Technology lecture vs value pitch

Two approaches to pitching your product. I prefer #2

1. Engineering approach: explain the layered product architecture and the solution process, and after this theory lecture you can make a perfect logical case about why your product delivers this great value to your customer.
2. Customer-focussed approach: highlight the big issues the customer has (to get that nodding head), go through the benefits that your solution offers and only hint at the technical magic that allows you to deliver them. If the customer is interested, you can do pitch #1 in a second meeting.

Project time wasters

I have submitted price proposals to hundreds of projects and won/completed the majority of them, so I have gotten a pretty good sense of what presentation design activities cost time, and which ones do not. Use them to your advantage when negotiating a project with a freelancer.

Project time wasters:

1. The most important one: unclear story that needs sorting out
2. Lots of physical meetings
3. No clear decision maker on the client side, i.e. freelancer needs to collect and synthesise feedback into one voice
4. Requirement to run 2 parallel versions of the same presentation (different language, different audience)
5. Start and stop, pick up the project after a hiatus that was long enough for everyone to forget what it was all about
6. Inconsistent PowerPoint masters, i.e., client provides feedback pasted in the default PowerPoint template so all colours, fonts, and slide formats are messed up
7. Requirement for a text 1-pager that summarises all, with lots of iterations on the exact wording of the text
8. Related: communicating micro edits over the phone to the designer, rather than quickly doing them yourself in PowerPoint (text edits, slide order changes, etc.)

You that slide count does not appear in the list. Adding a few slides with a few new concepts to an existing presentation deck. Once you have understood the story/company, the marginal time required to add things to a presentation is low. Of course a 100 page deck takes more time to complete than a 10 page presentation, but still.

Clicking links in slides

It might seem cool to have an interactive slide full of clickable links in your presentation. In yes, in a 1-on-1 meeting you could permit yourself the luxury of clicking back and forth through slides as you tell your story.

For a big audience, a linear story is much better. And when you need to click on a link in a slide, it is likely to be the exact same link/box/object every time. Why struggle with mouse pointers and try to hit that exact box when you can just click through the next slide that starts playing your video? The audience will not notice the difference.

Simple can be difficult

This is a text editor that only allows you to use the 1,000 most common words in English (“thousand” is not one of them, hence they called it “ten hundred”). Try writing something, it is pretty hard.

Here is a blog where scientists use the tool to describe their research projects.

Icons that try too hard

Icons can work really well if they can be kept very simple, and refer to very simple things like a cog wheel for settings and a 1980s floppy disk for save.

When you try to summarise very complicated concepts into very complicated icons, things get lost. In those cases, a box with a few words will do a better job explaining what you mean.

Stock image maps

Maps in stock photo sites are not designed for use in presentations. I hope designers are reading below to find out what is wrong with them:

• Crops are focussed on the target country. But why crop so many of the surrounding areas out? Israel for example has a vertical shape. I would prefer to put in a map of the entire Middle East, and put text boxes over those part of the map I do not need. It will look much better than a narrowly cropped map
• People use blunt colours and/or gradients. As a designer, I want to set the colour tone of the presentation myself. Much better options are muted greys, or better, vector files I can recolour myself.
• Map designers add city names hardwired in ugly typography. Also, they add roads and other useless geographical information. I will not be using these maps to find my way, if I need to add cities, I would like to do it myself, in the font of the presentation deck.

So how do I pick maps in stock photo sites? Usually, I go for vector images for a far wider area than I need. I zoom in and strip out all the information I do not need.

** Footnote

In tables, I prefer to right-align numbers with the same amount of decimals after the dot. A footnote reference can break that line. Two ways to solve it: One: add the ** as a separate text box on top of the table. Two: if you have to use many footnotes use numbers [i.e. 7) instead of ******] to keep your footnote references short.

So, in short?

This is a great question to ask yourself after you finished designing the presentation.

“Well, what I really want is raising a bit of extra equity to de-leverage the company (slide 12, yellow bars). I think it is a really good deal for investors, since it looks like the stock is undervalued (slide 24, bottom right). Management has delivered on all its promises over the past 5 years (slide 15) and no one in the industry has a scale that is even closely to ours (slide 37 on the left), so it looks like our advantage will hold out for the foreseeable future.”

 Your presentation can be shorter: focussed slides upfront, with extra info in the appendix.

White on white

White letters on a white background enable you to make a nice slow-reveal slide. I used it for a client in BI (business intelligence) that creates insight by overlapping multiple analyses.

Custom fonts - redux

Custom fonts (fonts that are not installed as standard on most computers) give your presentation a nice distinctive look from the rest of the world that uses Calibri and Arial. It comes at a price: viewers who do not have your font installed on their machines get a poor experience.

For these practical reasons, I leaned towards sticking with standard fonts in business presentations. Things are changing though:

• PDF is now my preferred format for sending presentations to people: it can easily be viewed on mobile devices and has a nicer, more permanent feel to it than an editable file. Once a PDF is created, fonts will display correctly on any device
• There are more and more free fonts available that make it technically easy to download and install a font quickly, without having to count the number of seats that use the font in order to get in trouble with the license I paid for.

So, when do I consider using a custom font?

1. Smaller organisations that are relatively tech-savvy. The big traditional Fortune 500 company is still locked into Calibri for the time being I am afraid.
2. When I can use an open source font, not so much to save money, but to save the hassle of having to deal with license seat counts

Project pictures

Many business presentations contain pages with images of projects: real estate, solar farms, factory installations. Usually, they are small, low resolution, many on a page, and backed up by a dense paragraph of explanation.

To make your presentation look better: do the opposite. Stretch them across the full page, use high res images, use 1 image per page, and set a brief explanation text over the image.

The audience will not notice that you clicked through 7 slides when discussing your project portfolio. For them, it is just one slide.

Another way to show off your portfolio is to use the images throughout the presentation on separator and title pages that mark the beginning of a new section in your story. So, you have 1 image on your portfolio slide with the explanation that is 1 of 35 buildings. The audience gets a sense of the other 34 throughout the presentation without talking directly about them.

Using Prezi sensibly

For people bored with PowerPoint, Prezi can be an alternative presentation design platform. It is web-based, has powerful zoom effects and enables non-linear presentations. I would suggest to keep the following in mind when using Prezi for a business presentation:

1. Stick to a linear story line, especially for larger audiences. If you have 20 minutes in front of 500 people, it has hard to get your message across using a random and unpredictable flow.
2. Use the Prezi zooming and moving effects where you really need it, and not just for spectacular slide transitions. The audience will get motion sickness, or worse, will start giggling when you discuss your very serious business topic.
3. Try to bring the look and feel of your Prezi in line with your regular PowerPoint colours. You will not have time to design Prezis for every presentation you do.

Deck inertia

In the beginning of a presentation design project, things are fluid. You are open to different approaches to tell the story, the look and feel of slides. But once you created a good first draft, you become hesitant to change it, even when smart people give good advice. I have seen many decks that started with an apology: this was the slide deck that they used since last year, but now we tell the story a bit different. Have the courage to change your presentation as your story evolves.

What is that font?

I get this question a lot. My logo is set in Futura Condensed Extra Bold. Other major brands have followed me...

Cheating with headshots

Pages with headshots of people are always a pain to design: the names and titles of people can vary greatly in length.



I spotted this neat trick in a promotion email for this book. People with long titles have been moved to the bottom where a 2 line job title does not break the grid. Also, the right column looks a bit wider than the first 2 to me, again creating a bit more breathing space for long names and/or titles.

Now, hopefully your CEO has a short name (she always wants to go first).

Data chart consistency

There are many options to format a data chart: write million or m, put percentages in columns or not, a thin baseline or a fat baseline or no baseline at all, tick marks or not, grid lines or not grid lines, drop shadows or flat, you can go on and on.

Whatever you choose, choose the same preferences on every page so your presentation will look consistent.

Infographics that try too hard

Many (maybe even most) infographics focus primarily on a cute visual concept and forget about the data they need to communicate. The result: pretty pictures that are impossible to understand.



First, focus on the data and think what you want to show: a trend, a comparison, a ranking, a contrast. That should be the basis for the design of your graphic.

Then, remember that cute icons can be as hard to understand as a bullet point: sometimes it can be more effective to write down the words “home” and “work” than trying to come up with illustrations of a house and an office.

Clients often request a cool infographic to get their message across. My response is to stuck to a more traditional presentation format, but if they insist on an infographic look, to go more creative on colors, shapes, and especially fonts at the expense of technical compatibility and the ability of everyone in your organisation to edit the slides for their own needs.

The WTF Visualizations blog is full of bad infographics, enjoy! (Via Daria)

iOS7 and PowerPoint templates

Most PowerPoint template designers think that what you put on the empty template page sets the look and feel of the presentation. Gradients, watermarks, logos, color bands. I have long been arguing that the template can just be a blank white page, what sets the look and feel is your approach to how your design the slides: what shapes, what colors.

The new iOS7 is a good example. Icons that looked great in iOS6 now look dated instantly in iOS7. The design philosophy has changed, without new logos, or repeated graphical elements on the page. It is the combined power of the new iOS7-ready icons that together create that new fresh layout.

So in PowerPoint, pick your colors, your fonts, your approach to shadows and gradients and you can use a simple blank page as your PowerPoint template.

Instant poll during a presentation?

One reader is interested in a simple, easy to use and set up smartphone/tablet solution to run a quick poll during a live presentation. I could not help him. Any suggestions?

UPDATE: some good suggestions came in in the comments and via Twitter:

• IQ Polls
• Mentimeter
• Polleverywhere
• SlideKlowd

Explaining big data

Many of my clients are now in “big data” and need to explain why what they do is so clever.

One approach to do this is the mathematical research paper approach: describe the algorithms and point out on what data sets they work.

A much better one is the take one practical case example throughout your entire presentation. Show how you searched millions of health records, cross matched them with facebook location data down to the square kilometer, overlayed that with climate data for the past 300 years and came to this very targeted, very unexpected insight that you would never have found out using a Google search, buying a research report, or other 2 common search methods.

The scientist will like approach number one: no ambiguity and a perfect explanation. The rest of us will prefer option two.