Useful colors

If you have the freedom to pick the colours of your presentation yourself, try if you can find ones that have enough contrast both with black and white. The Idea Transplant orange for example can be a background for both white and black text. Skype blue also works. Design is always a combination of aesthetics and practicality.

Entire story on 1 page

Sometimes it is useful to frame your entire story in 1 table on 1 page. The other day, I had a client in the semiconductor industry. The story centred around 3 things that matter (the column headings). Then, the rows were: first: current product features, next row: why they cause problems, next row: what bottleneck you need to overcome to solve this, next row: how the bottleneck is overcome, next row: alternative product features. In a written management consulting report, you can stop here. A live presentation requires more work. The presentation design challenge is now to take this boring table and turn it into a compelling story, spreading it out over many pages and many minutes. The table is a little cheat sheet to make sure you have captured everything.

Rehearsing in one go

When you are rehearsing your presentation it is tempting to speak softly, sit down rather than stand, and re-start parts of your talk that did not come out well. The best practice however is to simulate the real thing as much as you can: in one go, standing up, looking at the audience, while speaking at the same volume you would do on the stage.

Overdoing special effects

Image manipulation software can do a lot, but most of the time it is used over the top. All that technology causes most ads to look worse than those elegant compositions from the 1960s.

First of all there are the clear Photoshop disasters such as this nice composition below (via the PSD blog).



One step up, designers get the technical execution right, but the chosen concept just hurts the eye (via Ads of the World).



Finally, it possible to get it right, but in most cases these compositions are beautiful illustrations rather than image manipulations. The only difference with the 1960s is that the analogue pencil has been replaced with an electronic one (via Ads of the World).

Fitting the trend

The world of Internet startups is filled with buzzwords: SoLoMo (social, local, mobile), freemium, wearable computing, big data, social sharing, sticky eyeballs (2000), monetization, consumerization to name just a few.

I see many startups trying to force-fit themselves into one of these trend boxes. You start with the buzzwords, then steal charts about the buzzwords from analyst reports (“online video will be huge in 2017”), and then present a diluted story about your company, showing how it fits in.

A better alternative is to explain how your company solves a big problem in a unique way and worry about the buzzwords later.

Investor infographic

Equiprent is raising money, and put together an infographic to attract the attention of investors (found it on the Cool Infographics blog).
What I like about it:

• One page Executive Summaries are boring and yes, this is a much better way to grab attention. Equiprent is realistic and does not think that this graphic is landing them the investment. Its sole purpose is to get a 5 minute phone call to discuss the next steps in the fund raising process
• The company is not afraid to get the fact that they are fund raising out in the open: it says so, it shares their suggested valuation, and it states how much they are raising in return for what % of the company. I feel that the benefits of publicity and reaching more investors outweigh the drawbacks (putting some of your company secrets out in the open). The fund raising process can be much more open than hush hush discussions in small venture capital meeting rooms.
• The infographic itself catches the basic points of an investment pitch, if an investor is convinced that all the claims are true, she will for sure invest in the venture.

Some feedback on where it can be improved:

• From a design perspective: some objectives on the page can be aligned better
• Content-wise: maybe the fragmentation point can be beefed up more. It is the core argument of the pitch. I have no immediate suggestion how to do it better though
• Financial projects look impressive, but have little credibility without the accompanying assumptions

All in all, a refreshing approach to an investor presentation.

The 2-line slide heading

In some presentations, I use a template with a 2-line slide title, giving me more screen real estate to spell the key message of a chart. The format is very similar to exhibits I drew at McKinsey, where the message of the slide was written in a paragraph that could span 2-3 lines of text in point 12 font above the chart headline.

When to experiment with this format? Smaller audiences, lots of complicated data charts, chart messages with nuances that are hard to capture in a newspaper-style article heading.

Oh, and when you use the longer headlines, there is not reason to re-write that same sentence in a big bubble or box on the right of the chart.

Difficult strategy meetings

A story works great in a TED talk, but a cute personal anecdote might be less effective in a highly charged and political Board room meeting where a strategy decision has to be made. What can you do when you are in the hot seat? Some thoughts.

