Every word counts

Often, presentation slides are filled with verbal padding: words that take up lots of space but do not add any additional meaning. Every sentence you write in a slide is like thinking of a newspaper/blog article headline: it should be as short as possible without diluting the content to an overly generic statement. Unlike a text document, in a presentation, every sentence needs careful consideration and scrutiny.

The audience expects it

Some presentation slides live for years, and that might be the reason that we are hesitant to change them, we think: well, the audience will expect this slide.

If nothing about your story has changed, then this is a valid point. If not, it is the wrong approach. The same slide signals no change at all, business as usual. Also, even if you did change its content, the audience will think it is the same slide as last year, and will not notice the different content.

Sometimes, change is good.

Hide to emphasize

One way to draw attention to a specific object on your slide is to apply all of these at the same time: pink colour, bold, italics, underline, big drop shadow, fat circle around it (also pink), big arrow pointing at it. Maybe it will stand out of the clutter on the rest of your slide.

The other way: hide everything else around it. Semi-transparent white shapes are great to dim items on your slide.

Cover images

The ideal cover image of your presentation (the slide that sits on the projector while the audience walks in) would be one that tells your whole story so perfectly that the presentation itself can be skipped. Many people try to reach this level of perfection by putting up a messy collage of different images, a very tricky visual concept or a highly tacky and cliche stock image that represents the values of the brand: young, healthy, lively, dynamic, and social.

I am less ambitious and usually pick an image that fits the corporate colour scheme of the client and is a preview of an image that I use on a very important slide somewhere inside the presentation. It looks nice and calm when the audience enters, and it will generate that instant recall of that important slide when I show it for the 3rd time on the closing slide.

PowerPoint template mix up

Copying PowerPoint slides from one presentation to another can have disastrous format implications. Some survival advice.

• When saving/defining a new PowerPoint theme, stick to the suggested colour uses that PowerPoint suggests, i.e., text/background dark should be a dark colour for example. If you move slides across between templates in properly defined colour schemes, the damage will not be that big
• Make sure you copy slides into the file with the desired template and not the other way around. Sometimes this might require you to create a 1-slide presentation in your preferred template, and then copy the 35 other slides into it.
• There is a way to merge PowerPoint slides and keep their original formatting, see an old blog post on the subject.
• At the top left corner of the ribbon is a layout button that opens a drop down menu of slide formats that are present in the master. Use to to correct disasters.

Good luck!

Presentation template recipe

Here is an almost sure recipe to get a good look and feel for a presentation template, even with an Arial font:

• One nice accent colour, but used sparsely for only that: provide an accent
• The other objects in shades of grey, using relatively more light ones than dark ones
• Text in dark grey, not black
• No lines around shapes, let the color (i.e., grey) do the work
• Everything flat: no shadows, no gradients, no reflections
• Black & white images only

Hidden Microsoft Office data

Take care when sending Microsoft Office files to outsiders, you might send hidden confidential data with it.

• The presenter notes fields in PowerPoint might contain notes you do not want others to read
• Taking out the data labels with confidential numbers from a data chart does not remove the actual data in the underlying spreadsheet
• The PowerPoint sticky notes links are very small, which is great so they do not obstruct the design of the slide, on the other hand, you might just forget to remove them.

PDF-ing your document will solve most of these issues.

Learn to see

A child find it hard to draw realistic 3D perspectives, because her brain is still developing 3D perception. She draws a house with a front, and a side wall without that wall disappearing towards the horizon. She is not drawing what she sees, she is drawing what she thinks the house looks like. When the drawing is finished, she notices that someone is not right, but she finds it impossible to lay her hand on it what it exactly is.

The same is true for grown ups and graphics design. You see a beautifully designed page, you want to make something similar in PowerPoint and somehow, it does not come out. Why? Because you stuck to your own mental model of a PowerPoint slide (and what you think it should look like) and did not really see how the designer deployed white space, used of grey scales in text rather than blunt black, and set the space between title lines slightly tighter, and was careful not to overdo it with the colours.

Here is an exercise. Take a poster or design that you really like and literally recreate it in PowerPoint (or Keynote) until it looks exactly the same. Now apply that template to your presentation.

