty. “At least I can lecture about X or Y and flood the prospective client with facts”. In the end what makes the sale is not the lecture about you, but the dialogue about the client’s issues.

It also works for me and my presentation design business. A quick email conversation when a prospect asks “What do you charge and send us a link to an example of your work” is less likely to convert into a project then a half an hour conversation about the actual story.

Most of the times, clients think they are looking for slide make-overs, while actually they need a story redesign. Stating: “I redesign stories and look here is where I have done it 500 times before” does not make the same impression as doing the actual thing on the fly.

Sort your bars

Sometimes bar charts have a clear order, a ranking of items. In other cases it is less obvious. Still, you slide looks visually more appealing when you sort them in descending order even if the ranking is not the core of your message.

Smarter questions -> better stories

If you are writing an investor presentation you can Google what questions should be covered:

• What is the market?
• What is the competition?
• What is the business model?
• Who is in the team?

Or, you can take it one step further and already anticipate the most obvious questions an investor might have:

• I am doing something similar to Google, is that smart?
• I look like I am 21, isn’t that a bit young to run a startup?
• We have been working for 18 months and still there is no prototype, will it ever arrive?

Smarter questions lead to smarter investor presentations.

Being sick and designing

Back in my days as a management consultant, I would surrender to an illness only when I had a really big fever and stay in bed. Now, as a designer it is different.

My work no longer involves in running around, chasing things, sitting through meetings. And even the slightest disruption of your health has a direct impact on your design work and creativity. I often sense the onset of a cold before the first real symptoms such as a soar throat: not being able to focus, a simple chart that I simply cannot get right.

Well in these cases, there is always the end of the month accounting to do...

In NYC at the end of April

I will be in New York at the end of April. Let me know if you would like to connect in person.

Full "Pitch It!" PDF available

I just uploaded the PDF version of "Pitch It!" which can now be purchased and downloaded. You can view it on any device that can display PDFs.

When compared to the iPad version, 99% of the interactive functionality is preserved, I replaced touch objects with static image galleries.

Distribution of this book is not restricted by Apple’s policies, and is available anywhere in the world.

I am looking forward to your feedback (content, and - hopefully minimal - technical glitches).

Pressing the button below will take you to the PayPal check out page:

New look? Don't forget PPT...

When I get the brand guidelines from a client (explanations about logos, colors, fonts), the PowerPoint section is usually at the back, put there as an afterthought after brochures, business cards, and letterheads are being discussed.

Designers usually do not pay much attention to PowerPoint (PPT is uncool for serious designers) and you end up with fonts, shapes, and concepts that are 1) hard to incorporate in presentation design software (no, most people do not have Frutiger installed on their machines) and 2) - more importantly - are very hard to understand for the layman designer.

The face of a company used to be the letterhead, but today it is the website, and yes, the PowerPoint presentations that are cobbled together by the amateur designers and shown to customers everywhere, all the time.

So, when designing a new corporate look, think about those amateur designers, and the best way to do that is to design your look for PowerPoint, then adjust it to other canvases. Sorry.

The consulting presentation

As a former management consultant, I can say it: consultants make very poor presentations. But what about these fancy looking documents full of graphs (exhibits as they are called)? Well, they are decks meant for reading, not for presenting to a live audience.

And as documents intended for reading, they are pretty good. Consultants have replaced a word processor with a slide design program, which adds more writing freedom:

• It is easier to add data charts and data tables
• It is easier to add structure to a text (frameworks in consulting speak)
• It is easier to group edit a document that consists of 1-page-1-topic that can be shuffled

Still, consulting reports meant for reading can be designed better: cutting jargon and using simpler language (synchronising key performance indicators across behaviour segments takes up a lot of space and does not mean much to the layman), and think better when to use data charts (often one single data point gets put down in one single column chart with one single column).

Now, this document is great for people who have been deeply involved in the project (consultants on the team, team members from the client). To win over the hearts of people who will see the recommendations for the first time, a whole new presentation needs to be designed from scratch. And unfortunately, most consulting firms do not make this final step.

Why do Keynote slides look better?

I was asked to answer this question on Quora the other day. My hypothesis that it does not have anything to do with the preinstalled templates or the software’s underlying capabilities.

I think that on average the population of Keynote users are better designers. If you invested the effort to get to grips with a new presentation design tool, you are probably likely to be able to design better slides.

