Do you have MacBook screen stains as well?

The anti-reflective coating of my late 2013 MacBook pro has started to peel of. Posting on Apple support forums has not given an answer. I am glad to see a web site staingate.org, that collects images and serial numbers of affected users. I you have the same problem, please add yourself to the list.

Art: Vassily Kandinsky, Composition 6, 1913. Sign up for SlideMagic. Subscribe to this blog. Follow on Twitter.

The lone column

Most of the time, numbers in graphs look better than numbers in a table. There are exceptions though: when there is just one number, and when there is very little variation among the numbers. During my time at McKinsey, I have seen many examples of "lone columns", column charts with just one number in them, or tables full of tiny column charts with hardly any variations among them.

These charts are not only difficult to read, but they are also very hard to create in PowerPoint or Keynote SlideMagic's grid structure does it in a snap though, but hopefully users won't abuse the app for these type of consulting charts. Sign up for SlideMagic here.

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Art: Painting of Trafalgar Square (c. 1865) by Henry Pether. Sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow on Twitter

The only data charts you need

I have been designing presentation slides for over 20 years now (scary) and over time stopped using more and more types of data charts.

• Pie charts: I don't like the way they look, it has to place data labels, it is hard to compare two of them side by side
• Line charts have ver little presence (duh, a thin line) and I use column charts where possible to visualise time series. Yes, for correlations and hard core scientific data I might have to resort to them
• Clustered column charts, I find them confusing, it works better to just put 2 column charts next to each other
• Hybrid charts with 2 axes, very confusing. Again, I split them up into 2.

So, as a presentation designer you can get away with a very limited arsenal of data charts. Here is a quick run down of the ones I use: columns, stacked columns, and bar charts. (You can can guess which ones ship with SlideMagic)

The key to designing good data charts is careful, manual design (the opposite of copy pasting from a spreadsheet). What is the one single message that you want to pop out. What are the 10 to 20 data points that support this. Where to drop the accent colour, to what number of decimals should you round up the numbers. What breakdown categories should you group consolidate. Do I need a graph, or is it clearer to put the numbers in a single table? Data charts take time to prepare, but once you figured out what you want to show, can be produced in 5 minutes.

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Art: Willem Claeszoon Heda, Breakfast Table with Blackberry Pie (1631), sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow on Twitter

New PowerPoint 2016 for Mac can beat Keynote

The preview of the new Microsoft Office 2016 is out (finally) and I have installed it on my production machine letting it do all my presentation design work for clients. (You can download the Office 2016 preview here)

• It looks beautiful. PowerPoint 2016 for Mac looks exactly the same as PowerPoint 2013 for Windows. A calm flat user interface. Working in a beautiful software environment always encourages you to create beautiful presentations.
• The whole interface feels faster, snappier, and smoother, somehow. This is especially true for Excel. The current version of Excel for Mac has a highly annoying latency when entering data in cells. 
• Subtle changes to the default colours and fonts. Gone are the boring olive greens of the old PowerPoint colour scheme. Calibri light looks great on Retina displays. Gone are the default gradients and drop shadows. Gone are the tick marks in data charts.
• The commenting infrastructure is nice for collaboration with other people
• Full integration with OneDrive cloud storage (if Microsoft has guts they should add Dropbox as well, and maybe even Google Drive).
• Now PowerPoint gives suggested snap lines to place objects, automatically distributing and aligning things on your screen. 
• The grid behaves more normal with a centimeter ruler. If you accidentally move a grid line (yes, this still happens) it is easy to move it back to the right position. 
• Now text and shape backgrounds have the exact same colour rendering, an annoying bug in PowerPoint 2011, where despite selecting the same RGB value, colours on text and shapes would render differently.

There are a few important things that are missing:

• The ability to customise the toolbar at the top (here is where I put my align and distribute buttons for example) (this was possible in PowerPoint 2011)
• It is still not possible to embed fonts with a presentation saved in PowerPoint for Mac (it works on the Windows version)

I think PowerPoint 2016 is so good that it has gained the edge over Apple Keynote. Recent user interface changes in Keynote have made the workflow a bit slower. You need to navigate around too many menus to do basic things such as colour changes. Keynote looks nice and clean, but this organised UI comes at the expense of usability.

But before PowerPoint can take the trophy, some bugs that are still in the preview need to be ironed out. I am confident that Microsoft will be able to do this over the next few months until the official release. Here wo go:

• Font rendering: The software UI looks clean and crisp, but the presentation fonts look a bit fuzzy. In Excel, there is an inconsistency of fonts across the spreadsheet. It looks fine towards the top and bottom of the screen, but not in the middle. 

• The colour picking is not completely fool proof, especially when you want to use it define new theme colours for your presentation
• There are frequent crashes, save your work
• Font variations to not come through as in PowerPoint 2011. For the Apple Helvetica font, the bold condensed variant does not pop up for example

But hey, you are developing a PowerPoint killer?

Correct (and therefore my review is biased), I think that PowerPoint and Keynote have too many features, and leave too much design freedom to a layman designer. The result: boring bullet point presentations. My presentation app SlideMagic is trying to address these issues. But that is a separate discussion.

UPDATE: This post was corrected, shape booleans are still present in PowerPoint 2016

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Art: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, Facade (sunset), harmonie in gold and blue 1892-1894 Musée Marmottan Monet Paris, France. Sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter

Fitting a data chart into the grid

Strategy consulting emerged in the 1930s by blending techniques from mathematics, engineering, and economics and apply them to improve company performance. The profession also pioneered new ways of business communications.

1. Tables, frameworks, and drawings were used to visualise strategic trade offs. A departure from the long-winded corporate memo.
2. Line, column, and bar charts were simplified and focused on a specific message. A departure with data-loaded scientific graphs

In my management consulting charts, tables and data charts are blended. Often the most important statistic in a table is visualised using some sort of bar chart. See the example below.

Many consultants push this technique too far. I have seen many charts were many, many columns were represented by bar charts. These bar charts had become so small that it is more clear to just stick in the value. If there is very little variation among your data, then using a bar chart does not make the chart much clearer: you get a bunch of bars of roughly the same size (I do not believe in breaking axes). And the worst consulting mistake is the famous bar chart with just one data item.

Getting data charts to line up with text in PowerPoint and Keynote is very tricky. SlideMagic is built around a very strict grid and this data chart grid alignment was one of the hardest things to get right in the design. I think we cracked it and the SlideMagic templates contain a number of slide compositions where data charts and tables are blended.

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"Let's start with the slide headlines"

This is often how a manager starts a presentation design exercise. For her, it feels very comfortable: the 20 slides are in production, just fill them out, everything is under control. In the next meeting we can check against the agreed headlines and point out empty spots that still need to be completed.

Here is why I usually skip this stage of a project:

• The slide headlines you can come up with at the start of a project are usually, hollow and descriptive: the market, the competitive advantage, the financials, the team. They do not contain any content
• Even if you were to push them one level further (3 meetings later), you focus the attention of your manager on editing headlines and shuffling slides. There is the hard to resist urge to word smith the language for endless flow iterations. Still without the actual meat of the presentation.
• "Empty" slide headlines are great to carve up a piece of work. Team member A gets this data, team member B focuses on that. But, creating the logical fact pack that solves the problem is different from creating the emotional presentation that will convince people to act upon the audience.

So, I actually dive straight in. Create the key slide that hammers home the key point of the presentation. I add backups that support this point (for example a new way to look at the competitive positioning in detail). I add place holders for less important stuff: the work plan going forward, the financials. These can be filled out later.

Meetings that discuss substance are so much more interesting and useful than meetings that discuss process, empty headlines and story flows of empty slides. 

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Art: Gray and Gold, John Rogers Cox, 1942. Sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter.

