Cheaper stock images

A decade ago, the first stock photo web sites started at $1 per image. Over time prices have been creeping up to $15 or even more. I could buy 10 or more of these for a client presentation. Now I see the amount of money I spend on images going down again.

• I use fewer images. Not every single point you want to make needs to be backed up by a photo.
• Stock image databases have been diluted by millions of cliche photo compositions, wherever I can I look for alternative more genuine images that are free to use under a creative commons license
• There is increasing competition from free stock image sites, and even competition among the big guys (if you are an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber you can buy 10 images at $3 each each month from Adobe Stock).

What can stock image sites do?

• Curate images better
• Offer bundles of images that are compatible, uniform in style
• Offer images with huge white spaces, i.e. extended canvases
• Instead of ready-made compositions, offer layered Photoshop files so you can make your own

Let's see if the stock sites are listening

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Art: Gerard van Honthorst (1590–1656) , Allegory of Painting, 1648

We are cool! (and you are not)

You are a hot social media startup and you need to sell your product to conservative, old-fashioned, traditional media publishers. What sales deck to use?

Here are the points that are usually emphasised in draft presentations that I see:

• We are cool, you are not
• "Social", "mobile" is eating the world, you are on the menu

Firstly, there is a good change that the people in the traditional media company you are speaking to already understand this (their bosses might not). Secondly, it is a bit offensive to put it that bluntly in people's face.

There are a number of other questions the media dinosaur might have which will be very important to close the sale:

• Is this a financially stable company or will they go bankrupt tomorrow?
• Are these people serious business partners, or just playing kids?
• We might be uncool, but we still have 100 years of editorial integrity invested in our brand, will we throw that out of the window when working with you?
• Is your product actually easy to use, how does it work day-to-day?
• I like these guys, but how am I going to convince my boss?
• I can see that all this stuff is interesting for 15 to 25 year olds, our readers are 45+

Even if your product is cool, you still need to show that you are a serious business partner. Spending all your slides on the obvious is a waste of the sales meeting.

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Art: Ferdinand Lured by Ariel is a painting by John Everett Millais which depicts an episode from Act I, Scene II of Shakespeare's play The Tempest. 

Style or substance?

Sometimes when a client approaches me for a new pitch deck, I tell her "your problem is not the presentation". For some products the pitch can be incredibly easy, a 30 second explanation, or even better a product demo. The problem is: how to turn this brilliant opportunity into a valuable company.

Typically investors go through a number of questions when taking in a pitch

1. Do I understand what the product actually does? (Yes it sounds basic, but many startup pitches don't get this right)
2. Do I think that this could be a big thing?
3. Can you make money of this? Are people willing to pay (enough)? Can you somehow defend your margins against competitors? 
4. Is it likely that all of this will happen. Do the people have the right skills, is there momentum, and is there a good plan in place to take the company to the next step?
5. Wildcard: do I like these people, this product

For the situation I described above items 1, 2 are nailed in 30 seconds. Item 5 cannot be covered in a presentation, it is chemistry. Item 3 and 4 are the bottleneck and preparing your pitch presentation is less about stunning visuals and awesome images, and more about the traditional business plan homework: gantt charts, cost structures, competitive analysis.

But hey, remember that there are many companies out there that will be jealous of being able to do the general pitch in 30 seconds.

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Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849

Salami slicing valuations

Negotiating company valuations is part art and science. Science (Excel sheets) can be helpful, but also dangerous in investor presentations. One risk is "salami slicing". I explain what this is in 2 examples

• You email the full valuation Excel model that backs up your $95m valuation (cell D34 of the DCF worksheet) to the other side. Obviously this model is full of assumptions, and these assumptions are set with a seller's bias. The buyer can now take each of these assumptions one by one, nock them down a bit, and get an instant reduction visible in cell D34. Your own logic is being used against you. In M&A situations it is better to just exchange assumptions and let the other party stitch them together to a point estimate in their own model.
• You are an extremely early startup and benchmark your valuation against an Internet giant on let's say a sales multiple. The salami slicing can now happen in multiple ways. You should correct the multiple downwards to compensate for some assets that facebook has, and you obviously do not have, or people can go back in time and see what facebook's valuation was when Mark just started out in his garage.

