A nice pie chart background

I saw this pie chart in the presentation below (full of interesting Internet stats). It is interesting to extent the chart into its own background. It is easy to recreate with some triangles and rectangles, you need to fiddle a bit with the angles of the triangles to get it right.

Here is the full presentation in case you are interested:

Activate Tech and Media Outlook 2016 from Activate

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Art: Still Life with Turkey Pie, 1627, Pieter Claesz

Arrows in SlideMagic

Based on many requests, we deployed the ability to create arrows in SlideMagic. You will notice a more elaborate user interface when working with connector objects. Try them out and let me know what you think.

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Art: Guido Reni, Reclining Venus with Cupid, 1639

Presentations on mobile devices - taking stock

Five years after the iPad launch let's take a step back and see what is actually happening in the world of presentation software and the use of mobile devices. My observations are based on the people I see around me everyday: startup employees (mostly mid 30s to 40s) and staff in big corporates (a bit older).

• Designing. Apple has made a big inroad in terms of hardware, but it is still PowerPoint that runs on a laptop machine that is the preferred set up to create slides. I have not encountered anyone who uses a mobile device to do this. Apple Keynote is pretty much still a niche application.
• Frankensteining / finding stuff. Cloud-based file systems can be confusing to use. I still do not understand exactly what happens when Keynote on iPad tells me it is converting a regular Keynote file. In practice, the file system that everyone is using is.... the email inbox and sent box. People with gmail can find stuff faster than Outlook users.
• Viewing. Yes, more and more, people use their mobile devices to view a presentation. And it is not the iPad, a tablet, it is the mobile phone, where people squint to see what is in the slides. These are investors looking at a pitch deck, these are managers/superiors proving input on a slide. Think about it, this might be a more important audience for your slides than the ones sitting in conference room.
• Emergency edits. Still laptop, although a tablet could work here, few people use it in a corporate setting.
• Coffee chat, 1 on 1. Mostly laptop, I see fewer iPad/tablets than I saw 1-2 years ago.
• Conference room. Laptop. The crappy VGA projector is being replaced by crappy LCD screens. Presentations that look beautiful on your retina display, look absolutely horrible on an LCD screen with poor resolution and overly bright settings. (Test, test, test). Advanced meeting rooms now allow you to airplay your presentations into the screen. People use their laptops to do this, not their mobile devices.
• Big keynote. Conference laptop with a memory stick plugged in.

So what is really changing? People are viewing decks on mobile phones, especially busy people that might not be overly motivated to see your pitch (investors in round 0 of the due diligence process for example).

Presentation gurus like me used to discourage dense bullet points because you can't (too small) and don't want (too boring) to read them in the back row. Now it is a bit more subtle. You can't read small text on a mobile screen. But, more and more desks are read without a presenter being present and you actually need some text to explain things properly.

In SlideMagic, I encourage big, bold, but extremely simple designs (that will come through nicely on a mobile device), plus I left space on the side for a regular explanation paragraph.

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Image on WikiPedia

"I don't believe you"

The other day I had a frank discussion with a client. Usually, when an investor does not believe you, she might ask a polite clarification question, leave some hints in her body language, but most of the times, probably move on.

When preparing the pitch, we can be more frank. The answers to the "I don't believe you" point were as follows.

• Repeat the description of what the system can do one more time. But I understand that that is what the system is supposed to do, I just don't believe it can deliver.
• Remind me of the credibility founder. Yes, the track record of the entrepreneur is very impressive, and no, I have not doubted a single second that there was an issue with the management team. I am just suspicious that the technology cannot deliver what it promises.
• State that my question is really, really easy to address, but that I fail to understand the big questions that I should be asking: how to make money of this. (And then the second question is answered, not the first one).

Answer the investor's question, even if you think it is not a smart one, or the right one. If not answered, you will have had a nice meeting, but blocked the door to the next step in the due diligence process.

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Text: "The Ghent Altarpiece - Singing Angels (detail)" by Jan van Eyck (circa 1390–1441) 

Let go

Some presentations stay in use for years. The designer has made small updates to slides, but overall the document has not changed. While the slides are more or less the same, the story probably has moved on.