How to pick a nice accent colour

You can't argue about taste when selecting your colours for your look and feel. There is a practical consideration though. Try picking a colour that gives enough contrast with both white and black characters. It creates a lot of possible colour combinations without a lot of colours. Example: SlideMagic blue.

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Art: Van Gogh, self portrait, 1889. Sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter.

Are you comfortabie with work in progress ambiguity?

Over the years I have discovered that different people can tolerate different levels of work in progress. Some clients freak out if I send an incomplete draft, others welcome the opportunity to discuss my work early on in the project.

My own preferences:

• Incomplete headlines and text: For me text is a mental place holder for a concept in a slide. I actually need to force myself to get into the detail and get the wording of a line exactly right. I think visual, not verbal
• Provisional story flow: again I do not mind that much, story flows can be fixed quickly. 
• Ugly, early slide designs: this is a huge deal for me. The wrong photos, a misaligned composition, it bothers me very much.

When working with new clients, I need to find out quickly how they respond to incomplete work. Most clients have the opposite preferences:

• Very worried about the exact formulation of text
• Very worried about the exact flow of the story
• Not that concerned about slide design early in the project

This client set of preferences puts you in writing mode (sequencing bullet points and slide titles), my preferences puts you in visual design mode. As a result, most of the times, I finish a presentation almost 70% before showing it to a client. In this way we can discuss visual design. Otherwise we might be stuck in story line editing forever.

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Image: J. S. Bach's The Art of Fugue breaks off abruptly during Contrapunctus XIV. Sign up for SlideMagic. Subscribe to this blog. Follow me on Twitter.

You do not really need animations in presentations

As professional presentation designer, I hardly use animations, and my presentation software SlideMagic does not have animation functionality.

• Animations do not show well on mobile devices and/or in PDF files
• Most animations are used for slide transitions or spectacular intros and exits of slide objects. These just distract the audience and reduce the level "seriousness" of your pitch. Flying text boxes work in MBA class, but giggling venture capitalists are less likely to invest in you.
• Layered animations are a pain to edit

If I need to build up the content on a slide slowly, I duplicate a slide multiple times and add a bit more on each page. To the audience, it looks like an animation, it shows on mobile devices/PDF, and it is easy to edit/change.

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Art: Georges Seurat, The Circus, 1891. Sign up for SlideMagic. Subscribe to this blog. Follow me on Twitter.

Presentation or procrastrination?

A bit more elaboration on yesterday's post.

A lot of time is spent on presentation design in corporations. There are many mid-level managers and analysts that have PowerPoint open on their screen all day. For the wrong reasons. Here is a strong statement: I think managers are using PowerPoint as a tool to keep subordinates busy. Boom, I said it.

Big corporates work in the leveraged hierarchy model. Commands trickle down the line. Every manager has a lot of issues to worry about and subordinates to manage. It is like a giant juggling exercise. The key idea is that a manager could do each individual task faster/better herself, but can't complete all of them. It is more efficient to delegate work to others, check in now and then, spot mistakes or correct the direction. Although the total amount of time spent on a task is higher, and there is a lot of work wasted (someone going down the wrong track before being corrected), overall - at a company level - things get done faster. 

A manager's day gets divided up in meeting slots (see Paul Graham' post). In every unit of time, the manager has an opportunity to provide input into one of her issues, talk with one of her subordinates. If there is not a lot of time, meetings get shorter, and input gets more cryptical. PowerPoint is the conduit. "Make it a bit more polished, add a section on the competition, combine these 2 slides into one, show the breakdown by month" All instructions that cost of a lot (PowerPoint time) but add very little to the story or the decision the company needs to take.

Subordinates love it as well. You can work really hard on the PowerPoint slides, sit there until late in the evening and everyone around you sees how ambitious you are. A good employee delivers the goods the next morning, all changes are perfectly incorporated in the deck. But is this really energy spent right? No real decision has been taken. And a lot of discussion among the team is usually about "what does she mean?", trying to interpret the cryptical instructions of the senior manager. People's own thought and input have been switched of.

