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)

If AI gives poor results...

…when you prompt it to generate your presentation, maybe you are on to something new! AI generators predict what to write based on information it ingested before.

Now what if your AI generator comes up with a brilliantly written pitch?

Write the deck from scratch

It can take months to get the results of your strategy project, or your business plan. And along with it, your pitch deck has evolved as well. You take it out for every meeting.

A refreshing approach: rewrite the pitch deck (not the business plan of course) from scratch for your next meeting. My guess is that it should only take you 3 hours, since you did all the work over the previous months. A fresh story line, and only charts to support your messages, rather than provide backup data. No risk, if it didn’t work you will always have your old one, but my predication is that that one will start to collect dust.

What does this marketing agency do?

I find the world of marketing and branding agencies very confusing. You ask them what they do, and you get a description of a process that sounds and looks very similar to everyone else you ask the same question. But in practice, people are actually very specialized. Defining the personality of a brand, creating the competitive strategic positioning of a company, making the pitch deck, generating leads, designing ads, running online campaigns, designing logos, etc .etc.

The best strategy to find out what people do is to ask them to describe a project, and see where in this whole jungle they played a role, and most importantly, at what stage in this description see you light up the eyes of the person you are considering working with.

Can people multi-task? A slightly different view

Scientists seem to agree that humans are not really able to multi-task. Checking your phone messages while driving, or replying to every email the second they pop up is not very healthy.

This got me thinking. The stereo types are as follows: the extravert manager proudly claims that the above rule is incorrect, she can easily maintain dozens of email, phone, and live conversations in parallel. The introvert coder thinks the above is absolutely true, the buzzing of the microwave in the background kills her concentration.

I think the manager is actually not multi-tasking that much, and the coder might do a bit of it. If you are a manager, your task is to juggle lots of people and keep everything moving. I would consider this as one task.

If you are coding, you might find yourself rewriting 10 different modules, updating a database, fixing the front end, all in one, all components are open in the editor and the system won’t work unless you fixed all of them. That’s a bit more than one task.

So, I think it all depends on what you all a task.

Memorizing things

This is an interesting video in which a bass player (Cici) explains how she copes with memorizing dozens of (cover) songs that she has not heard before in a short period of time. The lessons here can be applied to any performance, including a presentation.

The key is the memory shortcut: compressing lots of information into something short and “catchy” that is much more easy to remember than the individual bits and pieces. Examples:

• Grouping individual notes into shapes on the fretboard of a bass guitar

• Inventing an unusual description for the sound of a song (‘the carnival song’)

• Quick reminders of where songs are unusual, i.e., a break in a completely different musical style

• Reminders that are critical for the performance and hard to cover up: i.e., the whole bands needs to stop exactly at the same time on bar 64, or your instrument is actually starting the song solo, without the musical reference of the band to help you along.

Brain variables

In computer programming (and math), things are stored in variables. A variable has a name and can point to pretty much anything. A numerical value, a user, another piece of code, a device, a map, an image library.

The variable is a little memory shortcut to access information. In the world of presentations, our brain works with variables as well. Visual symbols that are a shortcut to a fragment of a story.

Used in a bad way. After you have given a presentation dozens of times, the slides in your deck become ‘variables’. The page becomes a trigger for you to deliver a piece of the story. It does not really matter what the slide actually says. The audience who sees this for the first time however, misses this context.

Used in a good way. When brainstorming a story line, I often write down pieces of my store on stickers. Each sticker contains a fairly cryptic description. “The lazy point”. “Flipping is not possible”. Meaningless to anyone but me. For me however, it is a very condensed way of putting a label on a section of my story, and enables me to move things around to try out different story lines quickly.

I tried the above brainstorm a few times in a group: writing very simple text bullets in an email and move things around. The other members of the group missed the context, started editing the bullets into full sentences, discuss these, and before you know it, you have a 5 page document that is worse than the original you wanted to improve.

Hearing the entire band

It is hard to communicate an idea for a new song without the help of the full band.

• When you play the basic idea on one instrument to someone else, that person misses the context that it is in your head: the result a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.

• The same can happen to you. You had that brilliant idea, but when you get back to your note book the next day, the scribbles sound like a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.

The same is true for your presentation. Your audience is missing the context that is in your head, and the slides / your story is the only thing they can rely on.

Writing the whole thing again in 30 minutes

Writing a good presentation is a process that takes time. There is the time to complete the analysis and make the graphs and tables, but also time to ponder the story and the flow.

If you somehow end up rewriting your whole deck in 30 minutes the day before the presentation, and leaving out many of the data charts that took you days to make, then it does not mean that you made mistakes, got it wrong, or wasted your time. You actually had to go through the whole loop in order to pull off that 30 minute rewrite.

Back into AI and machine learning

I looked briefly at Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for SlideMagic a couple of years ago, but never really pursued specific ideas. Recently, I revisited things and was surprised by the amount of progress that has been made. Not so much the actual technology itself, but more how accessible it is for anyone to use.