Watch out for the salami slicer.

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Art:  Albert Anker, Still life Excess (1896)

Stale case examples

The shelf life of presentation slides can be months or even years as people re-use slides for new presentations. While we are usually good in updating numbers (it is immediately apparent that last quarter's sales figures are no longer the latest), other content can just sit there gathering dust for a long time.

An example of stale slide material would be using the video Gangnam Style as evidence that music hits are now created online rather than in traditional media. I remember startups still using the amazing growth of MySpace as an example of the social networks long after facebook took over its leading position. (I am writing this post in June 2015) 

In the world of technology presentations, things get recycled a lot. Someone saw a presentation somewhere and used it and gave someone else an idea who used it. Very soon after the case example will become an overused cliche, and you can hear your audience's "sigh" when they realise they have to go through it again. It is almost an insult that you considered them that misinformed.

Check two things before re-using that case example:

1. Is it still correct? If something used to grow fast and the data is from 6 months ago, chances are that things are different. And - especially on the internets - things can change dramatically in no time
2. Is it still interesting? As habits go mainstream, people might not need facts to be convinced of something that is considered to have become part of everyday life. People spend a lot of time staring at their mobile phones, no need for facts here, just look around you.

Case examples are usually interesting if they:

• Are really new
• Are based on data that only you have access to (and are willing to share with the world)
• Make a comparison that nobody before you have thought of

Keep it fresh, keep it original, and make sure you really need that case example to get your audience to do what you want them to do. Giving a lecture about interesting industry trends using stale case examples will not get you very far.

P.S. Gangnam style has almost 2.5b views now, that is pretty amazing. Someone must have the stats somewhere that shows that most of those views were done on mobile devices.

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Art: The 1897 painting of "Laelaps" (now Dryptosaurus) by Charles R. Knight.

Stuck in a mirror palace

When big corporates try to pitch a new business idea they can find themselves stuck in a mirror palace. Rather than pitching the idea fresh with a simple and clear angle, the try to describe the initiative by comparing and contrasting it against familiar frameworks. The result is a diluted story that sounds a lot like other big corporate presentations.

Examples of mirrors in the mirror palace:

• Mission, vision, customer comes first, care for the environment stuff. It is all important but trying to squeeze that into your product pitch dilutes things a little
• Traditional ways of segmenting the market and your competitors. Big technology research firms define labels for market segments, provide market sizing data for these segments. You have a problem when your product does not completely fit. Do not force fit it, but rather create your own version of the market view in your presentation and add a chart in the back that tries to show how things are related to the traditional view
• Overloading the benefits. Adding feature after feature, benefit after benefit. There a particular risk when many people work on a presentation (often remotely) and provide input such as "add 'great ROI' somewhere on page 39",  Too many benefits = no benefits
• Engineering approach to describing the world: everything is an architecture diagram. Great for planning and carving up software development work, not always the best framework to pitch your product.
• Over-structuring and over-story-telling. When you re-hash and re-hash the story over and over again with many people you end up with a business school essay. A logical but boring description of the market, the opportunity, and the solution. But you might spend too much time on providing market background, and taking out some of that raw edge of your story.

One way to unstuck yourself is to get the most charismatic sales person to run the pitch verbally without slides, and without interruption, record, and craft a slide deck that can support that spontaneous story.

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Art: Paulus Moreelse, Girl at a mirror, (1632)

Investors spend <4min on your pitch deck

Here is an interesting analysis of VC pitch decks that were hosted on the DocSend slide hosting/viewing platform. They aggregated data (anonymously) about what slides were included, how long the slides were viewed, how many meetings it takes to close the round etc.

Investors spend on average 03:44 minutes on a pitch deck, and 12% of them does so on mobile devices. In the second screen shot you see what this means per slide: 10 to 25 seconds. That is all you have to get your message across.

I do not completely agree that the ranking shown here implies how important slides are. Slides with financials, competitors, and team bios on them take more time to digest. 

You can see the full results of the survey here.