I think there is a bigger revolution going on in the corporate world, where mid-level management positions are eliminated and/or outsourced to freelancers (I built my presentation design business on this over the past decade). Slowly corporates see that this paper/PowerPoint shifting army of middle managers adds a lot of time/cost to a company, but not a lot of return on investment.

Presentation software SlideMagic is my attempt to help end this "presentation procrastination". It is goes beyond a software solution, it is a platform for a different, more effective corporate communication and decision language. If presentations become more uniform, do not contain bullet points, and are really easy/quick to make, there is more time for things that really matter.

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Art: Workers in the canteen, Ethel Léontine Gabain. Sign up for SlideMagic. Subscribe this blog. Follow me on Twitter

What takes the time?

Presentation design can take a long time. But most of that time is not spent on the physical activity of putting slides together. The time consuming bit is to come up with the design itself. 

Now we have hard data. A SlideMagic beta tester deleted the wrong presentation and had to re-create it from a PDF export. Time spent to create the presentation: 6 hours. Time spent to recreate it from the PDF example: 30 minutes. (Of course, SlideMagic's grid structure made it easy...).

Think about how you can spend those 6 hours most productively.  I would take 30 minutes to start thinking about your presentation way before the deadline. Then drop it. Spend time sketching ideas on paper, and then putting the whole thing on slides. And maybe you could have shortened that 6 hours a bit?

I think business presentations should have more standardised slides (a list, a transition, a contrast, an overlap, a growth path). You might say that that will will cause all presentations to look the same. But remember, that standardisation is already happening today: most PowerPoint users only know how to make bullet point slides, even if they wanted to be more creative.

That is what SlideMagic is trying to do: offer easy customisable slide building blocks that are more creative than bullet points but less complicated than hard-to-modify PowerPoint templates.

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Art: Henri Rousseau – The Football Players (1908). Subscribe to this blog. Follow me on Twitter.

"On each slide we have a line with the key message..."

...but it is not the headline.

Over time, many slide decks becomes so cluttered and messy that I have seen people adding a sentence or a bubble on each slide with a sentence that summarises the message of the slide. (I have even seen them in the footnotes on every page). "What we really want to say is this".

Why do this last, instead of first? If you start with the sentence, and you build your slide just to support that message, the slide will be a lot more effective.

Why not write this as the slide title? Many PowerPoint templates are so poorly designed that people do not use the headline. The headline is set in such a big font that you can only write 3 words. Two thirds of the headline space is taken up by the corporate logo. The elaborate graphic background of the title makes it hard to read what is written there.

In short: clean up the template, start with the headline, and write it where it is supposed to be.

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Art: Hans Krell, Battle of Orsha, 1525. Subscribe to this blog. Follow me on Twitter. 

SlideMagic is in public beta, anyone can sign up

Two years after having the first idea about creating a PowerPoint alternative from scratch, I now have taken the invite wall down on presentation software SlideMagic. Anyone can now sign up for the beta version.

Here is how to get hooked:

1. Go to the "templates" tab and clone one of the template presentations to start
2. Customise your own accent colour and logo
3. Go all the way to the end (beyond playing around) and create one real presentation for your next meeting. It can be a short presentation. It can be low-risk presentation.

Step 3 is the important one. You will see how incredibly easy it is to create a presentation, especially when you think you should go back to PowerPoint for your next presentation.

Let me know your thoughts and share SlideMagic with like minded people who you think might enjoy it as well.

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Art: Claude Monet, La rue Montorgueil à Paris. Fête du 30 juin 1878. Subscribe to this blog. Follow me on Twitter. Sign up for SlideMagic

Why SlideMagic is different

I created a quick presentation (hey, in SlideMagic) that highlights some of the features I have put inside that you will not get in other presentation design apps. Some of them you will never find there (even if people try to copy them) because of the fundamentally different way SlideMagic works. Less designer freedom and more uniformity allows you to do great things!

