Crop to fill

It is never too late to learn something. After my post about fixing aspect ratios of image fills in PowerPoint, Geetesh Bajaj pointed out that there is a much smarter way to do this. Here are his posts for Mac and for Windows.

Showing off your clients

Three different ways to show off your client list, depending on what you want to emphasize:

1. Page of logos to show that they include the biggest names in the industry (here is how to design one)
2. Map with dots to show that they are scattered around the globe
3. Bar chart with sales number ranking to show how much you sold them (if you can share this information)

Mixing them up might not give the best picture: logos of completely unknown companies, a world map with lots of dots in New York City.

Anticipation

Most of the time, it is more powerful to show events that are about to happen rather than the event itself. It is very well done in the ad below for an automatic braking system that anticipates the movement of objects on the road. It brings great tension to the visual, almost making the still image move.



Commenters on Ads of the World were less enthusiastic though. Maybe the plusses and minuses should have been made a bit bigger. And well, if there is something wrong with the chart, it is in its 3D composition. The dog is too close and actually not running towards the cat. But I am probably the only one who bothers about that...

Excel to recover from a PPT crash

PowerPoint 2011 for Mac does not work well with Apple’s Time Machine backup system. You cannot change the backup timing, so my machine always tries to backup during Israeli office hours (night time US), and guess what, one of the few files that needs a backup is the presentation file I have open right now in PowerPoint. While I am sure there is some sort of file conflict mechanism in place, it is not very effective and I had PowerPoint crashing on me numerous times.

What to do about it? This is a relatively friendly crash, your program is not stuck, it just refuses to save your work (with a frequent autosave setting, that should be about 10 minutes of work). Now here is a nice trick to rescue that chart: select all objects on the page, hit copy, and paste them in an empty Excel sheet. Force quit PowerPoint, re-open, copy the objects in Excel and paste them back in. You just saved yourself from having to redo that 15 layer animation.

Political communications

Yesterday was election day in Israel, and I was shocked how hard it is for a voter to find out what a party actually stands for. In the end, decisions are not based on information provided by the parties themselves, but election guides provided by the news media.

The cause of this is probably rooted in the way political parties work. Policy documents are hammered out after long internal debates, where people fight over nuances and single sentences. Translating that watered down policy document in a clear message to voters is very hard. As a result, fresh new parties do a better job at communicating what they stand for with a small group of people enjoying the benefits of a white sheet of paper.

Put everything away, take a pause, and sketch out what you really want to say.

Centring objects

Images with objects isolated on an empty background are not always cropped perfectly. Centring the image will not center the object. Draw a some quick guide lines and you can align things properly.

Investment banking presentations

A question that came in yesterday:

Jan, I have a question about presentations to investment bankers/analysts. One of my clients getting ready to go on a road show says their investment banking consultants have told them to present what I would call (ala Garth Reynolds) a "slideument" that will also serve as a leave-behind. The consultants claim this is the way it's always done and if they don't do it this way, their audience will disregard them. Your thoughts?

Yes, in financial services people are used to very text-heavy slideuments for fund raising and IPO roadshows. And in most cases, people will print out the full 200 page deck for each participant in the meeting room.

Now, in finance presentations you need a few pages that are dense (financial statements for example). But there is no reason why the general lessons for presentation design do not apply in finance. In the end, investors are people, and it is harder to convince people to do something (invest) with a boring presentation.

And I have seen it work myself. After the initial resistance, people were actually very impressed with a different style fund raising presentation (and proved it by wiring money).

So what to do? My advice would be to take both approaches. A fund raising roadshow is a big deal and usually people have enough time/resources allocated to it to prepare both a visual, and a dense deck. Present the visual presentation, and selectively jump to appendix charts if you have to. Let the audience read the appendix in their own time.

Armed with a presentation like this, there is often no reason to write an extensive PPM (private placement memorandum) at all (the lawyers might have to add some legal stuff to the back of your appendix though in that case).

Be careful to maintain a serious look and feel to the presentation: big pink fonts and funny pictures do not work in the wood panelled board room. But there is no reason why a highly visual presentation cannot look serious.

Hopefully, in a few years we can avoid the dense appendix all together, but until then make 2 presentations.

10 points that say it all

One of my clients is one of the finalists in a long RFP process full of long presentations, documents, meetings. After all this information, the client thought it was appropriate to send one last piece of PowerPoint: a simple recap of why they are the best choice in 10 slides.

It was probably one of the most convincing presentations of the entire process. It took very little time to write. It contained much more emotional arguments (we are fun to work with etc.) than all the previous material that was used.

The visual concept I used was designed for on screen reading. I doubled the width of the page to an aspect ratio much wider than 16:9. Reserved the entire left side of the chart for a sentence in huge fonts, and supported that sentence with a very simple picture on the right side. Just 10 pages.

PDF it, email it, and hope for the best.

Mailchimp online annual report

A few days ago there was Kickstarter, and now Mailchimp has put its annual overview online. I like these blends of web design and presentation design.

From a form perspective, the presentation is clever. Widen and narrow the screen and see what happens, as you make the window narrower, first the infographics move closer to each other, then the design switches from a 2 column to a 1 column layout.



From a content perspective, there is some work to be done. Data is not rounded up and makes it hard to read, and some of the information presentation is not terribly relevant to the viewer (pizzas served). Then, the objective of the site is to show that a lot of stuff is going on at Mailchimp, and with that in mind, they succeeded conveying the message.

P.S.: another cool annual report: Warby Parker (h/t Duarte)

Aspect ratios and image fills

PowerPoint distorts the aspect ratio of images when you use them to fill a shape. To work around the issue, you need to crop the picture in the aspect ratio of your target shape. In the example of the circle below, that is a square.



I use PhotoShop to crop my pictures. You can also use the PowerPoint crop function itself and right-click, save as image.

Crappy VGA projectors

Screens on computers and mobile devices are getting better in 12 month cycles. I design presentations on 2 giant 27" displays that show a lot of detail and reveal the most subtle color shade differences.

Then you put your presentation on a conference room overhead projector that has been sitting there since 2002... The screen resolution is so small that it takes you 5 minutes to find your application windows, and when you finally get to show the slides in presentation mode you will notice that white and light grey is the same color, and that almost black grey is actually bright grey, and that orange means pink.

Test run your designs for the crappy conference room projector.

Flat design

I never liked gradient fills, reflections, and bevels. But recently I am increasingly letting go of drop shadows as well, only using them for objects that really need to pop out. I guess I am influenced by the current trend of flat design in web/UI design.

Kickstarter presentation

This Kickstarter presentation is a beautiful example of simple visualisations that go beyond PowerPoint slides. It is a series of web pages, with simple typography, well-chosen images that are made uniform in style through a color overlay.



Slide design and web design are converging.

Open clip art

I am not a fan of 1990s-looking presentations full of childish Microsoft clipart, but this site Open Clip Art can still be useful resource for presentation designers. Firstly, clip art designers are moving into full illustration designs. Secondly, the site is a good place to find icons for your presentation. All material is free to use. As with all user generated content sites, there is no professional reviews before designs get posted, you need to select the poor from the great yourself.

An infographic that works

Usually, I find infographics too forced, trying to be cute at the expense of being understood. This visualisation of a big organisation over time is an exception. It must have taken some time to construct though...


Via Fast Company Design.

It does not look scientific!

In some professions people have gotten used to a certain way of communicating. Lawyers use complicated language, medical diagrams look incomprehensible (people want them to look realistic).

Recently, I changed a medical diagram to make it look less realistic, but a lot clearer to explain. I am still convincing the client that it is the right thing to do.

Origin of the elevator pitch?

Tom Tunguz claims that this is the origin of the elevator pitch:

The term elevator pitch originates from the very first demonstration of an elevator with a safety brake. At the time, elevators were hazardous, routinely plummeting down shafts when their hoisting ropes fell, destroying their payloads. In 1852, Elisha Otis invented a locking system that would catch and secure plunging elevator. Unable to drive much interest in his innovation, Otis organized a demonstration in New York City. He stood in the elevator as an assistant severed the hoisting ropes and the safety brake engaged. Otis' innovation paved the way for humans to ride in elevators. Today, the Otis company’s products transport 7B people every three days.

If true, this is a more interesting tale than the story that I thought was the source: finding yourself next to your client CEO going up in the elevator and having 1 minute to sell your idea.

Market sizing

Forecasting the size of a market that does not exist is tricky and nobody will have the right answer. Googling will result in endless research agencies or investment banks or consulting firms throwing in yet another inconsistent number.

With new markets, it is often as important to convince/teach an investor how to think about the market sizing than getting her to accept the answer, the point estimate. So merely quoting a random number without having a clue how it was derived is not going to help you very much.

So here is an alternative approach: make your own and keep the analysis very transparent. Build a spreadsheet that start with hard facts (populations etc., and slowly, slowly, adds more uncertain numbers. Use different colours for numbers with different confidence levels (green for rock solid all the way down to red for I-made-this-up). Put the resulting market size in your presentation, and add the detailed calculation to the appendix of your presentation.

Now you are on top of your numbers and understand where they are coming from. It shows you know what you are talking about, and you can teach your potential investor how to make her own market estimate.

And this, and this, and this

Rattling through 25 points about why your idea is great on page 1 of your deck is not convincing.

• You do not give the audience the ability to warm up, and first of all understand what it is you do
• You dilute the power of the arguments by spending too little time on each: big need, no competition, great team, we all heard them before
• You remind us of weak pitches where the lack of quality of the story is made up for by quantity: products with 25 benefits usually have no benefits

Instead, resist the temptation for detail and explain roughly what you do on page 1, plus the most important differentiator. Then follow with a presentation that is short enough for the audience to focus on your key points.

Popular posts in 2012

Here are some posts that people have been reading a lot on my blog in 2012:

• Aligning bullet points in PowerPoint
• How to create a McKinsey-style waterfall chart
• Putting PowerPoint text in a circle
• Semi-transparent text fills
• Building a logo page in PowerPoint
• How to make a 3D translucent ball
• Presentations on tablets
• About logic in presentations
• Keynote versus PowerPoint
• Combining stacked and clustered column charts

For me it is interesting to see that almost none of these posts were written in 2012, and that pretty much all of them are about technical PowerPoint software skills (there is a correlation here, as my posts have evolved a bit over the years). Presumably this is the result of people Googling when they are stuck in PowerPoint. 

Anyway, hopefully these posts are useful if you missed them the first time around.