"Producing yourself"

I just returned from a short Passover holiday, a first in a year. (Hotels, restaurants, here in Israel are now completely open while virus cases continue to fall towards zero).

During the break I watched a Master Class series by Alicia Keys about “producing yourself”. In music production there are usually 2 roles: the creative contribution of the artist, and the editing and arranging part by a producer. They usually happen in 2 spaces, the artist is in the recording part of the studio, the producer sits on the other side of the glass in the control room.

There is an interesting parallel to presentation design: I think most presentation designers are producing themselves, doing both the creative and the editorial part, pretty much like Alicia does.

At least, they are supposed to do so. In practice, when it comes to presentations, people are more arrangers than creators.

How does Alicia go about balancing both side of the process?

• She creates to completely different mindsets, amplified by the different locations: the vocal booth, the control room

• In creative mode she lets herself go completely, mistakes are OK, crazy things are OK (similar philosophy to corporate brainstorming sessions)

• But, she actually prefers to be totally alone, in order to “embarrass” herself freely, and to avoid being put in the position of an artist who has to entertain and perform (completely the opposite of a corporate brainstorming session).

• She records and captures everything, if you want to capture a creative idea in the flow / moment, you are too late. (As opposed to the brainstorm flip chart where someone else tries to capture and rephrase ideas that multiple people are “shouting” out).

• After all this, she takes a break, goes to the control room, and listens back with a completely different mindset.

I have helped clients on a number of occasions where they needed a presentation for a “risk free” internal audience. We could go for bolder visuals, colors, concepts. In the end, that bolder presentation often ended up being the backbone of a presentation for an external audience.

Limited time...

This chart lays out the philosophy behind SlideMagic: spend more time pitching, less time editing. There are only a limited number of productive hours in a day, it is a waste to spend them on slide design…

• If you are preparing for an all-or-nothing pitch, you free up time to really, really rehearse your story.

• If that quarterly report is sitting on the top of the to-do list and preventing your from doing other things, get it out of the way quickly.

P.S. I have add this slide to the database here, or search for ‘slidemagic’ in the desktop app to use it in your own presentation

Off topic - teaching kids how to code

As I went through to the process of refreshing my 1990s computer science degree, I am now trying to help to teach my teenage kids the basics of coding as well. Not as obligatory homework, but something that is fun to do. Some observations.

1. Unlike in 1986, it is actually very hard today to get a basic environment up and running to write a few lines of code. All the stuff you need to install. The HTML screen rendering complexity that is great to produce web sites on different devices, but an absolute pain to put something basic on the screen. So I actually need to deploy a fair share of my own coding horse power to build some basic functions that my kids can use to do something like plotting an ‘x’ in a coordinate system, reading keyboard inputs, getting code to wait for a few seconds. And there is of course the challenge of getting a small web site you build on your own machine to show up on a real URL.

2. I don’t believe in special kid programming languages or programming tools. I see the big problem with language for grown-ups as described in point 1, understanding the actual concept such as variables and loops is pretty much the same. And once kids get into it, they can continue to build out their skills that are useful in the real world, and are everywhere around them (inspecting code in web sites they visit for example). So HTML, Javascript, and CSS it is.

3. Coding is all about doing. Watching videos or in-person lessons is boring. Doing algorithm homework-style problems is boring. You want to get that frog move across the screen, and you try everything to get it to work because you want to, not because you have to.

4. Learning how to learn from others online is an important skill. Answers posted online can be wrong, outdated, not relevant. Sifting through information overload and tolerating ambiguity is important.

5. I found that the key to getting kids started is the presence of interesting problems for them to solve. Here are a few:

   • Tools that solve complicated formulas that come in handy for math homework

   • Tools that generate practice questions to prepare for tests

   • Retro games (or game elements) on grids with a small resolution: get things to walk around, eat each other, etc.

   • Doing things with huge datasets. For example you can download all the English words in 5MB on your kid’s. machine, put it in an array, and let them have fun with it. (Scrabble cheating, other apps)

All great fun, especially now that we are pretty much stuck at home during the holidays.

Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash

Pretty template, ugly slide

Most corporate presentation templates are designed starting from an empty slide. The designer feels the urge to spice things up a bit with logos and other graphical elements. Now when you actually use that template (designed for a blank page) with everyday presentation content, things start to clash.

The same things must have happened to the designers at BMW, who forgot the license plate that would be plastered over the front of their new car design….

The next time you brief a designer for a new PowerPoint template, give her a full slide deck including content, let her create a design you like, then strip out all the elements and see what you are left with.

<!— Sponsored content: with SlideMagic, there is no need to worry about a presentation template that fits your corporate branding —!>

(Finally) free to really think

For the first time in months, I am spending more time designing slides than writing code as I am building up the template database. It is a great feeling to see all that hard work paying of now as I add one slide after another to the database at a very high speed.