• Keyword search across all your slides, no more opening and closing files
• Image-based search: "get me all the slides that contain this image"
• Explanation slide-out drawer to turn an abstract visual presentation that needs verbal explanation into a document that you can email.
• A strictly enforced grid that makes sure everything is always lined up and distributed properly. And the most tricky part: that includes the columns and bars of data charts as well.
• Instant conversion from a light to a dark background and back (switch between a conference room and a keynote hall setting)
• And, a template bank that is constantly updated by a McKinsey/Idea Transplant designer!

Give SlideMagic a try yourself, you can request an invite here.

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Art: Albert Gleizes, 1912, Les Baigneuses, oil on canvas, 105 x 171 cm, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Published in Du "Cubisme"
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2x2 matrix clarity in presentations

The 2x2 matrix is a favourite layout for differentiating yourself from others. 'We, the good guys, are in the top right corner".

But people sometime force the framework somewhat. If you are having trouble filling the bottom left box, consider using a Venn diagram (a "best of both worlds concept").

If it is going to be a 2x2 matrix and your axis choice is a bit tricky, write things out in full. Rather than "ease of deployment, low, high" consider ignoring the axis name and write the 2 categories: "Big system integration project", "Up and running in 5 minutes". You can also write explicitly in the 4 boxes what they are about (BCG did that with their brand matrix: "dogs, cows, stars, question marks")

Framework in pitch presentation are different from those in a micro economics Phd thesis.

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UPDATE January 2018: we have now added 2x2 presentation templates to the SlideMagic template store.

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Art: Peterka Vlada, Sunset at Liberty Square, Oil on canvas, 40x28 inches ( 100x70 cm ), 2012
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"We can skip the problem"

Often, this is what a confident sales rep says when discussing the brief for a sales presentation. For industry insiders, it is true that you do not have to elaborate much about issues they already know. But I think plunging straight into features, benefits, and solutions is the wrong approach.

It is much easier to sell a problem than to sell a solution. Almost all my sales and investor presentations elaborate on the problem.

• For sales presentations, it is a good opportunity to discuss individual issues the client has. The best sales presentations talk about the client, and not about the seller. Even if it is old news for the audience, it is good to start your story on common ground. And most importantly, I often present the solution using a slide layout that I already introduced during the problem part of the presentation. "Here is that same slide we discussed before but now with that big messy part ripped out".
• For investor presentations, you actually need to educate the audience about the issue that your innovation is solving. So here the problem section is actually very important.

So, next time push back when they tell you to skip the problem.

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Art: Dalí Atomicus (1948) by Halsman in an un-retouched version
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The final clean up

Some things to check once you think you have finished your presentation:

• Are the fonts consistent throughout the presentation? Are have default Arials/Calibris managed to sneak in? 
• Are font sizes in comparable boxes the same?
• Are the headlines all in the same place on every slide?
• Are objects in each slide aligned, and properly distributed?
• Are the proper colours used on every slide, including data charts, or do you still see standard PowerPoint colours anywhere?
• Are all images in the proper aspect ratio, without distortion?
• Did you include an attribution to creative common images?
• In case you will be displaying the presentation on another computer, have you checked Windows/Mac rendering issues? Sometimes fonts are rendered in slightly different sizes, causing words to drop to the second line.
• Is data properly rounded up?

Now you see why SlideMagic has 1 font, 1 accent colour, and a strict grid that makes it impossible to misalign objects or put titles in the wrong places.

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Art: Berthe Morisot, Hanging the Laundry out to Dry, 1875
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Squarespace versus wix

There are two popular web site template providers: squarespace and wix. I like to think of presentation design software SlideMagic as "squarespace for presentations". Many other PowerPoint alternatives (such as prezi) are "wix for presentations". What is the difference?

• Wix offers a lot of features, colours, fonts, pre-programmed templates for specific sectors (vets and pets for example)
• Squarespace is muted, has far fewer choices, fewer colours, bells & whistles.

The great thing is that the design restrictions of squarespace actually result in better web designs. People have to think how (whether) to put that content on the page. A professional designer will pick a style and restrict herself to stay in that framework. That is why it looks so good. The layman designer cannot resist to add more stuff. Squarespace and SlideMagic protect the non-designer from herself.

P.S. Squarespace powers the SlideMagic landing pages and blog.

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Art: The Stadhuis under construction, by Johannes Lingelbach, 1656
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You cannot force creativity

I tend to work on presentation design projects in bursts: dive in, get stuck, put it away, work on another project, get back to it, put it away again.

Even when you stop working on something consciously, your subconscious mind continues to chew on things. This article discusses recent research that proves that the subconscious brain can solve real problems.

There is another benefit of this delayed approach. When you get back into things some details of the story have faded to the background a bit. It is this "numb" state of mind that is useful to piece together the story that really matters, you have to explain it to yourself again and it might come out clearer without the distraction of these details. In addition, other details might come to the forefront which you thoughts were not important.

All of this explains why presentations that are created at 3AM at night before the 9AM meeting are not very creative (most management consulting projects). It also explains why an outsider or senior executive/partner can walk into a room and articulate a story much better in 3 minutes than an entire team who has been working on it 24/7 for the past 3 months. It not all experience, it is also being able to take some distance from the subject.

What to do? Start thinking early about the presentation of your results. The problem of how to communicate your project, is a different one from the problem that your project solved (read that sentence again). While you still might end up finishing your presentation at 3AM, if you started early enough to think about it, your presentation will be much more effective. 

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Art: The Inspiration of Saint Matthew by Caravaggio, 1602
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Should you work for free?

I design a lot of investor presentations (hey, Google views me as the #1 investor presentation designer!), including pitches for startups. And companies that need to talk to investors are by definition short of budget. Many startups ask me whether I consider working for a delayed fee. Usually, I say "no" and that sounds harsh to a boot strapping startup. Here is a ruthless profit seeker trying to extract money from a small, fragile, company that could do amazing things for the world.

Here are some points to remember, and I invite all freelancers to use them where appropriate:

• Deferred payment is real money. Yes, you are not selling a physical product (nobody would walk into a car showroom and have the guts to ask for free vehicles with payment after the next fund raising round, if it happens), you sell time. But there is a real opportunity cost to working on one project: you cannot work at the same time for a client who does pay cash.
• Deferred payment is your own money. Most startups have some sort of funding, which means that they benefit from OPM (other people's money). Freelancers cannot. It is their own cash. (In my case where I am funding SlideMagic from own personal savings this argument is especially true).
• Startups do not equal charity. Startups want to become a commercial success. Doing pro bono work fore a cause you belief in does not equal providing free work to a company that is raising money.
• Success fees have to be so large that no startup will pay them. Venture capitalists require that their investments need to return 3, 5, 10 times their money. And VCs invest in a stage of a company where at least one risk has been eliminated: funding risk. The designer working on an investor presentation comes in before that, which would merit an even higher return. No startup has agreed to pay 10x the price of a regular project.
• The carrot, we will generate lots of work for you in the future does work for a big company that needs to feed a big fixed cost infrastructure. A successful freelancer will have no problem filling her work pipeline with other clients.
• This startup is not the only one. I get these type of requests every week. If I would say yes, I could spend 120% of my time working on a deferred payment basis. Why should I say "yes" to this startup and turn down the other 10?

And finally, there is a psychological argument here. Over the past 10 years, I have had very little success with deferred payments. Usually the startups who believe in themselves, pay cash, and stay happy clients for many years. The ones that seek deferred payments somehow don't make it, as if they know something already.

What is the solution? Some startups are happy to pay for a good investor presentation and see it is a crucial investment to get through the very first stages of their company. In other situations, I try to find a working model where I can be involved less to get to an acceptable result for a much better price.

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Art: Giacomo Francesco Cipper - Peasant Repast with a Young Beggar, 1725
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