Slides -> Text -> Slides

Most project presentations consist of slides ripped from the project working documents. Pages you used to learn and discover things to analyze and make conclusions. They are not the best visuals to communicate the project outcomes to outsiders.

• Their layout is likely to be messy and detailed, designed to be read at close distance

• The structure of your project document is likely to be methodological, like a workplan that makes sure you cover all the bits of work required.

Here is an alternative approach to make your final presentation:

1. Leave your project working papers for what they are

2. Write a long-hand text (1 page) that explains what the conclusions and next steps are, supported only by facts that are critical in supporting the recommendations. (Not a “this is what we did” paper)

3. Now, make a completely new slide deck based on just that text document

The crop of Trump's post attack picture

This image will go in the history books anytime the election of 2024 will be discussed. Image credit: Evan Vucci , image analysis: David Altizer

The trick here is cropping. A good photographer will have a good first start when snapping the image, but adjusting things slightly afterwards can add a lot.

Stock image 2.0

Stock images can be cheesy and cliche, and the current AI image generators are trained on tons of stock images. So if you ask for an image using a stock-image-like prompt, you will get a stock image…

Stock images can happen to the best of us, above, SlideMagic had a go at “a happy group of young adults taking selfies”.

Quick makeover: our high-tech industry matters

I saw the following slide coming by in my Twitter feed (original post):

Here are some things I fixed:

• Message in the title

• 19.7% -> 20%

• Simplification of the labels

(For those of you interested in the political context: Israel is fragmented in many population groups, the Israeli high-tech sector which is mostly secular, pro-democracy, situated around Tel Aviv, and not really represented in the current government is making the case that it generates a big chunk of the Israeli economy and is bank rolling many other sectors.)

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Version 3.1.8.

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It's just a draft

When quickly putting a draft presentation together, it is tempting to not spend any effort at all on design and layout. “We can always fix that later”.

I would argue the opposite. Make the draft look as good as the final product will be. It sets the entire mood for the project. Looking at messy / ugly charts is not a big motivation to do great work. Messy / ugly charts encourage people to add bullet point and too much text, because you can always remove it later.

The good news is that a simple chart with simple content does not take a lot of effort to design properly. Fix proportions, alignment and colors and everything looks great in a few clicks.

(Pro-tip: use SlideMagic for your draft documents)

Data chart labels: inside or outside?

This post on the F1 Instagram account has an interesting solution to the labels of a data chart:

• When the column is tall enough, the label is put inside with a contrasting white font color

• If not, the label is put on top, if possible with a font color that matches the column

The advantage is that this enables you to make the column graph taller as a whole (no need to budget extra space for the labels), and it is easer to put a background image as most labels (in tall columns) have enough contrast against them.

The vertical orientation of the labels though…

Image cliches

See below a screenshot of a news article discussing a pipeline review of a pharmaceutical company. Some drugs will be cut and the editor added an image of a worker chopping a tree.

Not sure about this. For this type of publication and news, another cliche image of the main entrance of the corporate building with a big logo might have been more appropriate.

Political ad makeover

Here is an attempt to redesign a Nikki Haley Instagram ad. I removed the bar charts (with the skewed axes) and added images to make the viewer really visualize the 2 scenarios.

I added the following slide to the SlideMagic library, search for “Biden” in the app and it will show up. Alternatively, find it here for download. Pro subscribers can convert slides to PowerPoint.

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An update

I have not been posting for a while here. As you know, I am based in Tel Aviv, and the attacks of October 7 made it impossible for me to continue and write a frequent “happy blog post” as if nothing happened.

This blog is about presentation not politics, so I won’t start a discussion here that repeats what has already been said everywhere. When reading and listening to all these opinions, keep this in mind: everything changed on October 7. Whatever you thought on October 6, needs to be reevaluated and reconsidered. Old narratives don’t work anymore. Whatever side your on.

I am continuing to work incredibly hard on my other startup in the medical field, where I try to tame “chatty” generative AI bots to provide disciplined and structured information which is not obvious at the moment. The results are actually very promising.

My blog was always about spontaneous ideas that came up during my work in presentations that go online without much though or planning. I spend a little less time in the world of presentations at the moment, but will try to start posting again slowly. I also owe users a few bug fixes in SlideMagic.