Cut to the chase. In a typical Board meeting, most attendants are probably familiar with the basics of what is being discussed. Leave out the descriptive intro, send big data fact packs before the meeting as background reading.

Create some sort of pro and con chart that summarises your logic for picking a certain option. Group the no-brainers on both side of the argument to avoid losing a lot of presentation time on issues that everyone agrees on. Single out the more contentious issues that should be debated. Keep coming back to this chart if someone brings up a point that has already been discussed, or that is a no brainer.

Push the rational argument with quantification and analysis all the way to the end. Not just the inputs (market share, customer satisfaction) but take things right down to a metric that matters (profit in scenario A, profit in scenario B).

Think about how to push the emotional side of the argument. Focus group quotes by customers look like just another text slide, adding a picture of the participant makes it a real person, putting a video snippet makes it even more credible.

Good luck!

Color hierarchy

Over the past few years, more and more people started to understand that as a presentation designer, it is important to have a look at the style, brand, color guide of the organisation you are working for. Program the prescribed colours into your PowerPoint or Keynote template, and your slides are instantly recognisable with the right look and feel, without having to remind the audience by putting a big logo on every slide.

But these brand guidelines often contain more than just the RGB codes for the corporate color. Color hierarchy is as important. Which color should you be using more often than others? Which color is background, which color is accent?

Randomly applying (the allowed) colours to slide objects can create clutter, especially for large shapes on your slides. Think about color hierarchy when designing your next presentation.

High-Low-High

This describes my usual creative process. You start off with digesting a story at a high level, and things seem clear - although most of the times presented wrong. Then you dig in, start asking questions, go all the way to the very bottom of detail, and things are confusing, ambiguous and not clear. After this stage it is time to rise up again to come to a new high level story. And that high level story is most of the times a completely different one from the first version that we started off with.

A parallel can be drawn to financial analysis: you start with a napkin, build a very detailed spreadsheet, and end with an extremely simplified chart (that looks different from the napkin you started off with).

Unraveling

Technical (process flow) diagrams can be mess with intersecting and overlapping arrows. The challenge of the presentation designer is to unravel them. I usually decide between 2 possible solutions:

1. Minimal clutter. Like unraveling physical wires, I re-draw and re-draw the diagram again until I have it in such a configuration that none of the connectors overlap (or with the minimal overlap). Then I resize boxes to the same size, align and distribute so that the whole thing lines up nicely in a grid. The result is pleasing for the eye.
2. Maximum logic. I take the big steps in the process and line them up in the logical sequence. Other intermediary steps get organised around this. Use differentiating color for the main big steps in the diagram. The result is pleasing for the brain.

Then decide whether to please the eye or the brain.

The print out

Some executives still have their assistants print out emails and/or presentations. Recently, I saw a proposal for a major project sitting on a desk for review, printed in black and white. Colours that looked bright on screen were translated into depressing dark grey and black shades. Big captions in light colours were faded and hardly readable. Photos enhanced with artistic filters looked distorted.

Lesson: try out how your document looks when printed. You can even do that using a print preview, no need to waste trees here. This is especially important if your document contains a lot of text, the temptation to print it is bigger.

Just make me a set up

“Oh, just make a set up, and I will fill stuff in later.” This approach does rarely work for presentation design. A framework is good to guide data collection, but when it comes to creating a slide to communicate your data and conclusions, you need the actual data.

I did not do anything today...

I sometimes have these days where I sit at my desk thinking, sketching, being distracted, and some more pondering. It feels like nothing happened that day, until I sit down the next morning after a good night sleep I crank out the entire slide deck in under 2 hours...

On gradients

In the spirit of flat design, I am not a big user of gradients in my presentations. It is one of those features: the fact that PowerPoint/Keynote supports them, does not mean you have to use them. Some observations.

Not all gradients work. A background gradient that goes from white to a touch of grey as your PowerPoint canvas often looks “dirty” on the presentation screen. Especially on antique VGA meeting room projectors. The inverse (pitch black to a dark grey) can actually look good. There is another challenge though with a gradient slide background: it is harder to work with shapes and images that have a non-gradient background that is close to the canvas color.

