Presentation design principles

The more I work with SlideMagic, the more I realise that it is not really a presentation design tool in itself, it is a tool that supports a philosophy how people in corporations should communicate with slides. Ultimately, I might write all this down in a more organised way, but hey, why not use this blog post to throw out my ideas.

• Soul. Presenters should be given the stage to be themselves, be convincing, use human language.  
• Efficiency. The big objective is to cut the amount of time that is wasted on presentations / corporate communication:
  • Time to prepare slides.
  • Time to deliver a presentation
  • Time to understand what the presenter actually wants to say
• Aesthetics. Ugliness pollutes the work environment: cheap, disorganised, second tier. Every corporate communication needs to look decent. 

How do we get there, and how does SlideMagic help?

• A small, simple set of presentation "Lego" bricks, a visual language with very few words. It is similar to English. "Business English" that 2 non-native English speakers use to communicate actually requires a very small vocabulary. 
  • They are easy to learn. Most people do not get past the level of bullet points in PowerPoint/Keynote because they don't want to, they do not have to courage to venture into the advanced features of the software. SlideMagic is simple enough to learn that people can push themselves and go beyond the bullet points
  • It removes a source of writers' block: no procrastination and thinking what advanced slide layout to create. In business, you actually only need a few concepts to express your ideas and SlideMagic enables you to create them. (A list, a table of pros/cons, a contrast, a progression in time, etc.)
  • Uniform layout: it always looks good, the audience know where to look for what, the designer knows where to put stuff. Uniformity is not boring, it is useful in business communication
• A disconnect from software that is used to write reports, slide documents, and spreadsheets. At first, this might look like a disadvantage: not being able to copy past your spreadsheet across. But, starting from that clean sheet of paper makes you focus on creating a slide that says what you want it to say, not a slide that shows page 53 of your analysis.
• Elimination of typography/design freedom to set margins, padding, title positions, etc. It is too hard to get it right, and too easy to get it wrong for the layman designer

What I am trying to get people to do in corporation is work really hard on their projects in PowerPoint, Excel, to find the right answer and recommendations. That can take months. But preparing the presentation to communicate the findings should take not more than a couple of hours.

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Image: Wikipedia