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Art: The dance to the music of time c. 1640, a painting by Nicolas Poussin

Putting text on images

This image that I saw on Twitter has composition problems that you often see in presentation slides:

• The text in the box does not have enough breathing space,
• The quotation marks disturb the balance and alignment of the text box
• The line breaks are not placed carefully enough, breaking apart words that belong together.

What is it like to see again after years being blind? @roseveleth investigates http://t.co/HJSdFGZNzL pic.twitter.com/XvmwYUgC7q

— BBC Future (@BBC_Future) June 4, 2015

I tried to come up with an alternative design in SlideMagic (which does not support the giant quotation marks [yet]). You clone these two slides to your own SlideMagic account here and use them in your presentations if you want. Image taken from WikiPedia.

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Art: detail of the Mona Lisa

Photoshop alternatives?

Adobe is moving to a subscription pricing model for its major software products (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc.). I signed up for a $20 or so monthly introduction offer but then forgot that I got upgraded to around $55 charge after one year. This is probably good value if you use many Adobe products, and use them frequently.

As a presentation designer, I fall in between the typical user segments. Here is how I use Adobe products:

• Acrobat:
  • Stitching together multiple PDFs into one
  • Reducing file sizes of image-heavy PDF files
• Photoshop:
  • Removing backgrounds from images
  • Compressing, re-sizing large image files
  • Putting text on blank 3D objects
• Illustrator: opening, selecting groups, re-coloring of stock vector files before saving them as PNGs.

Is there a combination of alternative software packages that could do these basic functions?

Some responses to an earlier tweet:

@ideatransplant Highly recommended!

— Timo Sorri (@SorsiusMaximus) June 2, 2015

@ideatransplant Best one I've seen in a free online tool is @fotoflexer Great tool for PS-like background removal!

— Mike Taylor (@tmiket) June 2, 2015

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Art: Typesetter at the Enschede printing factory (was located behind the St. Bavochurch) in 1884, painting by the American artist Charles Frederic Ulrich.

New SlideMagic video tutorials

I am in the process of creating a library of video tutorials for SlideMagic. Here are the first three, you can expand them to full screen size for more detail.

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From the 3x3 grid to a basic slide composition

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How to clone a template

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How to import individual slides from another presentation/template

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Art: William Merritt Chase, A Friendly Call, 1895.

Adding structure to text

Sentences or titles never have the same length, so putting them on a page without some form of framing makes the whole slide look unbalanced. My solution: a light grey background  creates a box that gives structure to the text. You can also use images to reinforce the slide's grid layout. Many people use an outline, a frame around text for the same purpose. I think a light box fill looks a lot better.  

The light grey box is one of the key structuring elements in my presentation design app SlideMagic. Traditional presentation design software is not very well set up to changing grids of text boxes and images. Try doing it in PowerPoint, then try to do the same thing in SlideMagic.

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Art: Piet Mondriaan, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942

"You don't look like a fashion company"

Related to last week's post about looking like the company you want to look like. A client in the fashion/apparel business recently got feedback on their pitch deck: "it does not look like the pitch deck of a fashion business."

Fair point. Especially if you are in the business of fashion, jewellery, sport cars, wine, etc. businesses for which consumer branding is important, you might want to spice up your presentation a bit.

Where do you find the slide real estate to do it? You cannot put a big image of that 1961 bottle on every slide. I try to use separator pages for that. Break your presentation in sections (problem, solution, about, financials) and use the page that announces a new section as the scaffolding for a page-filling image that reflects what your company does. Make sure the images throughout the presentation are similar in style.

Here is a separator slide that I could have used in my own SlideMagic pitch deck (it was of course created with SlideMagic...)

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Art: portrait by Giovanni Boldini (1845–1931) showing Elizabeth Wharton Drexel in 1905.

Look like the company you want to look like

Presentation slide design has two components:

1. The visual concept of the slide
2. The look and feel of the slide

Number 1 can be hard, hard enough that professional presentation designers like me can make a living out of helping out clients to do just that.

Number 2, the look and feel, is a lot easier to solve, and yet people get it wrong so many times:

• Times Roman (or even Comic Sans) fonts
• Standard Microsoft Office 2010/2011 colours (later versions of PowerPoint actually look OK)
• Low resolution, cheesy images yanked from Google image search full of copy right issues
• Three levels of bullet points (dots, dashes, stars) in different font sizes
• Clip art

Here is a simple observation: you come across they way you look. So, if you want to come across as a successful startup:

LOOK LIKE ONE

Slides that are poorly designed, contain too much text, and use the wrong visual concepts, still can look calm and professional when the basics of layouts, fonts, colours are sorted. Most slides in Apple presentations consist of a large picture of a piece of hardware with 2-3 short sentences/words. It all looks great.

It is hard to copy a design style of someone else. You often start out great, but bit by bit your own style creeps back in. You look at your effort, you look at your example, and somehow the example looks good and yours does not. You need to stick to your example. Fonts, positioning of headlines, text, images, everything. It is a similar effect when you see a small child trying to draw a 3D house. It does not come out right because does not have the courage to simply follow what you see: lines disappearing in a vanishing point, sometimes at extreme angles. It does not match with the child's perception of reality where everything is supposed to be straight.

In my presentation design app SlideMagic I tried to do the look & feel bit for you. Upload your logo, pick a matching accent colour, and you can't go wrong with the look & feel.

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Art: Georges Seurat, The Models, 1888

The impatient clicker

The revolution in presentation design over the past 5 years has mostly been about creating better on-stage experiences. Big pictures, one-message-per-slide, consistent colours, proper layout.

The definition of "presentation" is widening though. PowerPoint is replacing the word processor in corporate communication and is used to create documents that are meant for reading rather than presenting.

In my bespoke design work, I see more and more decks that are used as attachment to a cold email: VC pitches, sales presentations. The audience setting for these type of presentations is a little bit different from the classical standup presentation. Your audience is not captive and can decide to close the file, skip ahead, at any moment. A cold email deck is very similar to a web page competing with hundreds of other links to click to take you somewhere else.

Some design pointers to these types of presentations. SlideMagic beta testers will notice that I have put a lot of these requirements into my presentation design tool.

• Look and feel. When you are on-stage, you can masquerade the unprofessional look and feel of your slides somewhat with your overall stage presence. No such thing in cold emails. If the slides look like amateurishly designed PowerPoint slides, the company that's behind them will be perceived as such.  
• Must click. Like the beat in a piece of music, an impatient VC or potential customer has the urge "to keep on clicking". If the slides it boring, or hard to understand, she will not re-read the slide a second time, instead: "Oh, maybe the next one is clearer" [CLICK]. You do not control the beat, design your slides in such a way that the message comes across before the next click comes along.
• The basics. You are not there to explain, you cannot keep the audience locked in the room and force them to go through your dramatic analogy as an opening. Tell them bluntly what you are about, right upfront. 
• Keep them hooked. For standup presentations, you do not always have to throw those impressive stats early on. Here, you have to do all you can to keep people hooked. You can do this in 2 ways: mention the impressive facts (2 million paying users in 2 months) and - maybe even more important - anticipate the obvious questions: slide 3: "This looks like a Google me-too? Wrong!". 
• Branding. On stage there is no need to remind people whom they are listening to on every page. In cold emails, a bit of reminding is actually good. A tiny logo at the bottom right of each page is hopefully enough to get people to remember your name by the end of the deck.
• Explanation. You are not there, so super abstract slides will not be understand. Consider using 2 lines for the slide title. Or add a subtitle box under your slide with the full length narrative in point 8 fonts (SlideMagic ships with explanation boxes to the right of each slide).
• Details later. The first part of your presentation is all about getting people to understand what you do, and why things are so great. You do not need the full detail of your team, technology, etc. for this. But, if you succeeded, the reader might want to dig a bit deeper. Consider adding the more dry information in an appendix of your deck, in a denser presentation style. Bios of team members are a good example where dense text with rich backgrounds can add value.

In short, put yourself in the position of the impatient clicker who has the urge to press the mouse button every 10 seconds and will read straight over buzzwords and fluff. Also that clicker, might tab on a table or mobile device. 

Presentation design blends with web design to design slides for an non-captive audience.