Watch out with gradients that run between clashing colours. If the colours do not go well together (for example green and red) then the resulting gradient is probably not going to be good either. Complex gradients can work though, have a look at the book cover of “Pitch it!” on the blog cover page. You could construct a nice gradient with reds, oranges, blues, and purples.

There is one area where I often use gradients: visualising transitions from one state to another. Even if the colour clash, I would still add that colour transition on a big horizontal arrow.

But still, we have to admit modern display technology falls short in places where ancient artists thrived...

New audience, new message?

Some clients say that they have a different message for different audiences and therefore need presentations that are heavily tailored to those segments. In some instances, that is correct. Investors probably are not as excited by hard core scientific data as doctors are. But still, sometimes an ambiguity in strategy might be the reason for the deviating messages. If that is the case, it is better to iron out this first and return to the beauty of one strategy, one story, one corporate presentation.

10 years of independence

As of this month, I  have worked longer as my own boss than as an employee of my (only) employer McKinsey, and it feels great. All around me, I see more and more people taking the plunge and starting a freelance business, including in the world of presentation design. Some thoughts at the 10 year point.

1. The decision to go freelance is not a permanent or an irreversible one. If you pick the wrong employer, you have something to explain on your CV (why did you leave after 3 months), if you are dipping your toes into the world of freelance, you start with just one project, and if things go well, you do another one.
2. There is no need to define 100% what you do, in which category you fit in. Job descriptions are very tight and precise, a freelance role is not. You do the project you like, and the projects people want to pay you for. The challenge is to find the overlap between the 2. I started as an independent strategy consultant, and ended up designing presentations. Early on, I was obsessed with what to call myself (for example, what do you put in your LinkedIn profile). Not anymore. Self-selection (picking of clients, projects) will lead you to your preferred work, and it is highly likely that there is no role description for it.
3. As a freelancer, you will not get instant status that comes with a regular job, company car, and big office. “I design PowerPoint slides” is not instantly greeted at a dinner party with respect. It takes 5 minutes of explanation for people to get the full picture, and then they usually approve. But most importantly, I have stopped caring about that.
4. Niche design businesses do not scale very well. Super-bespoke presentations are tricky to design and adding a bunch of designers to a team will not recreate the magic with a factor 10. Most bigger presentation design operations fill capacity by slide make-over work that can be scaled up relatively easily.
5. Niche is the way to differentiatie yourself. Presentation design is broad. Business presentations are still broad. Within that, I have carved out an even smaller niche of the type of projects that work for me and for which there are very few people in the world that can do it. Super specialisation is a great strategy to build a global personal brand.
6. Once you have worked for a couple of months, a year, you will notice that the combination of new and existing clients will give you a business flow that is actually reasonably recession proof, and a lot more stable than your friends who are subject to continued corporate downsizings and restructuring.
7. Get a good sense of your pricing potential both from what the value of your services is (usually a lot higher than you think) and what the true costs of running a freelance business is (including office space, hardware, software, holidays, health insurance, pension, lunch breaks, etc.)
8. You will spend a lot of time working on your own. Personally, I love that quiet and productive time, but there are many people for whom this would be social torture. You know yourself best.

Good luck to everyone pondering this route!

Screenshot = picture export

Exporting things as a picture can be cumbersome. File types, resolutions (PowerPoint for Mac is horrible), finding where the file was saved, etc. More and more, I use simple screenshots to the desktop as my picture exporting tool. With the added benefit that I can make find compositions in PowerPoint which I often find easier than booting up Photoshop.

Seinfeld: "The Pitch"

Reading this column about Story tellers have more fun led me to an old Seinfeld episode where he is pitching a new TV show to NBV about, well, nothing.

Office for iOS - yawn

The column by David Pogue in the NYT says it all: the long-expected launch of Microsoft Office for iOS is a non-event.

As I am slowly progressing with the design of my own PowerPoint alternative, I start to realize that phones and tablets require a fundamental rethink of what a user actually wants to do in a presentation design/delivery context. I have not cracked it yet myself either but am trying hard to solve the problem by trying to disconnect my thinking completely from how desktop presentation design applications have been set up over the past 30 years.