Signs that this is the case:

• The presenter puts the first slide on, and then runs the entire presentation without clicking to the next slide
• The presenter discounts every slide, "what this slide really should say is [this] and [that]"
• The presenter skips through the presentation

If this is happening, it is time to let go of the presentation and create a new one from scratch. A fresh presentation that follows the narrative of your latest story.

I tried doing this the other day, but when asked for feedback, I got the old presentation back with bullet point added here and there, because "it was more familiar to edit" than the new one. I am going to push back. 

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Art: Ilya Repin-What freedom!" by Ilya Repin - http://www.lappeenranta.fi/images/20060517150232.jpg. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

When it does not work out

I design probably around 100 presentations per year and over the past decade or so there have been a few projects (out of 1000+) where it did not work out between me and the client. 

• The biggest one: the story was actually not that compelling. Even the best design effort can turn a poor story into a great one
• The client insisting on very remote, forced, unnatural visual analogies. 
• The client insisting on overly "spectacular" animations and graphics (1. I think they do not add anything to the story, the opposite is probably true, and 2. they are hard to do in PowerPoint).
• Not being at the core of the design process, when you are 2-3 steps away from another team that is writing the story and designing slides.

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Art: Escape from the 'Luxborough Galley', John Cleveley the Elder, 1760

How to recover lost PowerPoint 2016 files after a crash

Note: this blog post discusses PowerPoint 2016 for Mac.

PowerPoint 2016 is great, but it still crashes left right and centre, all the time. Autorecovery does not always work, and when you forgot to hit SAVE every 5 minutes in the heat of a presentation design project, you are stuck.

The good news: you can often recover data, even when PowerPoint thinks it is lost.

PowerPoint autosaves your files in the background, without your realising it. Make sure you have switched this on, you can set the save interval in PowerPoint settings:

Normally after a crash, PowerPoint will automatically restart and present you with the last file that was auto saved. Normally... If not, try the following.

• In the Mac finder window, open the "Go" drop down, press ALT, to show the LIBRARY folder and click it.
• Once in Library, go to  Containers > com.microsoft.Powerpoint > Data > Library > Preferences > AutoRecovery
• Have a look at the files there and spot a file with a "_autorecover" ending to its name, taking into account the time it was saved.
• Copy this file just to make sure
• Rename this copied file with the ".pptm" extension at the end. Ignore all warnings you are presented with.
• Double click the file and cross your fingers

There is no 100% guarantee this will work, but it is worth a try

One more tip: as soon as you see the small "spiral of death" spinning across the PowerPoint screen develop the instant reaction to take a screen shot of the application. If you are lucky and you grab the slide sorter window, you have captured a miniature icon of all your slides, which should save a lot of time recreating them. Worst case, you just got the thumbnails on the left of your screen that are in the regular slide editing window.

My presentation design tool SlideMagic is a PowerPoint alternative that does not work with files in the classical way. Things get saved into the cloud instantly. Feel free to try it out.

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Art: Letters "Whaam" inspired by Roy Lichentstein

Presenting the recommendations

After 3 months of hard work, your project is finished and you have been invited by the CEO to present the results. What to do?

• Wrong: present the project process. This is the team, this is when we kicked off, then we did this, then we did that, then we involved this, then we did that.
• Wrong: put the entire document in PowerPoint and present the full detail of all the analysis, wait with the conclusion until the very last slide
• Wrong: give a very high level fluffy summary full of buzzwords

So what is right?

• A very short background of the project and who was involved
• A clear articulation of the decisions you want approved
• Detailed backup/rationales for decisions that are not "no brainers" (a complicated trade off of multiple factors, an analysis with surprising/counter-intuitive results)

Not presenting all the work does not mean it was a waste of time. It was necessary work to get you to suggest the decisions.

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Art: 1965/1 - ∞: Detail 2.289.862 - 2.307.403, Roman Opalka, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, image by Esther Westerveld

SlideMagic on iPad

I have never been a big believer in focussed and productive presentation design on tablets, but presenting documents (mostly in 1-on-1 meetings) and making last minutes edits are important on mobile devices.

