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Creativity
In some projects I am literally stuck with lack of inspiration. The slides don't look good, the concepts don't pop out. To get going again I actually send the draft slides to the client, who inevitably will come back to me with "hey, we are not there yet". But in addition, it is often the few other comments that she makes, that provide a way out of the impasse.
It is hard to force creativity....
Now and then I encounter a PowerPoint presentation at a client which is clearly the work of a designer who comes from the world of Adobe / brochures / infographics. Here are the differences with my style:
Business presentation design is a blend of practicing good design, and making compromises to deal with the practicality of working with lots of non-designers. Being able to deal with frequent changes, keeping design standards up (also on page 5 to 20), and making sure that everyone can make decent looking edits in the presentation.
I am sure that Adobe Illustrator designers can write a similar post about PowerPoint designers trying to edit a basic vector illustration...
Some tips on creativity from a book on music production that I recently read: Music Habits, The Mental Game, by Jason Timothy. Most of them are applicable to any creative activity, and that includes presentation design. Here are some that stuck with me (in random order):
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When I have to write something (this blog post for example) or need to come up with a visualization for a tricky concept, background music disturbs me. It like the melody of the music highjacks my brain and takes things in a different direction than the storyline in front of me.
Cleaning up charts (make-over work), or building financial/economical models works great with music in the background though.
That's maybe why many people end up writing things late at night: finally it is quiet.
Image from WikiPedia
Design is all about uncovering patterns and proportions that are somehow hidden in the cosmos. Architects, music composers, graphics designers, chefs, film directors, painters, authors, each is hoping to uncover a genius composition that has been hiding in plain sight for a few billion years.
Recently, I was introduced to the patterns that jazz guitarist Pat Martino is using to teach chord shapes on the guitar. The diagram in the video (if you are interested) shows how he uses turning triangles and squares (visual objects) to construct chords (audio).
In other videos, Pat explains how he uses words as musical inspiration. For example, he assigns a note to each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, and then creates words ("beautiful" for example) to see what they sound like.
CEOs are banning PowerPoint presentations from meetings to improve company culture:
“From: Bezos, Jeff
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 20014 6:02PM
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Re: No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam
A little more to help with the question “why.”
Well structured, narrative text is what we’re after rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint.
The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than “writing” a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.
Powerpoint-styel presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.
Jeff”
“During his first two months as Diageo’s North American chief marketing and innovation officer, James Thompson counted every single presentation slide he was exposed to in meetings. The final tally was 12,000, which to him was way too many.
”It stops conversation. It makes people feel secure they’ve communicated what they wanted to. But, in fact, it doesn’t move anything on,” he said. So he has instituted a PowerPoint ban in some meetings. “Just talk to me, please” is his plea. His goal is to ensure his marketing team is “not totally buttoned-up all the time,” he said. “We just want people to be at their best, and that is usually when they are able to think and respond and build rather than sell.””
Bad presentations are bad for company culture. And boring the audience is just one aspect of this. People forget the other ones:
Presentation documents have become the language that corporate management uses to agree on ideas, and it is a pretty inefficient one. It is time for a change. I don't think completely banning visuals in meetings will solve the issue. A better alternative is to ask employees to use a super simple presentation tool to back up their pitch to colleagues and I am working on that.
"I just need an hour of your time to sit together to improve my slides. I know exactly what I want to say in tomorrow's presentation and all the slides are ready, they just need to be more visual"
I get this type of request often, and I usually turn it down. In one hour, 24 hours before the presentation, you can fix the layout of the slides a bit, but this is where it ends...
A proper presentation design process needs to go through a number of stages:
It takes more than 1 hour, it needs more than 24 hours, it is not a polish of the existing presentation, which will have vanished totally in the process.
Image from Wikipedia
Back in the days as a junior analyst at McKinsey you would often see a deck or listen to a presentation that you would not understand completely. Being 23, I usually kept quiet and assumed that this was my problem, not the presenter's.
Now at more than double that age, I still have the same issue: I often don't get why something is so special, so unique, so difficult to do from reading a slide or listening to the presenter. My IQ has not changed much (it probably got worse), and yes I have learned things, but the biggest difference that I have gained the confidence to know that it is not my fault. It is OK to ask a question that might sound trivial.
Photo by Matthew Paul Argall
I have been touring the city of Rome for a few days with my son which was great fun. It is amazing to see how tourists gather around sights that guides and guide book say are famous or beautiful. I snapped the double helix Bramante staircase in the Vatican museum (picture below), my guide was surprised I wanted to see it and he had to look for it. You can see on the picture that not many other people were interested.
There are a number of starting points for my presentation design projects that almost always result in great presentations:
Difficult starting points:
Never a dull moment in my profession!
Image from WikiPedia
I have argued many times before here that design work on small screens is difficult. It is OK to fix typos in a presentation on a tablet or phone, but the small screen is not the right interface to focus your creative energy. This was the reason that my presentation design app SlideMagic launched as a web app rather than as "mobile first".
The issue is not constrained to graphics design. Recently I started venturing in iPad apps that aim to be perfect replicas of ancient analog synthesisers. The Moog Model 15 iPad app is a technical wonder by packing so much sound in a small device, and offering a graphical user interface that enables you to connect wires everywhere.
Keith Emerson in front of a Moog synthesizer (image from WikiPedia)
The problem is the lack of screen real estate. You have to scroll constantly to go from one end of a wire to another. You cannot get the full picture of what you are doing. An I think that the experience would not have been much better on a laptop either, still to small. You need a very large monitor to get the same experience as standing in front of the actual instrument.
