Collapse into 1 slide

I get this suggestion a lot from clients who are concerned with the amount of slides in their decks. I usually push back, collapsing two messages into one (more busy) slide does not shorten the presentation.

When writing (without tinkering font size or margins): time = page count, when presenting: time = story.

He is just not lucky

Investors are not always 100% rational people. The other day an investor shared one of his criteria with me. If an entrepreneur has been hit by 14 cases of pure bad luck he is convinced that it will happen again for attempt 15. “Some guys are just not lucky.”

Featured on Indezine

Indezine posted a brief discussion of my presentation design book Pitch It!. Thank you!

A compelling pitch deck?

I was asked to answer the question “What makes a compelling pitch deck?” on Quora, and here is what I replied:

You can write books about this, so without giving a table of contents (Google it) here are some thoughts:

• Something that explains what you actually do (yes, some decks don't)
• Something that intrigues a potential investor enough to have another meeting with you
• Something that answers the big obvious elephant in the room questions ("What, that sounds like a page rank search engine")
• Something that shows through language/visuals/style/in-between-the-lines that you are a decent, honest, professional person to work with

Dry run guinea pigs

Before taking your pitch to your target investors it is important to practice your story for real. There are different guinea pigs available, recognise their strengths and weaknesses:

1. Your co-founder is blinded by the idea, just like you
2. Your parents probably do not really understand the concept but love everything you do
3. The speech coach really understands articulation, stance, and story flow, but will not spot that huge gaping hole in the business model
4. The friend of a friend of a friend who is an angel investor will suggest that you should make a comparison to that company featured in TechCrunch 2 months ago
5. The friend of a friend who owes a favor and is a VC does not really have time to go into the idea and will suggest to beef up the competitive analysis a bit, unfortunately he does not invest in businesses that are this early, come back in 6 months...
6. The casual friend who wants to be friendly but does not know you very well, does not have the courage to say what she really thinks
7. The management consultant sees problems everywhere and will suggest more analysis and risk mitigation

Still, each of the above has valuable input, just put it in context.

Harmonising headshots

Unfortunately, not many teams get together in one room for a team picture. The alternative team slide is a collage of headshots that are taken by different photographers at different times. How to make something decent out of it?

1. Make sure all images have exactly the same size
2. Crop all images so that the size of the head is more or less the same
3. Line up the eyes 1/3 from the top of each image
4. Go for a close up, losing some of the top of the face if required
5. Make the images black and white
6. Increase the brightness of selected images if require

From the archives: a 2008 post on the same subject.

Lots of them

If that is your message, you can write the sentence “There are 45 applications” with a cutely formated 45 on a background of a stunning image. The other solution is to write out the applications in 45 boxes that are nicely spaced out over the page. The latter solution is more cluttered, but actually makes the point in a more convincing way.

Data chart surgery

Related to Monday‘s post, there is another way to use a poor quality data chart image in your slide. Crop out all text elements (axis labels, footers, titles, etc.) until you are just left with the lines/bars/columns themselves. Set the background color of your slide to the same color as the image and manually recreate the text labels (if necessary, many graph images contain huge footers and duplicate titles that you do not need).

Pretty versus effective

This Tweet is spot on:

Tired of seeing "pretty" slides that suck at communicating. </rant>
— Roger Courville (@1080Group) April 8, 2013

Making pretty slides (beautiful picture, nice font) is not the same as making effective slides.

Extracting data from a poor graph

Sometimes the image quality of a graph is low, and/or the color scheme does not match yours, that you may want to recreate the data chart in PowerPoint. If there are proper labels, it is no problem. If not, here is a fix:

1. To measure the values of a column or bar chart accurately, you need an image that is as big as possible. I usually make a physical printout of a stretched chart image on an A4 paper.
2. Measure the bars/columns in millimeters
3. Decide the real value for your biggest bar/column, and using its millimeter value determine the value for all the other bars/columns
4. Now you can recreate the data chart. Since your values are not 100% accurate, do not use data labels, but simply put a value axis on the side of the graph (like it was the case in the source image).

Make the point on every page?

If there is a very important message in your story, there is no need to make it on every page in your presentation. Fifteen half-baked bullet points are not as powerful as one carefully crafted slide that drives your message home. Added side benefit: you can make your presentation even shorter!

Where do all the posts come from?

I get this question sometimes. Almost all content on this blog are disguised client examples. Every morning I sit down, reflect on what happened yesterday, and extract from it a small piece of advice that could make you a better designer. The advantage of being in the trenches of presentation design day to day.

Why is this a big deal?

“Our solution is flexible!”

To you and all the other industry insiders it is perfectly obvious why being flexible matters. For everyone else, including potential investors, it is not clear what flexible means, and why it is a big deal.

Explaining the problem is often more convincing than explaining the solution.

Add a face to an endorsement

The common way to present people that endorse you is a bullet point list of names and titles. Make that much more powerful by changing that to a mosaic of faces. Avoid the uniform conference-speaker-headshot-gallery, rather:

• Use different image formats (B&W-color, suit-jeans, etc.)
• Use a different aspect ratio than the 3:2 passport picture (landscape for example)
• Use action shots (people presenting standing on stage)

Now this makes for a much more dynamic visualisation of the people who support you.

Selling without slides

When pitching to a new client, you often carry a deck of slides with you to cover your uncertainty. “At least I can lecture about X or Y and flood the prospective client with facts”. In the end what makes the sale is not the lecture about you, but the dialogue about the client’s issues.

It also works for me and my presentation design business. A quick email conversation when a prospect asks “What do you charge and send us a link to an example of your work” is less likely to convert into a project then a half an hour conversation about the actual story.

Most of the times, clients think they are looking for slide make-overs, while actually they need a story redesign. Stating: “I redesign stories and look here is where I have done it 500 times before” does not make the same impression as doing the actual thing on the fly.

Sort your bars

Sometimes bar charts have a clear order, a ranking of items. In other cases it is less obvious. Still, you slide looks visually more appealing when you sort them in descending order even if the ranking is not the core of your message.

Smarter questions -> better stories

If you are writing an investor presentation you can Google what questions should be covered:

• What is the market?
• What is the competition?
• What is the business model?
• Who is in the team?

Or, you can take it one step further and already anticipate the most obvious questions an investor might have:

• I am doing something similar to Google, is that smart?
• I look like I am 21, isn’t that a bit young to run a startup?
• We have been working for 18 months and still there is no prototype, will it ever arrive?

Smarter questions lead to smarter investor presentations.

Being sick and designing

Back in my days as a management consultant, I would surrender to an illness only when I had a really big fever and stay in bed. Now, as a designer it is different.

My work no longer involves in running around, chasing things, sitting through meetings. And even the slightest disruption of your health has a direct impact on your design work and creativity. I often sense the onset of a cold before the first real symptoms such as a soar throat: not being able to focus, a simple chart that I simply cannot get right.

Well in these cases, there is always the end of the month accounting to do...

In NYC at the end of April

I will be in New York at the end of April. Let me know if you would like to connect in person.

Full "Pitch It!" PDF available

I just uploaded the PDF version of "Pitch It!" which can now be purchased and downloaded. You can view it on any device that can display PDFs.

When compared to the iPad version, 99% of the interactive functionality is preserved, I replaced touch objects with static image galleries.

Distribution of this book is not restricted by Apple’s policies, and is available anywhere in the world.

I am looking forward to your feedback (content, and - hopefully minimal - technical glitches).

Pressing the button below will take you to the PayPal check out page: