Designing a good logo page

Most sales presentations contain some logo page to show off your impressive client list. Make sure that the page looks impressive from a graphics point of view as well. An unstructured clutter of low-res logos makes an impression of an amateurish startup best to be avoided for serious business.

1. Check whether you got the latest logo of a client (visit the home page)
2. Use high resolution images
3. Where possible, use the logo that has a white background
4. Do not distort aspect ratios
5. Make sure the logos are more or less the same size
6. Distribute things evenly horizontally and vertically in a nice grid
7. Keep the page simple: just logos
8. If things look too busy, you can consider moving all the logos to black & white

The learning pyramid

I came across this image the other day, showing retention rates of students by delivery form. A lecture is the worst, teaching others is the best. I am not sure about the accuracy of the exact percentages, but there is something to the overall hierarchy presented here. And presentations are definitely somewhere high up there.

But we can learn from this pyramid to make our presentations better.

1. Audiovisual: This will not be a shocking new insight: use visual material in your presentation, avoid text 
2. Demonstration: Keep things highly practical, use case examples that people can relate to
3. Discussion: Easy to do in a small setting, but harder for large audiences. In sales presentations for example, this would mean improvising your entire sales pitch on the client specific situation.

How could you get to teaching others in a presentation?

Look serious

It is difficult for a startup to sell to a big company. Even if your solution is really innovative, large companies prefer to work with financially stable, large companies.

The look and feel of your sales presentation can add to that nervousness in the under belly of a big-corporate purchasing officer. Looks to avoid:

1. Amateurish layouts with childish colours and water cooler fonts such as Comic Sans.
2. Overly cute, touchy feely, retro look and feel, especially when selling in a male-dominated corporate culture (sorry).

Now we all know that the a slick visual deck full of stories and very little text will do great in these meetings (option 3), but, there is one surprising other option (4): the big corporate, lots of bullet points, serious, boring slide deck. Purely from a look and feel perspective, you will fit right in with all the other technology vendors, unlike option 1 or 2.

If you cannot pull off option 3, option 4 is still preferred over option 1 or 2.

16:9 layout

The 16:9 format was invited for movies not for presentation slides. Over the past 500 years, there is hardly any print work in a wide 16:9 format. Text that spans a wide column is hard to read, and most diagrams, paintings, visual concepts are more square than rectangular.

If you want to design slides in a 16:9 format you could consider breaking some of the slide design conventions. Examples: putting a multi-line slide header at the top left or even bottom left of your slide, saving up valuable vertical slide real estate. Or maybe even simpler: leave a lot of calming white space on the left and right of your slide.

The big picture first

Doing the product spec slides of your sales presentation is relatively easy. The big picture, how you position yourself versus the competition is harder. It is tempting to start with the easy bits and worry about the difficult things later. Still, I suggest to take on the positioning first since all other slides will depend on it. Moreover, it is the overall product concept that you are selling, not the features of individual products.

Flattening a story

Business school books and consulting reports have a clear hierarchical structure. This is great for reading a document: you can skip what you do not need, and go right into then detail when you do need it more explanation.

In short stories, hierarchy can be boring, you sound like you are given a university lecture. I often flatten that hierarchy, making the presentation more sequential. Out go the slides with the 3-5 setup bullet points, and instead I just let the story flow. If I have to, I bring back the structure at the end of the presentation to sum things up.

This works great for 20 minute presentations, for marathon presentation days we might have to revert back to the business school rigour though. But there is a reason why marathon presentation sessions are so stimulating for the brain...

Too much colour (2)

Following frequent requests after my previous post, I have included a picture here that shows the concept of the narrow coloured bar replacing a fully coloured slide object.

Too much color

Colours brighten up your slides and are a great way to group related items together: USA is green, Europe is blue, Asia is purple for example.

But applying bold colours to big text boxes makes your slides too busy and nervous. Instead, keep those text boxes light grey and add a very narrow colour box attached to it at the left side, almost like a fat line.

Uncovering

When you need a complex animation, it is often easier to uncover objects by removing a white box than build up a shape step by step, especially if the shape includes a data graph (columns, lines, bars).

Mess illustrates mess

“Hey, that chart looks very messy?”
“Yes, but that is what we want to show, right?”
“True.”

Design for reading

The other day, a client needed a presentation meant for reading, something that would be sent out to the employees by email. So, we designed it for reading and used the fact that for an internal audience we could be a bit more radical with the format.

Here is the concept: a dark 16:9 background. Each chart has a big visual on the left side while the message of the chart is spelled out in full sentences in a relatively small font in a column on the right. Full sentences, because nobody will be around to explain what the abstract graph means. A narrow column in a small font because it is easier to read than a very wide sentence spanning an entire 16:9 screen.

Use that style guide

If your company logo was designed by a professional designer chances are that somewhere in the bottom drawer of the marketing department you can find a complete graphical style guide that goes with it. Usually, it gets only used for commissioning other design work (brochures, web sites, etc.), and hardly any PowerPoint user knows of its existence.

Ask for a copy and use it to inspire your presentation design. See what colours the designer recommends, there might be more than present in the logo. See how pages are laid out. See what fonts and font colours are used. Lots of inspiration.

And yes, the section for the PowerPoint presentations in these style guides is usually pretty bad. Professional designers are not used to working in PowerPoint (an inferior product in their minds). Beautiful design work gets reduced to Arial, heavy top banners and watermarks. So, use the design inspiration of the first pages of the style guide to create your own PowerPoint template that fits it. Hopefully the marketing communications department lets you get away with it.

Every word counts

Often, presentation slides are filled with verbal padding: words that take up lots of space but do not add any additional meaning. Every sentence you write in a slide is like thinking of a newspaper/blog article headline: it should be as short as possible without diluting the content to an overly generic statement. Unlike a text document, in a presentation, every sentence needs careful consideration and scrutiny.

The audience expects it

Some presentation slides live for years, and that might be the reason that we are hesitant to change them, we think: well, the audience will expect this slide.

If nothing about your story has changed, then this is a valid point. If not, it is the wrong approach. The same slide signals no change at all, business as usual. Also, even if you did change its content, the audience will think it is the same slide as last year, and will not notice the different content.

Sometimes, change is good.

Hide to emphasize

One way to draw attention to a specific object on your slide is to apply all of these at the same time: pink colour, bold, italics, underline, big drop shadow, fat circle around it (also pink), big arrow pointing at it. Maybe it will stand out of the clutter on the rest of your slide.

The other way: hide everything else around it. Semi-transparent white shapes are great to dim items on your slide.

Cover images

The ideal cover image of your presentation (the slide that sits on the projector while the audience walks in) would be one that tells your whole story so perfectly that the presentation itself can be skipped. Many people try to reach this level of perfection by putting up a messy collage of different images, a very tricky visual concept or a highly tacky and cliche stock image that represents the values of the brand: young, healthy, lively, dynamic, and social.

I am less ambitious and usually pick an image that fits the corporate colour scheme of the client and is a preview of an image that I use on a very important slide somewhere inside the presentation. It looks nice and calm when the audience enters, and it will generate that instant recall of that important slide when I show it for the 3rd time on the closing slide.

PowerPoint template mix up

Copying PowerPoint slides from one presentation to another can have disastrous format implications. Some survival advice.

• When saving/defining a new PowerPoint theme, stick to the suggested colour uses that PowerPoint suggests, i.e., text/background dark should be a dark colour for example. If you move slides across between templates in properly defined colour schemes, the damage will not be that big
• Make sure you copy slides into the file with the desired template and not the other way around. Sometimes this might require you to create a 1-slide presentation in your preferred template, and then copy the 35 other slides into it.
• There is a way to merge PowerPoint slides and keep their original formatting, see an old blog post on the subject.
• At the top left corner of the ribbon is a layout button that opens a drop down menu of slide formats that are present in the master. Use to to correct disasters.

Good luck!

Presentation template recipe

Here is an almost sure recipe to get a good look and feel for a presentation template, even with an Arial font:

• One nice accent colour, but used sparsely for only that: provide an accent
• The other objects in shades of grey, using relatively more light ones than dark ones
• Text in dark grey, not black
• No lines around shapes, let the color (i.e., grey) do the work
• Everything flat: no shadows, no gradients, no reflections
• Black & white images only

Hidden Microsoft Office data

Take care when sending Microsoft Office files to outsiders, you might send hidden confidential data with it.

• The presenter notes fields in PowerPoint might contain notes you do not want others to read
• Taking out the data labels with confidential numbers from a data chart does not remove the actual data in the underlying spreadsheet
• The PowerPoint sticky notes links are very small, which is great so they do not obstruct the design of the slide, on the other hand, you might just forget to remove them.

PDF-ing your document will solve most of these issues.

Learn to see

A child find it hard to draw realistic 3D perspectives, because her brain is still developing 3D perception. She draws a house with a front, and a side wall without that wall disappearing towards the horizon. She is not drawing what she sees, she is drawing what she thinks the house looks like. When the drawing is finished, she notices that someone is not right, but she finds it impossible to lay her hand on it what it exactly is.

The same is true for grown ups and graphics design. You see a beautifully designed page, you want to make something similar in PowerPoint and somehow, it does not come out. Why? Because you stuck to your own mental model of a PowerPoint slide (and what you think it should look like) and did not really see how the designer deployed white space, used of grey scales in text rather than blunt black, and set the space between title lines slightly tighter, and was careful not to overdo it with the colours.

Here is an exercise. Take a poster or design that you really like and literally recreate it in PowerPoint (or Keynote) until it looks exactly the same. Now apply that template to your presentation.