This goes further I think. Laptops, and before that, crappy 768 pixel, 80x25 character monitors were big contributors to the design mess in business presentations. A big empty white board works better to design charts than a small A4 piece of paper.
For good design you need a big canvas, and my prediction is that technology will evolve, screens get better, thinner, crisper, pencils and style get closer to the real thing, but if a user interface stays physically small, it cannot beat the blackboard.
I now have spent more hours taking notes and sketching with my iPad Pro 9.7 + pencil combo (read the earlier post). Things are still not perfect.
The big issue is instant availability of your canvas. Keep the screen on continuously and you drain your battery in less than an hour. Do auto-power off and you find your self do this for every single scribble you want to make 1) press home button 2) touch id 3) touch canvas to activate the writing surface. The latter is probably an issue in the Evernote Penultimate app, which has 2 modes: One where you view notes, and one where you can edit them.
There is hope though. Most of these issues are solvable, and some even via software. We will get there in the end.
Image from WikiPedia
I heard the same thing from 2 sources this week. When we design, we are not really creating something new, but we are uncovering a secret that was there hiding in plain sight for billions of years.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal in the context of building innovative businesses:
John Frusciante, guitarist of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, on creating music:
Image from WikiPedia
A story line skeleton is hardly ever the best briefing for a presentation. It is useful for an analyst who has the fill in the missing pieces of data, not to convey a powerful sales or investor message.
The better approach is to set back and talk things over, that's when big ideas come out.
Image from WikiPedia
Usually big meetings to collect input on a presentation draft are an inefficient use of time. Conversations get side tracked, people make ambiguous comments, introverts who might have intelligent points to add do not speak up (and vice versa). For smaller comments, it is best to have them send to you by email.
There is one exception though: when the overall way to pitch the story is not clear, you have to discuss it with everybody present. Otherwise you end up going back and forth in numerous iterations with a fundamental re-write of the whole pitch. When you do run this kind of meeting, try to keep it focussed on that subject: the overall approach to the story, and not editing sentences and headlines on individual slides.
After McKinsey, I now spent almost 14 years as a freelance designer. And my work has gone through a pattern that many others are experiencing as well:
In the beginning you run after every piece of work you can get your hands on, invests tremendous amount of energy in projects to over-deliver, producing work that would not meet today's quality standards (I sometimes cringe when I encounter my early design work). At dinner parties you have a highly elaborate pitch of what you do, and what you don't do (that story changes monthly).
After a while your work pipeline starts building up. Reputation spreads, and happy customers come back to you for more work. You become more efficient at what you do. And at some time, that efficiency starts eating into your work. You try to please everyone and the only way to do it is to start cutting corners. The result: stress and work that is not as great as it could be. Designs still look a lot better than when you started out (you have learned a lot along the way), but the sparkle in the eye of the client is less bright than it used to be. I hit that point a couple of years ago.
I made a conscious decision to change things. Only accept projects that I knew I could add great value, and take things all the way. This means saying "no" to a lot of distractions. Creative work requires a lot of concentration and even the shortest coffee chat can render an entire morning useless. Out go:
The result: much better work and happier clients. The problem is that you have to go through the first 2 phases in order to be able to pull of the third one.
Image taken from WikiPedia
Most presentation design processes go through the following circle:
The successful presentation design project goes further: cutting things back to reach that level of freshness of stage 1. But there is a danger of cutting too much. Throughout the process, the team has gotten so familiar with the material that they have lost track of the starting point of a cold audience. Things that might seem totally obvious to them (after 2 months of work) are not that clear to a first time audience.
Was all the data digging a waste of time? No, it is good to get your facts straight, as long as you don't lose the creativity you had in that first kick off meeting.
As a professional presentation designer, I usually come in in stage 3, lots and lots of data, and my kick interview brings back the thoughts that came up in stage 1. An unfair advantage of the outsider...
Art: Kandinsky: Circles in a circle, 1923
I have tried many tablet note taking apps, but have gone back to the pencil. And of the many pencils I have tried, the Lamy 2000 propelling pencil is my absolute favourite. It is made out of plastic, but has a great feel to it, it has the right thickness, the right balance in the hand and looks great! The origins of the pencil go back to the mid 1960s when the Lamy pencil called in the help of a Gerd Mueller who has previously been designing for the Braun electronics company.
Marketing, Investor relations, corporate communications, business development, everyone likes to have a say in the design of the next keynote address of the CEO at that important industry conference.
When the team "works" on a presentation, you usually get the following pattern:
Design by committee also does not work for presentations. Here is why it goes wrong:
A better approach:
Art: Claude Bernard and his pupils. Oil painting after Léon-Augus Wellcome
Some of you out there are probably still afraid of using a new presentation design tool that is still in beta for live presentations. Here is another way to get started: use SlideMagic as your sketch board.
Many of you use bullet points to sketch out the content of a presentation. Maybe in a word processor, maybe in PowerPoint. The problem is that once you have iterated those bullets and everyone agrees to them, it is hard to turn those lists into visual designs.
Here is where SlideMagic could come in handy. It is very easy to set up charts that are not lists: a quick table, a quick contrast between two options, a quick 2x2. Jot your ideas down, and if you set your accent colour and logo, the whole sketch board will probably look better than a finished end product in PowerPoint.
Use SlideMagic to form your first ideas of your presentation, until the moment has arrived when you "have to" translate the designs to PowerPoint or Keynote. You can of course, but I think many of you will find that it is much easier to stick to SlideMagic after trying a few pages.
Art: an unfinished painting by William Berryman, created between 1808 and 1816