“AI” and “ML” are big buzz words at the moment and many of you are probably be wondering what it could mean for the industry you are working in. You read some blogs, books, watch some videos, but don’t really get it.

I would recommend to actively dive in and follow an online video course. The actual coding knowledge required is now very minimal, it is all about learning how to select and apply models. Sometimes, all the “AI” you need is basic statistics and regression. Sometimes, highly advanced image recognition software has already been cracked and can be used and accessed with a few lines of code.

Such a course is great fun, helps you understand what these technologies could really mean for your business, cuts through the buzzwords and makes you a better manager in case you are hiring people or service providers to build things for you.

Opportunity for freelance presentation designers?

Many of you readers are independent presentation designers. Having done a large number of online courses now, I think these udemy, coursera, etc. instructors could be great potential clients for you. Most of them talk through a set of poorly designed bullet point slides with a picture in picture video super imposed on them.

• These slides can obviously be improved, by a lot

• The narration and creative brief is there for you: the instructor gives verbal instructions as audio and often in a transcript

• These presentations can have a huge audience, and the overall visual quality can make a big difference in their marketing strategy: if the free sample lessons look really good, students will convert and buy the course

• As a presentation designer, you can specialize in a certain field: you start a self reinforcing loop: you understand the subject area better, you do better work, you can attract more work in that same speciality area as a result.

I myself don’t have the time to all this design work, therefore I leave it up to you :-)

A smart online instructor can do 2 things:

1. Outsource design work to a great freelance presentation designer

2. Do the slides herself, but in SlideMagic

The bullet point trap

How do we end up with so many presentations that are mainly slides with bullet points?

A pitch usually has 2 types of slides. The clear cut ones: head shots of the team, columns with revenue forecasts, pictures of the product, screenshots of the app, table of the budget.

Then there are the ones that are less clear, the ones that need to tell the story behind your idea. When we start off,:

1. we don’t exactly know what they need to say,

2. we don’t know exactly what they should look like

These are 2 big challenges. It is not obvious to craft the story line with messages, and after you did that, it is not obvious to design a slide that delivers the message.

What happens? We open a slide editor and start putting in sentences on slides, move slides around. We can’t think about design, because we don’t know the content of the slide yet. As a result, the default bullet point list becomes the design that actually sticks.

We work really hard on the messages, get our colleagues to comment on them, get our boss to “sign off” that exact message (after we added the qualifying comment on line 3). And more and more, the presentation starts to make sense to us (the writer). The slides become mental placeholders, and in our bullet point frame of mind, every new slide will look exactly like the previous one. This is the mental model we are working with.

How to break the trap?

Maybe don’t use presentation software to make that story line. Write things in a Word processor. Deliberately use short, grammatically incorrect sentences (‘The “we are bigger” point here’) to avoid discussions among colleagues to finalize sentences (like you would do in a legal contract).

Once that is done and agreed, you take the whole thing away and really start thinking what is the best way to visualize everything you have just written down. As soon as you start copying the bullets from the Word document, you know that you are on the wrong track.

6 months, then 30 minutes

We have been iterating a presentation for our new venture for months and months, and then just before we had to send out the first deck to a very serious potential partner, I re-wrote the whole pitch in just 30 minutes. New format, new colours, new sequence, new everything.

Unfortunately, you need those 6 months of pondering in order to pull of 30 minute trick. There are no shortcuts.

But on the positive side: if you have been using a deck for a very long time, you could give it a try and come up with a completely new visual approach for your story.

The brain is predicting

Here is an interesting article about how our mind works. The brain is constantly predicting impressions to save energy. It has a number of layers. A higher layer creates a prediction based o a lower layer. The lower layer can report inconsistencies to the layer above, in case we can go a level deeper.

This is probably the same mechanism that intuition uses, as long as we observe something that is in lie with our prediction, we maintain low energy mode, if things start moving apart, we add brain power.

Remember that this is how an audience will be looking at you when presenting.

Changing the engine while driving

This is the approach I take when making drastic changes to computer code, a presentation, or a spreadsheet. When you decide to turn a big piece of work upside down, you can’t simply tear up the whole thing. Instead, you change things carefully, constantly monitoring whether the program keeps functioning, and/or the spreadsheet still produces more or less the same answer. When it does, take the old stuff out bit by bit.

This is the only way to manage mistakes. If you changed 5 things and see that all of a sudden your average price per bottle is way off, you cannot tell which of the five is the culprit.

What if all of a sudden your boss, customer, or user wants an intermediate new version of the model. If you are mid-way in some major rewrite, you cannot produce it quickly.

Or, maybe you discover halfway through that the 2nd change of the 5 you pushed through actually does not make sense. Unwinding everything is hard.

Songs written in less than 20 minutes...

A clickbait link popped up on my phone with songs that were written in less than 20 minutes (I am linking to another post with the same subject).

Yes, these songs might have been written in 20 minutes, but I am sure that those 20 minutes are the result of years of practice, trying, and noodling by these musicians. All that effort that was built over a long time just fell in the right place.

I think this is true for every creative process, including presentation design and storytelling. In Hemmingway style: ‘gradually, then suddenly”, Seth Godin talks about it in “The Dip”, a tank filling up drop by drop until it finally bursts with great force.

Lost in translation

Many presentations are good because there are many steps involved between the “source” and the “receiver”

1. You have the story in your head as a complex set of ideas that are entangled and interdependent

2. You start writing it down in short hand, which require you to “flatten” the multi dimensional story into a sequence.

3. The sequence of bullet points now becomes a visualisation of your story. Instead of listening to a complex verbal argument, your eyes glance through the points and you can change the order at lightning speed. Cut, paste, slice, dice, until it looks good to you (without taking into account how it sounds).

4. Many people stop here and jump to stage 6

5. Now, chunks of this “visual” bullet point story get translated into visuals, another transformation: sentences, words, paragraphs get turned into visual compositions and graphs.

6. The presentation to the audience is no longer your story, it is you translating the visuals back into sequential verbal text.

7. The audience listens to the sound track of your slides and tries to reassemble the story that was in your head when you started the whole process.

Photo by Eirik Skarstein on Unsplash

How to hire a design agency

Hiring a creative agency is a bit different from negotiating with a building contractor or a car dealer. And talking to a small 1 - 2 person firm as a different story than dealing with a large design firm. Let’s talk about hiring a small firm (I used to be one these myself).

A good designer is busy and can basically decide which projects to take on and which not. Good designers will be expensive, but there are limits to budgets that people have for creative work, so besides “can you afford me” there is a range of other factors which makes a good designer pick you.

What is a good designer after: delivering beautiful work for clients that inspire and are fun to work with.

• Crazy deadlines, “you know how this works, we really need something yesterday”. If you are not an existing client, is unlikely to fly. Working under extreme time pressure is not only unpleasant, it also hurts the quality of the work you can deliver. If the designer is will to accept this, it might be bad sign for the buyer

• Disrespect: showing up late for calls, not replying to emails, taking other calls are all indications for how it is to work with you and whether you are going to pay the bill (in time) when all the work is finished

• Taste mismatch, if the sort of examples you discuss totally do not match the style of the designer, the project is a no go.

• Getting pushed outside of your speciality, “you would have no problem finding someone who can turn this into video right?” Any good designer would refuse this since the end result is almost guaranteed to be suboptimal.

• Creative freedom, if your hands are tied, and you need to follow someone else’s ideas literally, you will get bad end products.

• “We are big, and can give you lots of work, so please discount”. Big design agencies need to fill their fixed cost base of designers with a predictable work stream, the freelance designer who is running out of hands to work with has no such issue.

• “Can you give us some ideas, examples [free of charge]?”. If the designer agrees, she is not busy.

• Very complicated processes: lots of different people involved, lots of decision makers. Big design firms can deal with high maintenance clients via project managers and account managers and more managers. One person creative shops cannot.

A good designer is usually very busy, and very good in a highly specialized area of design. Make her excited work for you.

Photo by Tim Arterbury on Unsplash

Dreading the start

You have that big presentation coming up and you cannot get yourself to get started on it. Too many distractions, and too few ideas what to actually do.

Some ideas:

• Open a little (paper or digital) scratch pad somewhere and start jotting down ideas weeks before your presentation. Presentation design and storytelling are creative processes that need some brain incubation time. Your subconscious mind will chew on ideas you started without you realizing it. It is possible to crank out slides the night before the presentation, it is not possible to crank out creative ideas under last minute time pressure. Start early, even with scribbles and notes

• If you have a bit of time, postpone looking at existing decks and start fresh. Maybe the thought of having to iterate that same old boring, stale presentation is preventing you from getting into it.

• The other extreme: make one really great “killer” slide for which you have a clear idea and push it all the way to the finished product. Ignore story flow and its overall context, just make it. This ice breaker or sneak peek of what slides in your deck could look like might get you over that initial writers block and get motivated to get started.

Forget about folders

Filing and categorisation systems are a pain. It is tedious to put things in the right folder on your hard drive, put the data of a file in year, month, day format to make them sort, and final versions always become final final, final final final, really final v2. Google replaced Yahoo’s internet categorisation with search.

Back in the 1990s there was a Partner in McKinsey’s London office who gave up on filing (mostly paper at that time) and simply shoved everything chronologically in his cupboard, all clients mixed. Finding something was as simple as looking into your calendar and going back to the appropriate time. Usually, you roughly remember. It takes a tiny bit longer to find something, but save a ton of time doing, and nothing falls through the cracks because of a misplacement.

The same strategy might also work for your digital files in 2021. Your calendar becomes the index to dig something up from the “pile”.

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash