Free stock images

Sorry for the link bait title. The amount of quality stock photos (free, no attribution required, do whatever you want) is growing very rapidly. I am using more and more of them. Just run this Google search and see for yourself.

Evolving style

My presentation style continues to evolve, here is what I noticed:

• Fewer colours: lots of greys with one strong accent colour (maybe 2), more and more black and white images
• Fewer images: out with the overly simplistic or cliche visual metaphor (stunning photo of a guy standing on a mountain overlooking the valley)
• More consistency between image styles throughout the presentation
• Real, functional images: people using the product, our stores in Geneva, the prototype
• I use lots and lots of tables to layout elements on a slide

New PPT for Mac now 1 year later

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a new version of Outlook (the email client for Mac), but at the same time pushes back the launch of a new Mac version of its Office suite (Excel, Word, and of course PowerPoint) by a year to the second half of 2015:

Historically we have released a new version of Office for Mac approximately six to eight months after Office for Windows. However, following the release of Office 365 we made the conscious decision to prioritize mobile first and cloud first scenarios for an increasing number of people who are getting things done on-the-go more frequently. This meant delivering and continuing to improve Office on a variety phones (iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android) and tablets (iPad and Windows)—brought together by the cloud (OneDrive) to help people stay better organized and get things done with greater efficiency at work, school, home and everywhere between.
Continuing our commitment to our valued Mac customers, we are pleased to disclose the roadmap for the next version of Office for Mac—including Word for Mac, Excel for Mac, PowerPoint for Mac and OneNote for Mac.

In the first half of 2015 we will release a public beta for the next version of Office for Mac, and in the second half of 2015 we will make the final release available. Office 365 commercial and consumer subscribers will get the next version at no additional cost, and we will release a perpetual license of Office for Mac in the same timeframe. 

Microsoft is prioritising mobile over its desktop software. It is true that mobile is the hot area right now. But - call me conservative - I still think that initial content creation and design still will require a desktop machine with a big screen. A quick reply to an email, a Tweet, a quick presentation edit, can all be done on a mobile device. Great design, great stories originate from someone focussing, rather than boarding a train.

The other reason behind the delay might be that Microsoft is simply running out of ideas what to add to PowerPoint. It is probably true, that the software has been pushed to its limits, and that the true innovation lies in what to take out. I am working on it.

The bar is rising

The average investor pitch deck gets better and better (bad news for presentation designers like me). SlideShare, video streams of startup competitions, TED videos, all create examples of good presentations that people can copy.

Five years ago, version 1 would be a horribly looking bullet point document with standard Microsoft Office fonts/colours, full of small low resolution images scraped from Google with their aspect ratios distorted, that is changing.

Many startups have some sort of designer involved, she gets pulled of the web site work to give the slide deck a much needed make over. The result: decent looking slides, decent colour scheme, decent story flow, still lots of bullet point slides, but at least they are written properly, newspaper heading style.

How to push it one more level up?

Focus on the content, not so much on the local and feel which is already pretty OK. Here is a check list of possible mistakes:

• Think about where to focus your time/slides. Many of these decent presentations spend too much time stating the obvious. Instead go one level deeper: everyone seems to understand the problem, but why is it that in 2014 we sill have not found a solution for it?
• Add more substance to your competitive differentiation. A simple 2x2 matrix with generic sounding axes is not always enough. Why are these other companies doing something different while it sounds like they do exactly the same thing you do? And why do they do it differently? Very rarely, this will because of stupidity, there is probably another reason these companies focus on a different solution for a different customer segment.
• Even if your bullet points are short and well-written, remember that as soon as you start listing more than 3-5 benefits/differentiators, the audience will perceive this as no benefits/differentiators. Bla, bla, bla

Good luck!

Demo vs introduction

A live app demo is not the same as an introduction of what your app does. Getting the technology to work, logging in as a dummy user, creating some dummy files, showing some dummy output, changing some settings, quickly going back to the management console, before switching to the user screen. All this shows that the app is real, it exists, the beautiful design, the fast response time, the powerful algorithms. But it is step 2 in the introduction, the audience is missing step 1, the overall context of what problem the app solves, and what it actually does. Time to throw in some good old slides that can get these messages across faster/better than a live demo. Then, fire up the tablet.

What to see at a conference

In this blog post, a developer discusses his criteria to pick from an overwhelming menu of presentations at a conference. Some interesting insights for conference organisers and people invited to speak at a conference.

• One person is best. Moderated panels are often an excuse for people to fill time about a subject without preparing much. You get a generic questions, provide a fluffy answer. Everybody sits back, relaxes, nobody takes responsibility for the quality of the presentation. One person on the other hand, feels the responsibility to avoid boring the audience.
• Deep is better than broad. Very generic topics can only scratch the surface. Deep dives on specific issues/problems are much more interesting to watch/listen to.

It reminds them

When confronted with something new, our brains instantly compare what we see, hear, feel, taste with all the 500 million previous experiences we had in our lives. This is why our intuition can say that we do not like/trust the person in front of us, without being able to say why. Apparently, we had bad experiences with these type of characters before somewhere, sometime.

The same is trie for the look and feel of a presentation. If it reminds us of boring experiences we had before, we switch off and anticipate a replay.  A bullet point first slide, a stale clip art image, a cheesy stock photo, all tell-tale signs that what is about to follow is unlikely to be interesting.

There is a positive side to this as well: you can interest your audience, simply by being different. Even if different means that your slides are not very pretty.

App update

Many people are asking me for beta invites for my PowerPoint killer presentation design app. Here is where things stand at the moment. A handful people have been testing the app so far which provided feedback on a few glitches to iron out. The core engine (the concept behind the app) works great (big sigh of relief), there are now some things about workflow flow that needs fixing, so that you can move around faster in the app. Rather than widening the user base who will give me the same feedback, I will fix the obvious issues first.

A self-funded side project, patience please...

The company shareholders

If you are are a company shareholder, it is reassuring to see the shareholdings on the first or second page of the company presentation.

For everyone else, the shareholdings can go somewhere in the back.

Going off script

When you get a question during your presentation, should you abandon your story flow and answer it? It depends.

• For very large audiences, no. One person’s question does not merit throwing out your carefully crafted story line and potentially confuse the rest of the audience. Answer the question very briefly (“Good point, we use super glue for that, I will get back to it later in more detail”) and move on.
• For smaller audiences that have seen the material you are presenting before, probably yes. For example a presentation to the partner group of a venture capital firm.
• In one on one meetings: definitely yes. These meetings are not presentations, they are conversations and you should adjust the story flow based on questions, interruptions of the other person. If there are none, then follow the script, but that is likely going to be a boring meeting.

Presentation startups

Searching Product Hunt for keyword “presentation” gives a treasure full of presentation startup ideas.

How to evaluate a designer

The web is full of freelance presentation designers and full of sample portfolios. How to get a true feel for the style/skills of a designer: go beyond pages 1, 2, or 3, and look at a page somewhere in the middle of the deck. What does the designer do when no one is looking?

Humour in presentations

Jokes can be great ice breakers in presentations. Jokes can also be incredibly awkward when introduced in the wrong meeting, at the wrong time, with an audience who is not ready for them.

Here is my advice: do not hardwire risky jokes into your slides, but rather, keep the option to tell them verbally. If the mood is right, go for it, if the audience vibe is not right, you can bail out at the very last moment.

Borat bathing suit slides cannot be unseen, even when double clicked really quickly...

The basics

Here is a checklist of basic PowerPoint design skills. If you master these, you are all set to designing great business presentations:

• Program your company colours in the theme
• Set default shapes and lines to fit your company colours
• Delete all slides in a template master until you have just the title page and an empty page left
• Know how to add text to boxes
• Know how to make compositions of text boxes (including aligning and distributing them)
• Know how to crop images (instead of stretching them)
• Know how to make basic bar and column charts in your company colours

No need to learn anything more...

My facebook page: 2% reach

Facebook is a poor alternative to RSS. Because I am not buying ads, blog posts on the Idea Transplant page reach around 2% of likers. Twitter, RSS, email, are better ways to stay up to date.

This is what I always say...

...when I put up this slide [that says something else...]

Solution: change that old slide to have it say what you want it to say!

VC body language

Last week, I sat in the same seat many of my clients sit in: the one facing a VC. I had a couple of meetings in the valley to test initial appetite for my “PowerPoint killer” web app.

The body language in these meetings was very interesting. In all these meetings you could clearly see when people where excited, agree with you, do not agree with you, listen to you, are not listening to you because they are thinking about something else (probably the next question), already got what you want to say.

Read the signals and use them to steer the conversation in your meeting. But this might be hard to do in real time. The big use of this feedback will be your next VC meeting.

Apple Keynote is broken

I really try to like the latest version (6, October 2013) of Apple Keynote, but a year later, I still cannot. The user interface in the latest release has been cleaned up (gone is the cramped inspector window), and initially I thought I would overcome the initial confusion where functions are. I did not.

Basic stuff like centring text, changing background colours, fonts, font colours, all require me to think, which submenu to pick: style, text, or arrange? A flowing, fast user interface is not always a logically laid out one. Functions do not always have be grouped together based on whether they are related or not. In software, features should (partially) be grouped based on frequency of use.

Then there is the “Sorry, iCloud Drive isn’t compatible with OS X Mavericks” error message I get everytime I open Keynote. After Googling I now understand that I need to wait for the release of OS X Yosemite and that I upgraded my iCloud too early, still....

Never change a winning team.

How did you get there?

Many people who read this blog are considering a career in the world of presentation design themselves, I get many questions about how I got to be who I am today professionally.

The answer: it happened somehow over many years, there was no deliberate career planning. Once I was free from a big corporate structure, you can shape the projects you choose to work on. Finding the first projects was hard, and the work I did closely resembled my strategy consulting work at McKinsey.

When you build up your initial base of happy clients, words start spreading and you get increasing freedom to pick those project that interest you. There is a reinforcing loop here: you do your best work in the type of projects you like, which gives you more demand for more projects you like. In my case, I loved presentation design work, and the prize was: more pie.

But. This transformation took years. It required a certain skill base to start off with (10 years of work experience in consulting in my case). At first, you get highly unpredictable income. As a freelancer, you need to like working on your own. A super-specialised freelance business is hard to scale beyond increasing pricing. (See Seth Godin on dumbing down/scaling up, I smarted up and scaled down).

Overdoing the icons

It is tempting to use an icon for everything in your presentation: enterprise customer, picture of a guy in suit; small business, picture of a chef; consumer segment, picture of a smiling woman. Alternative: a factory icon, a house icon, a face icon. Other alternative: browse the clip art library

There are a few problems with this:

• Unless you are pro designer, icons, pictures are hardly ever consistent in format/style
• Icons/small pictures add clutter to already busy presentation slides
• For the viewer in the back of the room, the small icons/pictures are actually hard to see
• Clipart looks so 1990..

Sometimes keeping it simple is the best solution: 3 boxes in 3 different colours with the words ENTERPRISE, SMB, CONSUMER will do fine. Throughout the presentation, use the same 3 colour to talk about your user segments.