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Art: Eduard Charlemont A Drink for the Drummer, 1889

Makeover of the Buffer pitch deck that landed them $500k

When Googling for examples of VC pitch decks, the on that Buffer used to raise $500k in 2013 ranks high. I decided to give it the SlideMagic treatment: how would the deck have looked when the slides would have been created in SlideMagic.

• I changed the slide design to fit SlideMagic
• I did not change the slide content
• I did not change the story flow

I have a few comments on the slides that I have put in the SlideMagic explanation boxes.

Here is the original:

The slide deck we used to raise half a million dollars from Buffer

Here is the same deck in SlideMagic. You can clone this presentation to your own SlideMagic account by clicking this link and use some of the slide concepts in your own presentations. I have also added this presentation as a template in SlideMagic's template library.

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Art: Johann Zoffany paints a group of Englishmen in Rome for the Grand Tour, united only by their wealth and love of art; unlike most conversation pieces, this was not a commissioned work

Reading, watching, listening, writing, presenting, telling

They are all different activities, they all require different slides:

• Presenting and watching: The creator stands on stage with some visual support, the audience watches the performance. You have 3 types of slides:
  1. Slides that set the mood (a big picture/word/sentence)
  2. Slides that show a fact/trend
  3. Slides that show how things are related
• Writing and reading. The creator writes text (facts and ideas held together by a story line), and the reader reads them, without assistance. Slides: text pages or bullet points.
• Telling and listening. No slides, the creator imagines, translates to audio, the audience listens and reconstructs.

You see where it goes wrong. People use slides meant for reading to an audience that is watching.

The more I think about it, any slide that just lists stuff in a sequential order without any other relationship, should just be eliminated out of a presentation that is meant for watching and replaced by multiple "mood slide", "fact/trend", or "relationship" slides.

Fact and relationship slides could actually get complicated and busy in some cases. Bullet point slides of unrelated items can be incredibly clean and minimalist. The first are OK, the latter not.

I need to develop this quick thought a bit further in future blog posts.

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Art: In England, artist Francis Barraud (1856-1924) painted his brother's dog Nipper listening to the horn of an early phonograph during the winter of 1898. Victor Talking Machine Company began using the symbol in 1900, and Nipper joined the RCA family in 1929.

Good and bad use of data charts

I came across these charts created by The National Geography in a special article about Food by the Numbers. The print article is an extraction from a video. (I made a poor quality image with my phone).

Like in most infographics, the rules of creating data charts are broken. It works well in the 2 graphics on the left, not so good in the map.

• The line charts abstracts away everything you do not need. Years are omitted, the scale is really rough. It focuses on the things that need communicating. The exact point estimate for "today" (2011), but still the number is nicely rounded (not 1,800,232,433). The growth trajectory is clear (without cheating with broken axes). Real data and projection are clearly separated.
• The connection to the pie chart is good. The pie chart itself is super minimalist with a huge data label to communicate and visualise the one number we need to know (could have bee "4%"). [Contradicting myself here, usually I do not like pie charts].
• The map works less well. The differences in size between the bubbles is hard to see. A simple stacked column might have been better here. Also, the really interesting statistic is to show the 4% broken down by region, not the absolute size. Maybe South America uses relatively more bio pesticides than North America?

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Art: Pieter Breughel the Elder, the Harvesters, 1565

Common presentation design mistakes

Here are some common mistakes I see in briefings for presentation design projects. They range from typographical details to big picture issues:

• The presentation never explains what it is you actually do
• The slides say something different than the verbal explanation
• Too many benefits, as a result: no positioning
• Doubt between positioning options shines through in the slides
• Presenter gets lost in side stories
• Amateurish images ("funny" ones)
• Images with copy right issues
• Font, colour, alignment, image resolution, aspect ratio chaos
• Inconsistent graphical style
• Inconsistent analogies
• Cliche analogies
• Good data, but the wrong data charts
• Jargon and buzzwords
• Quotes from airport best seller authors
• Bullet point place holders rather than a story
• Too many words that explain too little
• Too few words that say something generic
• Five slides combined in one
• The presentation spends too much time on the obvious
• The presentation avoids the elephant in the room
• Slides from a strategic Board meeting that talk about some strategic choice and expose weaknesses are ported straight into the pitch deck
• Comments and notes with sensitive information are left in presentations for everyone to read
• Sensitive data that is taken out of the chart can still be accessed when opening the graph
• 99% solution, 1% problem
• About us, us, us, us
• Too long a summary, too short a body, too long a wrap up
• Errors marked by the spell checker are still ignored
• Custom fonts that get rendered as Arial
• Slide title appears 3x: in the title, in a bubble, in a line across the bottom
• Second line of a bullet point paragraph is misaligned
• First line of a regular non-bullet point paragraph pops out as if it were a bullet point
• Inconsistent slide templates throughout the presentation (resulting from a Frankenstein, slam the deck together, effort)
• Some charts are still in Microsoft Graph / Microsoft Office 2003 format
• Data charts are copied straight from Excel, without bothering to round up/down

