In this ever changing world...

Please do not use that sentence in a presentation.

CEOs get used to slides

If you want to make a dramatic difference to the look of a presentation, do it early in the design process. After a number of iterations a senior executive gets used to the look and feel of a slide, even if it is not a pretty one. The CEO sees a placeholder (no longer a slide with content) as the back drop of which to tell the story. Changing the design of a placeholder her makes her feel she has to redesign her story from scratch.

2 great creative movies

Here are 2 movies I recently watched that talk about the revolution in the creative industry and how individuals can now deliver the work that a few years ago only could be done by big firms. This is also true for my own firm, where I often work alongside big PR or Investor Relations consultancies.

Indie Game: The Movie is about independent game developers realising their dream and incorporating some very personal stories in their work



PressPausePlay is a more general film covering a lot of creative disciplines

Face or no face?

It depends:

• To make an emotional point, or show a human connection to whatever you want to say, show the face (pick a stock image that is not fake, but shows a real person)
• To show a gesture or an object, it is better to crop the face out and zoom in on what you want to show

The same boring framework

Frameworks are great to structure information but incredibly boring to present, especially if you have to repeat them many times over.

“Over the next 30 minutes I will describe each of the 15 business units using this framework: challenges, opportunities, profit potential, next steps. Here is business unit 1. ”

Oh no! 14 more to go...

It is better to tell a specific story about each business unit, actually on purpose using a different approach to tell it. The 15 data tables can go to the appendix for bed time reading.

Announcing Pitch it!

UPDATE 1 February 2015: this book can be accessed free online here. 

I have been working steadily on my first book: “Pitch it!" and I am reaching the final stages of editing. The book is written as an Apple iBook, which allows me to create a great-looking interactive document, rapidly, at the expensive of cutting people off that do not have iPads (sorry for now). I am planning to ship early, and using reader feedback to upgrade the book which will get pushed automatically to people who purchased the older version. Stay tuned!

Join me for a G+ Hang Out

I am glad to speak live about startup investor pitches in a Google Hangout organised by the Google Developer community in Israel. The event is this Wednesday 14:00-14:30 Israel time. I think up to 9 people can join the interactive conversation, but Google will live stream the event so other people can follow it “on mute”

Details of the event can be found here.

Give your eyes a break

When someone emails you a PowerPoint presentation, PowerPoint remembers the screen size that was last used. If that version was created on a small laptop, the slides will show up as tiny rectangles on a big desktop monitor.

All the time I see people making edits to presentations in tiny tiles. Why not give your eyes a break and scale up the slide to fit the page? Getting rid of toolbars, the speaker notes field, and reducing the outline on the left will deliver some more screen real estate.

If you are not excited...

Observed in a presentation: “Oh, yes this last bullet point, almost forgot about it, hmmm, well, it is not that important (should have taken it off), as you can see it says [read out aloud], let’s move on to the next slide.” Out comes another 10-sentence list. If you are not excited about your presentation, your audience for sure will not be moved...

Changing a corporate template

I am close to convincing a large client to change its corporate presentation template (at least for one event). Here is my strategy:

• Convincing people that a high-profile, external event merits a format that can deviate from everyday documents that are mainly used for internal audiences
• [But this is the most important one] Comparing the 2 template options not based on a blank slide, but on one of the most important slides of the entire event. Seeing a straight comparison of what is, and what could be for one of the most important messages of the company makes deciding easy. You pick the one that looks better.

Pause slides

Some slides require a more dramatic introduction than just plopping it on the screen. I often use a blank slide wit a teaser sentence (not “the solution”) for this purpose. It breaks the flow and brings the audience attention back to the presenter.

Gestures

Sometimes simple human gestures make the most powerful background images. See the example below about people not being compliant with their medical prescription.

iPhone mock ups

Many high-tech presentations involve some sort of show casing of a mobile phone app. This site has a number of iPhone mock ups that could work great in presentations. With elementary image editing skills, you can take a front-facing image and past your device screen shot in. More advanced Photoshop users can probably get the 3D tilting to work.

The full list of iPhone mock ups are here on Design Beep.



Someone suggested this link on Twitter, but I forgot who it was... If it was you let me know and I will give you credit.

Saving time with files

An annoying part of my workflow is clicking through file hierarchies to open and save documents and images. I do not understand why it took me around 20 years to figure out to pin the folders of the current projects I am working on to left of my file open menu. On the Mac, you simple dag a folder onto the side bar (you can do something similar in Windows as well).

Found it!

A client spend a lot of time and effort looking for a solution to a problem, until they discovered it in an unexpected place. The chart below is simple to make: a magnifying glass and different font sizes (and a transform font effect if you want), that is all.

Zap!

In case you want to use laser beams in your presentation, they are easy to make: red lines, black background and a small dot with a huge red, semi-transparent glow.

Marker nostalgia

I sometimes think back of the early 1990s, before we started putting Microsoft Word text pages on overhead transparencies using a photo copier. The only thing you had was an empty transparency and a big marker. The resulting slides were a lot more creative than many of the bullet point slides of today.

Presenting the presentation

A client was using a presentation to explain the presentation to people who had to present it. After a short discussion, it was decided to try to design a presentation that could be understood instantly by the presenter. If the presenter gets it, the audience probably understands it as well.

Framework homework

Some corporates manage by strategy frameworks and push down a prescribed template down the hierarchy lines: “Tell your story by filling this out”. Should you obey and stock to SWOTs, 7Ss, Porter boxes?

Strategy frameworks are useful to solve a problem. Managers can make sure that everyone covers all the right things. If a framework worked before in a similar business, or during last year’ strategy discussion, then there is a good chance it will work here as well. If you are the CEO of a number of similar businesses, having all your strategy presentations come to you in the same strategy template makes it easy to compare them.

The problem is that strategy frameworks are often too dense to present to a live audience, and that generic templates often do not completely fit the specific situation of a business.

My suggestion: if you are somewhere in the middle management layer of a big company, it is probably best to do your homework and fill out the boring strategy templates. But I would not stop there.

After you created the required pages, do not invest any effort to make them look more interesting, but rather stick them all in the appendix section. Then step back and start crafting your story from scratch ignoring the prescribed frameworks if you have to. When submitting your presentation call your tailor-made presentation the - overused word alert - “Executive Summary” and say in the body of your email that your homework is still featured as the appendix of the document.

I think the senior executive who has to sit through 15 template presentation will welcome your fresh approach.

We are robust!

Sometimes, putting up a slide that says explicitly “We are a robust company!” might make the audience actually think the exact opposite. “Hey, so far this was a fantastic and professional presentation, I did not realize these guys are a tiny startup, that is until now...”