This also puts me in a position to start thinking really what SlideMagic (maybe 3.0?) could do, now that I have a basic platform in place that can store/search templates, all listening to a uniform design layout. What if there are eventually thousands, and thousands of slides, keywords, concepts? Things can get interesting!

Yes, there is still the challenge of turning 2.0 into a proper company…

To be continued.

But it won't take that much time?

Many clients do not understand that, no, I really do not have time at the moment to do that small presentation design project, as I am focussing 100% on my coding efforts.

People understand that it is unreasonable to ask for a big project, but that small presentation fix, that should work right? It will only take a few hours.

Here is the problem with those few hours:

• The opportunity cost of those few hours can be huge, since coding a big feature in the app can take an entire day or more. Knowing that you have to spend a few hours on something else means you won’t even get started on it.

• Building on that: this small project might actually be an excuse to put off that major feature update

• Now that I am a bit out of the presentation design flow, what used to take me a few hours, could actually take a lot more time.

• A small design fix is not a big rewarding project, it is likely to be a fix: a small payment, not my best work, in short a distraction.

Photo by insung yoon on Unsplash

Taking a step back

I just returned from a wonderful bar mitzvah trip with my son that took me to all kind of car-related venues throughout Germany and Italy. Upon return I did two things: open the code of SlideMagic 2.0 to remember where I left things, and recording some musical ideas. Both were surprisingly positive.

Taking a break does wonderful things for creativity.

• Your brain continues to think / process thins in the background without you realising it

• Often, you dig yourself in a hole of small problems that make you lose the ability to see the big picture

• Rest is always a good thing.

I use this all the time in presentation design. A few weeks before the presentation deadline, I force myself to think really hard about the presentation. Make rough sketches, write down story lines. Then I put things away before working on the presentation in earnest at a later time. This small investment of time pays off handsomely later. The key here is to make a real effort in the beginning, not just a quick though experiment.

Image via WikiPedia

The art of procrastination

Waiting with things until it is too late to do them properly is not very good practice. But postponing the moment you open your computer to start making slides before you have a really good idea could be helpful. Take time to ponder different approaches.

In the video below, film score producer Tom Holkenborg gives his point of view from the world of music.

Cover image by Xu Haiwei on Unsplash

Communicating musical ideas

In my spare time, I like to play electronic musical instruments. Recently, I amassed all my courage together, and started writing my own music, and send it carefully to a few selected friends, forcing myself to feel the responsibility of creating something for an audience.

It is very hard to communicate a musical idea in raw form, and it feels a bit like the curse of knowledge. The expert cannot explain an idea because she has all the context in her head that others lack. When I tap a melody on the table, I hear a symphony, the audience hears tapping.

So, sending over a basic chord progression and a rough melody line with a plastic drum beat, some strings, and a piano is not cutting it. Now, what gave me some encouragement, is to try and play famous songs using exactly these tools, going the other way.

Let's see what happens.

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Cover image by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

Breaking the step-by-step guide

Most things we get taught are presented in a step-by-step sequence: history lessons starts with the stone age, kids need to play a boring flute before being allowed their guitar, presentation design goes from thinking about your audience, key messages, flow, charts...

As I am trying to refresh the coding knowledge that is still left from my 1990s computer science degree I now see how this approach totally does not work for me.

• Most concepts are not step by step, sequential. You need to increase your knowledge of all the steps involved gradually, rather than mastering step 1 100% before going on to step 2
• Brains get bored, and switching from skill training effort to another is a great way to expand your attention span.

Here are ways I sometimes dive deep into slide design, even at the beginning of a presentation:

• Often there is that one killer slide that you simply know has to be in the deck. Why wait?
• Nothing better to wake up a bored brain than quickly putting together a beautiful slide master with title pages, separators.
• "Sweat work" is another way to do something useful when creativity is stuck: plopping in a P&L, creating the team slide, all easy wins
• Super detailed comparison tables are nerdy slides that often don't make it past the appendix of a presentation, but, they put the entire story of a presentation on one page (yes, I know), and can serve as a great guide line for the story of the entire presentation, or as a check list to see that you have not forgotten anything. Better design that one first.

Hence, I stick to that zig zagging creative process.

PS. Think about this from your presentation's audience perspective as well. The logical, step-by-step, build up might work for a patient computer, not for easily bored humans.

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Cover image (of a Tel Aviv traffic jam) Photo by Jens Herrndorff on Unsplash

How to start a new presentation slide

When starting a new slide, most people think of what to write in it, then worry about composition which usually involves moving text boxes around so that everything still fits on one page.