Training AI on presentations?

ChatGPT is good at writing fluent text because there is lots of quality text around on the Internet to train it on. Most text online is at least grammatically correct, and a subset of online content is of some decent quality at a story level (books, reports, professional news websites, etc.) . Midjourney can make up great images because there are lots of images around to train it on, they do not even have to be that good in terms of composition, the pixels in an image add up to an accurate representation of something.

Now with presentations though…. There are fewer of them around online, and most of these are actually not that good. Even if you were to feed let’s say McKinsey’s entire archive of decks into an AI model, would it be able to produce a McKinsey-style deck based on a prompt? Maybe. But the result would be a consulting-style, dense document, not an engaging pitch deck.

AI's strength: categorizing

In 2023 the power of ChatGPT is not in automating extremely complicated tasks, but taking out the daily hassle of smaller things. For presentations, one of my favorites are translating long-hand text into tables of short points. “Please summarize the pros and cons of both options discussed in the following text”. What you get back ia a bird’s eye view of all the elements of the story. Often, the first thing an old-fashioned presentation designer does on a piece of paper.

Combining column and line charts

Below is an interesting chart from McKinsey. It combines a column chart with a line chart. The chart only works when a column has a reasonable size though.

I am not aware of any presentation software that can produce these (including SlideMagic), so this might have been bespoke illustration work.

Link of the original post.

Abundance of data, now what?

Recently, I started writing code to analyse data from all kinds of financial and healthcare data APIs. The amount of information is endless. Most data sources have some sort of dashboard that allows you to slice and dice data in any way or form you want.

Still, the skill to make sense of this all is pretty much the same as it was 30 years ago.

I remember building a lot of company valuation models where I would sit on the buy side of an M&A transaction. As a buyer, I had to rely on outside information and focus on the data that matters. Often, I found that my model was more accurate than the one of the analyst on the sell side, who lost herself in the abundance of data available.

My workflow in the new abundance of data:

1. Use some sort of dashboard to explore what types of data is available

2. Use a spreadsheet as a napkin to scribble analyses

3. Code the analysis on a small scale

4. Scale up the analysis to a full scale

The crucial step is number 2.

The agenda deck

Here is one use for a slide deck: keep a meeting organized.

Yesterday I saw someone preparing a meeting with the following ingredients:

• Zoom, i.e., hard to manage

• Content that can spark heated debates

• Lots of participants…

• …and participants who would like to say a lot

A simple slide deck that might not be essential to get the messages across but organized the preparation and will organize the meeting was the solution. All points are covered (once) and will be discussed in an agreed order

Organized randomness

While working on my 9xchange site, I used one of my approaches to present a document. “Pages” that sit randomly on a table or surface (see below).

I use this technique as well for the banner image of this blog, see below.

This effect is very easy to make. Take an empty slide / page in any presentation app. Save the document you want to show as individual images (good old screenshots will do as well). Drag the images on to the slide and tilt them. Add a little drop shadow behind them.

Things are not as random as they seem though:

• The angles of the pages need to look interesting, not all the same, not too different

• The page need to be semi-readable (i.e., not upside down)

• Key headings should be visible and very readable

• You need to decide whether to let pages bleed off the page, keep them 100% in the frame. It will create very different effects

• You should select pages that look varied, and interesting and are presentative of the content of the document you want to show.

Sounding like ChatGPT

Here is a headline from last night’s GOP candidate debate: Christie accusing Ramaswamy of “sounding like ChatGPT”

We might hear this more often in the future when it comes to debates and presentations. Things that make you sound like ChatGPT:

• Highly structured stories: intro, your supporting points, the wrap up

• Very polite language

• Zero human emotion, humor, anger, cynicism, fatigue

• No spontaneous tangents

• Arcs of a few paragraphs each

You get the point. It is similar to “sounding like a marketing content writer”, a style that has been around a bit longer.

Not another...

When your headline says that your product is not another [FILL IN PRODUCT CATEGORY], the audience will believe that it actually is one…

By René Magritte(1898-1967) - Image taken from a University of Alabama site,”Approaches to Modernism”;: [1], Fair use (Old-50)