Slide make-over: polarising brands

I am across this chart recently:

You will find more statistics at Statista

This chart can be improved in a number of ways:

• Actually, take down the brand images, or make the smaller. The different colours and sizes make the chart cluttered
• It is hard to read what the percentages actually mean
• The biggest problem is the confusing line up of the data bars
• The data could be sorted, to create additional structure for the viewer

I replaced the chart with the one below in PowerPoint, using a line graph with big markers instead of the bars.

Ideally, I would have like to flip the chart 90 degrees, but this would require quite a lot of PowerPoint surgery (you can probably do it with a scatter chart somehow). The other option is to construct a highly complicated "waterfall" chart.

My own clean PowerPoint template

PowerPoint templates get corrupted over time. It usually starts with a template that was designed by a print graphics designer as an after thought after designing the logo and the business cards: creating slide layouts without paying much attention to the technical issues of programming a template that can be (ab)used by thousands of employees. Then over, slowly but gradually, "foreign" templates infect the original until nothing is left of the original.

I go back to zero every time I design a new presentation. The file that I put up in the SlideMagic template store is pretty much the one I start every new presentation design project with. It is really simple. You can customise it with your own colours and you are good to go.

When creating a new slide, go to the "Layout" button in the top left of the menu to create a select a new slide layout.

Focal point chart

A while ago, I discussed how to create a "focal point" slide, where a series of triangles can create the illusion of text boxes all disappearing in one big point. You can read the instructions how to create it in this blog post, but now you can also find them in the template store.

I am spending part of my daily time that I used to invest in blog posts, and increasing the library of my template store, I have an infinite amount of template ideas in my head, so there is still a lot of work for me cut out. Ultimately, the value of this store will be some sort of subscription, as a sign of support for me, in return for which you get unlimited access to all the designs. The combination of a powerful search engine and the largest library of useful charts on the net, I think the proposition of 1 second downloads will beat the alternative of manually copying my designs. Let's see how it goes.

Soft launch of the SlideMagic template store

Many users of the SlideMagic presentation app ask for the slides that the app generates in PowerPoint format. In response, I have built a SlideMagic presentation slide template store. The basic store infrastructure is finished, but the amount of slides available is still small.

It was quite interesting to see how in 2017 it is possible for a designer to pull of a full-fledged digital content eCommerce store with downloads and payment processing in a matter of days. (OK, my computer science engineering degree came in handy a few times when I had to go deep into HTML to customise the store template in a few places). A few years ago I was toying with the same idea, but the required investment in technology would have been a lot higher.

The main shortcoming of PowerPoint templates vs my presentation design app also applies to my own template store: templates are hard to customise. Adding a row of boxes to an existing design and getting everything to line up properly requires a bit of design skill. It is a trade off you have to make. The app is free to use, and makes these adjustments really easy. Where possible I will add slide variants to accommodate the layman designer where possible.

There are thousands of presentation template stores on the Internet and I tried to make mine different. All stores try to hard: designs are too sophisticated, full supporting graphical clutter that makes slides hard to customise and hard to fit in to corporate templates. My slides are incredibly simple and should blend in nicely when pasted into another corporate colour scheme.

The other missing item in template stores is search, how to find a decent template that fits your specific business concept you want to visualise. In my template store, I will start with paying close attention to tags and search terms. For future releases, I am working an "AI engine" that can guide you through a process to match your visualisation challenge with an actual slide suggestion (this is the biggest source of value, a library with thousands of suggested layouts is not).

I will build up the slides in the stores gradually. My first challenge is the complete the basic library of the store, then I should be able to add a few slides per day. Maybe changing the scope of my blog a little bit, discussing a possible visualisation of a business concept, and then putting the final result up in the store. With 250 blog posts a year, this will get us to a nice library over time.

I am using the gradual approach as well to get feedback. The most important one is customers voting with their money. Which slides will sell, which ones not? I have no idea yet. Secondly, I am encouraging users (you) to post requests for slide designs. If I can can accommodate them, I will add the relevant slides to the store.

The business model for the site is not yet finished. Once the library gets bigger, an "all you can eat" subscription model seems the most sensible. This is especially valuable for users as I keep on adding slides and concepts from blog posts and user requests.

Some of my clients have already noticed that I have a bit bandwidth for bespoke projects at the moment. I might drop a daily blog post here and there as I am trying to focus to get the slide library to a decent size over the coming weeks.

As I make changes to the store, the site might go "black" now and then, apologies in advance. I would invite you to look around and send any feedback to jan at slidemagic dot com. Let me know what you think!

Templates for others to fill in

Some projects involve getting a lot of similar presentations from different business units or people. Examples: the annual investor day, or the annual budgeting round. At the start of the project, the same question comes up? What presentation template to send everyone in order to ensure that things look consistent.

My take:

The most important thing to get right is the programming of the template, not the slide layouts: fonts, colors, default shapes, everything should be hardwired in correctly. 

It is very hard to prepare a complete presentation in the absence of specific facts, or a specific story. No business unit is exactly the same. And if they were the same, these uniform presentations combined would make a visually boring story!

One thing you can do is separate data collection from the the summary presentation. Be strict on format for collecting data (boring tables that are well designed), but give freedom for telling the story.

You could do things in 2 steps: send out the broadcast master template, let people work with it a bit, then schedule follow-up calls to make adjustments.

Or: you can have one business unit push a presentation completely to the end, come up with a finished product, and use that as a visual example for the other units. To see slides filled with data is much clearer than empty theoretical layouts.

What the template says about you

These food packaging make overs illustrate what is wrong with many of today's presentation templates: they make you look like you are "that kind of company". But remember, the hipster customer segment is likely to be a lot smaller than the mass market. Think about your audience, and whom you want to look like. 

A new way to organise my presentation templates

I am experimenting with a new way to organise SlideMagic presentation templates and started adding them to www.slidemagic.com/templates. I will be adding more over the coming days. Please let me know if you have request for specific slide concepts I should add and I will see whether I can help you.