Next time, start with the composition, then do the writing. Think how a few boxes and arrows can visualise common business concepts in a slide:

• Something is bigger than another
• Something is growing
• Torn between opposing forces
• Reinforcing loops
• Ideal fit or a mismatch
• Trade off
• Dead end
• A sequence

Put the shapes, align and distribute them, now add some text

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Cover image by dylan nolte on Unsplash

Starting to use the store myself

Recently, I have started to use the template store myself for the few bespoke design projects I still do for long standing clients (SlideMagic gave me a really attractive rate :-)). My hard drive is filled with 1000s of slides and still it is difficult to find a nice clean layout to use as a basis for slide number 1001.

Up until a few weeks ago, I started every slide pretty much from scratch, I have gotten pretty fast in setting up yet another 4x5 table grid. But even I can't beat search the store for "table" and re-download that slide again and hit the ground running.

I am continue to monitor which slides people decide to buy, and which slides are downloaded by subscribers. Many subscribers download a lot of slides right after they made the purchase, and then don't return for a couple of weeks. Initial downloads include slides that you can only use in very specific situations, like these sheep. They hardly ever download the same slide 2x. There could be 2 possible explanations:

• Less likely: after that $99 annual subscription, you better make sure you get what you paid for, maybe the store will stop running somehow before the 12 months are up.
• More likely: we have built up the habit of mining through old decks, and recycling slides into a new presentation.

As a designer who now uses its own store, I would encourage you to think Netflix, iStock, Spotify: your slides will always be there, and search is there to help you find the slide you need at the moment (and nothing else). Change your design process:

• From: open your consolidated SlideMagic deck (which took time to assemble from all the individual slides you had to download), pick 20 designs you think you are going to need, see how you can tell your story with these 20 designs
• To: scribble your story flow on a piece of paper, create a deck of empty slides with just titles, search the appropriate slide template on SlideMagic

It will take you less time, and you get better presentations. And remember: I am constantly adding new slides so your first burst download will run out of date soon.

Having said that, I am willing to look into a technical solution to combine multiple slide downloads in one deck, my commerce platform cannot handle that (yet).

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Cover image by Henrik Dønnestad on Unsplash

Finding inspiration via search

A very significant part of my efforts to get my template store up and running goes in its search engine. I am surprised myself how well it works. My bespoke client work is the test case for it, and whenever I start out on a new slide, I give the search engine a go, and voila, most of the times a suitable lay out pops up.

Business presentations are a bit like business English: you actually don't need a big vocabulary of layouts ("words") to make a decent deck. 

You can use the search engine to you advantage without shelling out a dollar to buy a slide. Simply search for a concept, and maybe you can "borrow" the design that comes up, or the search results remind you of slides you designed before.

Here are some examples of how you can use the search engine:

• Look for a business concept, anything to do with talking about the competition
• Find specific well known strategy frameworks: 7S, Porter forces, etc.
• Search for a specific layout: Venn diagrams, 2x2 matrices
• You need a slide to visualise 4 things: look for the number four
• And you can always try your luck with using SlideMagic as a stock image engine (try Stormtrooper), images on SlideMagic are free to re-use

I am monitoring the search terms people use closely. If a key concept is missing, I will add the slide, if a keyword does not match a suitable slide, I will fix that. At the moment, I am constraint by the search engine in the eCommerce platform that powers my site, which means that I need to work with keyword tagging of slides. As SlideMagic grows, I envision migrating to a custom search engine that can offer higher levels of intelligence. Ultimately, this will be the real differentiation of the site: coming up with the right slide layout on request.

Photo by Kyle Popineau on Unsplash

"Do you have a standard process?"

Some clients ask me. The answer: "no". Each situation and story is different. I jump back and forth between high level story line design to graphics design details to numerical analysis.

Is this the best approach to presentation design? Probably not, but I can pull it off for a two reasons: many years of experience, being a 1-person operation, mostly having 1 contact person at a client, and having clients that self-select, i.e., if they uncomfortable with this approach they would not choose to work with me.

As soon as you deal with multiple people, at different levels of experience, and an agency that tries to scale up, there is no escaping to a formal process with specific end products at specific times.

Business document production workflows

Production of documents and reports inside corporations is a hugely inefficient process, because of a number of reasons:

• Using the face-to-face meeting format to discuss small text edits
• Do zero preparation for such a meeting, and start reading analyzing the text with the junior analyst in front of you
• Because of this lack of preparation, completely upend the start of the presentation because critical bits are missing, without reading things to the end
• Having too many people involved: lots of captains on the ship giving contradicting input
• Refusal of senior managers to make tiny text edits directly into the text themselves

I remember this from my early days as a junior analyst at McKinsey. Fight 1 hour of traffic to drive to a meeting with a senior client and/or partner. Listen to small talk, get send out to make paper copies, multiple people making edits to slides with pens, make copies again, back into the car, in the office at your desk failing to read the hand writing, going back and forth via fax machines until you get it right. Technology has moved on a bit, but document editing is still pretty much the same today.