Testing - Pitch It in PDF

I am preparing the conversion of my book Pitch It into PDF based on the comments I received yesterday. In the process, I am becoming an expert in Adobe InDesign as well. The challenge will be to translate the interactive iPad content into static sequential images.

Here is a trial of the first chapter, which is available for download for $0.01 (PayPal obviously does not allow $0 transactions). If you want, you can check it out and let me know whether the format works and how you liked the shopping experience. But I understand it if you save the $0.01 for the full version (chapter 1 is an introduction and does not contain any of the core content of the book).



You can download the first chapter by clicking the button below for a $0.01 charge:

Table with fat lines

For boxy charts, I find it very convenient to use tables as the basic organising structure. Use big fat lines to separate the cells. In this way, it is easy to add, delete cells, combine, and split them. The Mondriaan look.

A non-iPad version of my book

A question for people who do not have an iPad and want to purchase my book about presentation design. Would you prefer a highly illustrated PDF file that can only be read on high-end Kindles or computers, or a mainly text-based document that will render nicely on all Kindle devices (but lacks the illustrations)?

Shall we do a video?

This question often comes up when we start discussing the first sketches of a presentation.

Videos are great, it is a studio quality recording of a presentation, you can do it over and over again until you get it perfectly right. In addition, you have more visual tools at your disposal to support your message.

Having said that, if there is no story, a flashy video is not going to change that. That is why I advise my clients to start with a regular presentation, slowly add more video-like slides to it (faster sequencing of images / shapes) and only then make the leap to video (and that can go in 2 stages, one a narrated recording of your video-like presentation slides, and two a professional animation).

B&W images

Converting all your images in a presentation to black and white can help even out the colours in the document. What is left is a series of slides in subtle shades of grey with your corporate color popping out to make a strong accent. I use that look a lot recently.

Keynote annoyances

I have now clocked a significant amount of hours designing slides in Apple Keynote. I love the program, but there are still a few annoyances that cannot be solved by adjusting your slide template or configuring other settings. Hopefully Apple will fix this in a new release (it has been a while):

1. Selecting what you click, not what you cover with your selection triangle
2. Make it easier to fill shapes quickly rather than having to go back to the inspector. I am always struggling with color windows and inspector settings
3. Enable custom toolbars, especially with options to center and align things. Yes, the smart drawing guides are useful, but not useful enough. 

Too cute for investors

Unfortunately, in 2013 most investors are still male. Coming in with a cute deck (curly flower background, pastel colours, retro-chique font, etc.) is not going to get you points. Even if your product itself has to be cute (a cosmetics line for teenage girls for example) you can still separate things in your investor deck. Use more macho graphics for the serious business stuff, leaving the cute graphics for the product show case pages.

Freelancer versus big corporate

This week I lost a big presentation design project for a large enterprise. The issue was price. I think the client is going to give it a try on their own. The project involved the design of 4 days worth of presentations of the company's bid for a major tender. It was competitive against a handful of other major global enterprises.

Here is my postmortem analysis of why it went wrong.

• Complexity cost. Big corporates create more expensive projects, it is the agency cost of being large. Lots of meetings, lots of stakeholders, that need to be kept in the loop.
• Not seeing the value. The client spent a lot of money on months of management consultants, traveling experts back and forth across the Atlantic to develop the solution and create thousands of pages of material. The client probably thinks that the majority of the convincing power sits in this material and that the presentation is a small effort that comes at the back of it. I think that the presentation can make or break the sales process, and it is especially valuable to have an outsider frame the story completely fresh.
• Big corporate negotiations. Large enterprise extract favourable terms from suppliers through their sheer size. They can offer very large purchase volumes. It is one of the main rationales for the corporate mergers and acquisitions. This works for factories with lots of spare capacity that are bound to a specific ration. Less for for a one-person operation with a steady flow of business that comes in from all over the globe via the Internet.

It is interesting to see that the most powerful presentation I design are often for smaller, more agile companies. With the exception of those cases where you can work directly with very senior management in a big corporate, in those cases you can get that creative flow that delivers great work.

Ok, I have written the frustration off my chest.

Pro tip: guitar in your office

I tend to work in focus bursts of 30 to 45 minutes (sorry, yes that is why I put my cell phone in a different room when you tried to call) after which my mental energy drops and my brain is looking for distraction.

I recently found the antidode to pointless facebook and Twitter browsing: put an accoustic guitar in your office, play for a few minutes, and dive back into your work. I do not miss reading about those 5 mistakes every designer makes...