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Art: Giovanni Boldini (1842–1931), The Laundry, 1874

Dear Big Company

Most large companies have lost their ability to innovate and moved to a model of delivering small performance improvements quarter by quarter. Employees are often under a lot of pressure and busy with day-to-day activities that the help of freelancers is called in to supplement hands, brains, and most importantly distraction-free creativity.

As a freelancer, I try to accommodate the constraints of my big clients as best as I can. Reprioritise other clients, maybe work a few hours on the weekend now and then, trying to deliver the best work possible. Being flexible when some designs are considered "too creative". Working with my direct contact points usually works great.

Then comes the accounting department. The electronic invoice of my highly efficient and transparent billing system gets printed out on paper, send across to a central pan-European payment processing centre, where a clerk discovers an error (info that probably sat in the body of the email or on page 2 of a PFD that did not get printed), marks the error and mails it back in regular mail from a European capital to Tel Aviv. I provide explanation by email, which get printed out, send to the processing centre, and goes back to me by mail.

Freelancers are consider suppliers, not employees, and get the supplier treatment. You did not get that PO number right, hah, hah, perfect excuse to postpone payment to you. Got you! We expect you to be flexible and human to meet that deadline, we on the other hand can be as flexible as a brick wall.

Big suppliers can defend themselves against these tactics. They invest in the same SAP software, they employee accounting departments with people who have time to call and chase things, and - of course - they do the same thing to their suppliers. They get paid late, but hey, they pay late as well. And, the financing cost of delayed payment is anticipated and gets priced into the invoice.

Big suppliers are willing to tolerate this behaviour. Big fixed cost bases means that big supply contracts are required for survival. Freelancers don't have the resources to deal with this stuff, but also: freelancers do not have a big fixed cost base that needs filling. A good freelancers is probably 100% doing her art. A good freelancer has alternatives.

The big obstacle for large companies to innovate and be creative is the ability to attract innovating and creative talent: be it employees or freelancers. Giving your freelancers the big supplier treatment is not going to help. 

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Art: Mustafa II receiving the French embassy of Charles de Ferriol in 1699; painting by Jean-Baptiste van Mour

SlideMagic bugs fixed

Presentation software needs to be absolutely bug free. Unlike a social media mobile app, where you can wait with grazing your news feed for a few hours, the presentation app needs to be ready for that critical 20 minute slot for the all-or-nothing presentation.

That is the reason I am keeping SlideMagic still in beta as I iron out all possible glitches. Here are some we fixed recently. If one of these caused you to stop using the app, give it another try.

• Fixed: small (but annoying) differences in font size rendering between what you see in PDF and what you see on screen, causing words to drop to the next line when you don't want them to.
• Fixed: erratic font size behaviour when rapidly increasing or decreasing font sizes
• Fixed: enabling multi-edit of cells to manage colours, font sizes of more than one cell in one go.
• Fixed: no need to leave and re-enter the shape format menu to work on another cell
• Fixed: Windows/Firefox UI freezes
• Fixed: story mode drag and drop issues

SlideMagic is moving closer to production stability.

B.t.w, I updated the SlideMagic marketing site yesterday, making the positioning plain and simple: it is easy to make business presentations. Easy, that's it. Also made the images a bit more daring.

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Art: Scène d'été, or Summer Scene, is an oil on canvas painting by Frédéric Bazille, completed in 1869