When I start to work with a new client there is usually a small adjustment process, especially when we are on different continents. Am I a junior analyst who needs paragraph by paragraph instructions? He is 7 hours ahead, but hey, I am the client and get to set the meetings. Better schedule frequent update calls to make sure he stays motivated to press on. 

After a while, clients discover the luxury of an overseas design partner. Make small text edits yourself, jot down broader comments in a box on the slide, hit send before leaving the office, and hey, all is done when you come in the next morning. Sometimes not being in the same physical location makes life easier for everyone involved.

40 minutes in

They exercise is good for many things, creativity being one of them. I do the occasional exercise in the form of mountain biking. Preferably, I would roam around on single tracks all the time, but time constraints often limit me to loop around Tel Aviv, close to my home.

And here is the weird thing that is happening to me: every time at about the same time/distance in the run, I get some pretty useful ideas for design problems I am struggling with. I started to notice, because the choice of tracks around my home is not that big, the weather in Israel is pretty much the same every day, so these bike runs happen at more or less the exact same circumstances.

So, the inspiration comes 40 minutes or about 16 km in. Maybe it is this exact amount of exercise you need, or there is something about that specific location....

Editing the bullets in a cafe

I have seen it many times in coffee shops. Two people at a laptop. One doing the typing. The other stretching back, looking at the ceiling, and rephrasing that sentence until it is just perfect and encapsulates everything: "With flexible automation, value delivery is now ensured throughout the customer journey". "No, I think that should be "value creation". "Yes, you are right, change it". "Make "automation" bold, italic, underline", that is the key message here". "Red color as well?" "Yes, this starts to look perfect".

• Noisy coffee shops are not the best environments to do design work
• When you really get into the story you are touching on highly confidential issues (weaknesses, strengths, competitive positioning, development pipeline) that you do not want to discuss in public places
• Bullet point phrasing does not equal visual slide design

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Image by Gavin St. Ours on Flickr

Clean that keyboard

Clean crisp design work is unlikely to happen in a messy working environment. No, most employees have little influence over the interior design of an office, but your own desk? You can do it. Apple keyboards look horrible after a year of use, but are easy to wipe clean. Buy a nice pen/mechanical pencil, invest in a beautiful notebook (buy it yourself if it is against corporate purchasing policy), peel off the Intel inside sticker from your corporate laptop. Clean up the outdated post it notes on the whiteboard. Wipe the whiteboard. Open the blinds.

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Art via WikiPedia

Trends in presentation and pitch design

I opened some old presentations on my hard drive and started thinking about how my work has evolved over the past years. Here are some observations:

• Starting points of presentations (the briefing decks I see) have gotten a lot better. Garr Reynolds, Apple product launches, TED talks, etc. etc., and maybe most importantly a younger post-overhead project generation is joining the workforce, raising the bar in presentation design
• The audience has evolved as well. People know the general drill of a startup pitch, the Internet or a smartphone is not as strange as it was in the early 2000s. People have the courage to cut a bad presentation short. 
• Back in 2003, I was probably one of the very presentation designers in the world, now there are thousands. 
• Given the above, my work is moving on a bit. While I still do the proper upgrading of the look & feel of a presentation, it is completely not the most important thing I do anymore. Actually, my graphics and visual concepts are getting simpler, and simpler, maybe even regressing to what I did a few years back.
• Orchestrating the flow of a pitch is still important, but as pitches get shorter and shorter, and everyone has pretty much settled on a classical investment pitch are start to focus more and more and the pacing of the story. People skip over important things too quickly, while spending far too much time on the obvious, and finally sometimes they do not even touch on a very fundamental missing step in their arguments. 
• My favorite design work are the "puzzles": diagrams that need to show very complex trade-offs, technology infrastructures, or relationships of multiple factors impacting each other. In the end, these diagrams look very simple, but they can take a relatively long time to construct, burning through endless amount of scrap paper in the process.

Here it all comes back to my presentation app SlideMagic: the final technical slide design is increasingly a very, very simple diagram. The tricky bit is 1) get the pacing right, 2) find that simple composition that summarizes that complex relationship.

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Painting by Max Lieberman

Designer state of mind

Creative jobs are different from managerial jobs. I started noticing the difference when transitioning from being a management consultant to a presentation designer. It especially obvious with being sick. As a consultant, I could usually function pretty much normal with the help of some coffee until drastic body feedback such as fever or a splitting headache prevented you from going any further.

With design work it is different. You notice that something is "not right" in your head 1-2 days before the onset of other symptoms. You can't come up with any good ideas, or you can't focus on your creative work and decide to do the monthly accounting. So, sometimes after these 1-2 days, I do actually develop symptoms, or things disappear while others in close proximity do get sick. 

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Image from WikiPedia