Presenter fatigue

Giving your presentation over and over again makes you a better story teller. You need to know your stuff inside out in order to be spontaneous. Pretty much like a musician who can only start to improvise after the basic song can be delivered on auto pilot.

But, some presenters go to the other extreme, they get bored of their own presentation. Energy levels drop, and slides get cut and reduced to generic bullet points that say it all. They say it all to the experienced presentation, they say nothing to the novice audience who hears the story for the first time.

So, how can you freshen up a presentation? Some thoughts

• The most important one: now that you are more confident about your story, you can move toward much more daring and unconventional slides.
• Add stories or anecdotes
• Go for a totally new look and feel (dark background, light text)

But different slides can only do so much. In the end you have to power yourself up to tell that story the way did it the first time to your audience who hears it for the first time.

We are big

What you measure is what you get is a common management saying. Most line managers in large corporations are focussed on market share rankings and top line sales figures. Chart after chart of many investor presentations often repeat that same message, look how big we are. But a simple “We want to bet the biggest” is unlikely to be a compelling strategy to investors. How are you going to turn that size into shareholder return?

Listen to yourself

Most data charts are cluttered with numbers that hide the actual message that you want to convey. So next time, listen to what you actually say when you walk people through the chart. Next, try to design a chart that only contains the numbers and items you spoke about, leave everything else out. It does not matter that you do not have the full comprehensive analysis on the screen, what matters is that your message comes out.

Slides = confidence booster

Most clients give an almost perfect verbal investor or sales pitch in our first briefing meeting. Somehow, in one on one meetings it is easy to connect with the 1-person audience, and construct a compelling story with a natural flow.

As soon as the number of people increases, something goes wrong.  Luckily we have our presentation slides projected big on the wall to remind us to get on with telling our story just like we did in the 1-on-1 meeting.

And here is the secret of the professional presentation designer: I often follow that first raw 1-on-1 pitch very closely in my story flow design. But do not tell anyone.

Two types of detail

1. A tangent that distracts from the overall story, especially confusing for a novice audience who comes in completely cold to what you want to say
2. A deep dive that serves as an example to support a major point in your presentation.

Audience perspective

The PowerPoint or Keynote slide sorter view with the small thumb nails is a good proxy for how the audience will see your slides. But sometimes, they are even worse off as in this image by Ali Eslami.



While I would not go as far as recommending to fill the top of the slide with all the important content, it is true that this is the part of the slide that will get the most visibility. At least write the message clearly in the headline, rather than using the space for a descriptive title.

Perspective

Have a look at this image (I did not buy it, so cannot embed it). The tilted but aligned rows of numbers in different font sizes give an instant depth effect. You can easily replicate this in PowerPoint or Keynote.

Twitter IPO presentation review

The Twitter IPO presentation is posted online. Overall it looks good and very professional, here are my thoughts on how it could have been even better (comments in random order):

UPDATE: The official presentation has been taken down, it is still out there on YouTube:

• The whole story is structured around a description of Twitter, what do we do, how do we make money, how are we going to grow. It could have been pitched more to the point: why is Twitter such a great company to invest in. This would have changed the flow of the story significantly
• For knowledgeable investors, there are a number of huge elephant-in-the-room questions about Twitter: the biggest one being, how are you going to make money? The presentation should have included hints to the answer to that question upfront in the presentation, and elaborate on it more during the presentation (the CFO only gets to the meat around 27 minutes into the talk, many potential investors might have tuned out by then).
• The presentation is full of social media speak: engagement, driving conversation, rich media experiences, content, etc. To an industry insider, the sentences make the exact point, but to an audience who might be tuning in and out (watching the presentation online, while now and then checking the email inbox in another tab), this creates too much white noise to which the brain pays limited attention.
• The look and feel. Twitter has an incredibly powerful branding (colour blue and the bird). It could have been used more prominently in the slides. Not by increasing the side of the logo, but by using the graphical language in the actual content of the presentation. 
• Using the actual embedded Tweets in the presentation is good, but the small print makes them hard to read for the audience. Also complicated conversations (a celebrity chefs replying to a person preparing for a dinner party for example) do not really come across, or worse, the audience is trying to read all the stuff that is going on on the screen (windows, tweets, hashtags) and loses the audio narrative that drivers the big point home. A better solution would have been a tiny representation of the actual Tweet with an extreme close up of the content that actually matters.
• The 16:9 aspect ratio leaves some canvas blank on the tiny 4:3 screen of this 1990s video delivery platform of the Retail Roadshow service. For an IPO this size, they should have resized the slides.
• The energy of the presenters (CEO, CFO) is held back a bit sometimes. In some sections, it flares up. For example: the interesting statistics about Tweets during TV shows, or the CEO closing remarks about the importance of the platform that can give everyone a voice.
• Some very interesting messages are not reinforced by explicit slides. I found interesting for example that on Twitter, advertisers can target people by their actual interests in life, while traditional advertisers have to derive/guess these interests from demographics information. A big point, it deserves a slide. Another example: the majority of Twitter users are outside the US, while international ad revenue is a fraction of the US one, again a point that can be made in a slide, ideally with some growth curve that shows that it is not unreasonable to assume that international ad revenue is catching up to US levels fast.
• Video is used only in the beginning of the presentation (mainly portraying the founders), it could have been used throughout the presentation.  Interviews with people, or snap shots of important live events that were broken on Twitter. The video animation of the spread of the Obama-4-more-years Tweet was amazing to watch, and only popped up in a small window.

Overall, Twitter comes across as a company that is organised and diligently working to monetise its user base and make a decent profit from advertising. But maybe it could have upped the story and add the ambition to do something amazing to the Internet, or even humanity, and remind us of that at the end of the presentation with a closing by the CEO, and not a simple thank you for your attention after the financial slides. A bit more courage!

Crappy screen, crappy impression

When you invite people over in your office and you run a pitch presentation on a 10 year old screen with a stretched aspect ratio, pixelated images, and burned in colours you are not leaving a very good impression.

LCD screens are not very expensive today, and the right cables plus a bit of tweaking with screen and laptop settings will give a razor sharp picture. Maybe it is time for a meeting room upgrade.

Other quick wins: removing used coffee cups, empty cookie boxes, de-greasing the screen remote, eliminating chewed-on pens and used stationary, open the windows.

First impressions count.

Months in advance

Waiting with the preparation for your presentation until the last minute is not a good idea. At 3AM at night before the 9AM meeting, you are not the most creative person in the world.

The other extreme is useless as well. Preparing for a big presentation months ahead will not help you get better results. When the content is not ready, none of your colleagues are focused on it, you are simply freewheeling and wasting your time.

Sometimes I see the long lead time in big companies that prepare for a big investor day. Work starts 3 months before the deadline, but people only start to focus for real 4 weeks in advance.

And yes, the best option is somewhere in the middle: start a few weeks (up to 6) before with thinking about what you want to say. Put it aside, get back to it, maybe design one slide all the way to the end in the look and feel you want, and slowly iterate your way to presentation day.

Personal chemistry

Now you hear it from VC Fred Wilson himself: personal chemistry is hugely important in the VC pitch process. What does it mean for your presentation? That your body language and interaction in the meeting are as important (maybe even more important) than the actual content of the slides.

A pitch meeting is an excuse for a venture capitalist to figure you out. How are you to work with?

PowerPoint web app

After my quick review of Keynote and its new web app version, I went back to check out the Microsoft PowerPoint web app, which is free to use for anyone with a Microsoft Sky Drive account.

Overall the look and feel of the app is similar to the desktop version, interactions are reasonably snappy, but there are a few very simple roadblocks towards making this a credible alternative to the desktop version. I did not bother to go into a more detailed review at this stage:

1. Fonts. If you used custom fonts in a presentation designed on your desktop, they will not show up in the web app (I use a Mac so I cannot embed fonts inside a PowerPoint file). This is a showstopper: it is very difficult to edit a presentation when you cannot see what you are doing, and completely kills the option of using the browser to present your slides.
2. Data chart. You cannot edit or create them. No use for a business presentation.

 We are heading in the right direction, but are not there yet.