DIY shapes

It is hard to get an arrow to point exactly right in PowerPoint. If the standard shapes fail, why not construct your own out of small individual bits. You can group the shape together, or create a new custom shape with one of the shape boolean functions (Windows instructions here, on a Mac: select 2 shapes, right click, go in the grouping menu).

Just a confidence booster?

Often, I see that the slide deck is just a confidence booster for the presenter of a new story. Having those beautifully designed slides behind you makes sure you will not s**w up. Over time, you become more and more confident in delivering the story, your slides get bolder and more minimalist, until finally, you do not need them anymore.

But, without that slide deck on day 1, you would not have gotten to that level of story telling...

Flowboard - presentations on iPad

Flowboard is a presentation design app for iPad. In the TechCrunch video below, the company CEO gives a quick demo of the product.

I am curious to hear your feedback on designing presentations on a tablet in a new app (using an iPad to display them is a no brainer). I can see the advantages of mobility, the touch interface, but on the other there are drawbacks: screen size, lack of navigation precision, incompatible file formats, and file management problems.

VC presentation parody

This cartoon of Nikola Tesla (who do you say?) pitching VCs highlights many of the dynamics that are happening in VC pitch meetings (unfortunately).


Two comments to this though:

1. While entrepreneurs have no shortage of ideas to make a parody about VCs, I think VCs might have equally rich material to make fun of entrepreneurs pitching. 
2. But more importantly, anticipate this sort of VC behaviour. In this video the entrepreneur did not manage to get across what it is that he is actually doing early enough, and as a result the investor focused more on their email. VCs probably make up their mind whether something is worth listening to in the first few minutes of your pitch, partly maybe because they are arrogant, but also partly because it is the only way to deal with thousands of ideas being thrown your way. Get that elevator pitch ready, and the objective of the elevator pitch is not to land the investment, but to get the attention for the next 20 minutes.

Put things in perspective

I just returned from a camping and hiking trip in Israel’s southern desert (the Negev) and came home with some beautiful pictures.

It is very hard to capture the sheer size of a landscape in a photo, and one trick to do this is the make sure to have an object in your frame that the viewer knows the size of. In the example below you see that the perspective greatly diminishes when I Photoshop my friends out.

The same is true with data in presentations. Putting the stunning image with the word “53 million” on it does not put the size of the number in perspective. Relate it to something instead.

You understand everything?

An aspiring presentation designer asked me this question. “You really are confident that you can grasp any story that is thrown at you (scientific, financial)?” I answered positive.

Yes, I have some background in business, engineering, and financial analysis, but there are cases where I do not get it the first time around. I do not think that that is my problem though, if I do not get it, the audience of reasonably intelligent people will not either. Time to try to explain it to me again.

I am not embarrassed to ask stupid questions, and never say that I got it when I did not.

Tell people what they should see

What is clear to you is hardly ever clear to everyone in the audience. A screen shot with a cleverly integrated login feature, a photo of a long line of people who cannot wait to try your product, an image of an unhappy customer. When in doubt, put a big call out or title that says what the audience is expected to see.

Oops, doesn't fit

PowerPoint is not very good at creating line breaks in a shape. With lots of space left, it breaks your long word (&lquo;management” is a favourite) to the next line. Two things you can do:

1. Right click the shape, hit format shape, select text box and un-tick the wrap-text-in-shape box. Now you can make your own line breaks
2. For bigger fonts a 1.0 leading between lines is too much. Select the shape, click format, go to paragraph, and set the line spacing to multiple and put in the value 0.8 or 0.9 instead of 1.0.

Viewer churn

The big challenge of website design is people clicking away to more interesting places. when you send a pitch deck without verbal explanation, you have the same challenge. Will your prospective customer or investor make it all the way to the end? Maybe presentation designers can learn from web designers?

 I was brainstorming this with a client the other day. We were thinking about how to include a fake demo in the presentation. Demos always look better with the biggest possible screen shots. The result however, is a very large presentation and the viewer might not make it to the end. A possible solution: add big PREVIOUS and NEXT arrows to the left and right of the screen, maybe a counter (Demo slide 4/12) and a bit SKIP button to keep the viewer on board.

Just a random idea, I need to think more about how to add navigation that is actually useful inside a presentation.

Preaching to the converted

Most sales presentations go on and on and on about an issue that the client might already be convinced of. Worse, if you present slide after slide in an amateurish format making the same point, your client might actually start to doubt what she believed when entering the meeting room.

That is time and slides wasted. More time efficient and effective ways to tackle this:

1. A couple of really professional and serious looking slides with the highlights, plus an invitation to visit your web page for all the details
2. Discussing the weakness of your competitors verbally and informally: it is hard to put this on paper. Suggest your client some tough questions to ask when they meet the competition. Note that this is actually a presentation design challenge, without creating the actual slides. You need to have this story prepared, maybe even with the help of a “spontaneous” flip chart sketch

Now spend the time you gained on the issues that really matter: are you expensive, is it hard to switch supplier, etc.? Preaching to the converted is never a good use of time.

Working title “Pitchera”

I am brainstorming names for my upcoming presentation app and am currently using the working title “Pitchera”. You can start signing up for the mailing list to stay updated on progress here. In that same form you can indicate what sort of presentation designer you are, I am still pondering to what type of audience the app should be targeted at launch.

I will talk to that

That is what many experienced executives say. It is true that not every point your want to make in a presentation needs to be spelled out in a slide. But sometimes the crucial message of a presentation gets omitted.

Some slide that has been used for a thousand times (often a bad one) is the trigger for the experienced presenter to tell her story that has been told a thousand times before. It looks like a slide presentation, but in practice the presenter is telling the story without slides.

In a focussed one-on-one meeting, the message gets across. It might get lost in a presentation for a big audience, and it will for sure not be communicated when sending the deck by email without verbal explanation.

A really fundamental point in your presentation deserves a slide. It often takes an outsider to point out to you what that point is. “Hey, that is sort of obvious, I can talk to that!” Not really.