We are not making tablets a design priority, but have deployed some changes to the code that makes SlideMagic run pretty smoothly on an iPad (iPhone is still not optimal). Try it out and report back any bugs. Android tablet users, let me know what happens (I have not tried things out there yet).

With the large iPad Pro coming out later this year, there could be a brighter future for SlideMagic on iPad given the very simple menu structure we use.

Screen shot of SlideMagic on my iPad Mini 2

McKinsey exhibit make-over with SlideMagic

See the McKinsey exhibit below. (I found it in a LinkedIn stream, so I cannot source it to the original article.)

This table is an example of a pros/cons trade off or feature comparison matrix. I find them very useful to visualise the impact of multiple trends, or to trade off complex issues. Still there are a few things that can be improved:

• The finance sectors are not ranked, it is better to sort them based on the total profit impact
• There are too many steps in the scale, resulting in too many colours. And, the colours are not chosen according to a consistent colour scale. Especially the greens, they are different types of green
• The title of the chart is woolly
• The row labels are too long and complex
• Column headings are not centred, they look weird
• The foot notes are too prominent

I have tried to recreate the chart in my presentation design tool SlideMagic. Manipulating tables in SlideMagic is especially easy since it uses a very strict grid system. I collapsed a number of categories into one. The result is that I lost some precision, but I gained a much better visual representation of the effects. If you want, you can add a second layer of data to this chart, by inserting numbers (on a scale from 1 to 7, or on a scale of -3 to +3) to show more granular data.

If you want to use this chart as a template for your own presentation, follow this link and clone the chart in your own SlideMagic decks.

3 steps to a good slide

Here are the basic 3 steps to come to a good presentation slide. And for 2, you do not have to be a stellar designer to get them right. For step 3, you can use my presentation design app SlideMagic)

1. Decide on one message, one message only. Here is where most people go wrong: they try to put more than one idea on a slide. Too many things to grasp at once, too much content/clutter on the slide. Only if your message is: "There are 15 reasons why you should stop smoking") might you consider a list of 15 small bullet points.
2. Decide on a basic slide structure. The only structure most people use is the list. But there are other (simple) ones that you should consider. A contrast (box on the left, box on the right), a ranking (bar chart), an overlap (Venn diagram), pros and cons (table), cause effect. They are not that hard to put on a slide.
3. Get the design right. Now, here it might be trickier for the layman. Fixing alignment, proportions, grids, colours, white space, etc. etc. SlideMagic users won't have to worry much about this, for everyone else, here are some of the guidelines I have implemented in SlideMagic:
   1. Everything lines up 
   2. Everything lines up according to a grid
   3. Calm colours: one accent, lots of shades of grey
   4. Safe (sans serif) font
   5. Slides look similar in one presentation (positioning of titles, margins, etc.)

There is no reason to get 1. or 2. wrong, and you can learn 3. over time.

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Art: Silver Landscape, Photocollage by Gordon Rice

Contract editing versus presentation editing

In business, legal documents are edited in great detail. Exceptions here, clauses there, footnotes. It goes back and forth between parties. In this process that can take weeks, both sides get to know the text inside out. The dense text is actually a pretty useful format to communicate and avoid ambiguities.

Presentations are different. Most of the time, the audience sees the slides for the first time. Most of the time, they will see/internalise only part of the visual. Most of the time, the slide is a not a final legal document that will be signed right there and then. 

So editing/designing slides can be a bit different. Distracting tangents, bubbles with exceptions, tiny footnotes. These details will not really register, and worse: confuse the audience. Editing a presentation is different from editing a contract.

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Art: Pieter Brueghel the Younger, The Village Lawyer or The Tax Collector's Office, 1626

NASA Apollo photo archive

NASA has uploaded a ton of public domain images of its Apollo missions online. Free to use in presentations. You can find them here. You can find more sources of free images here.

Big pompous marketing slogans

Twenty years ago in business school we were taught that you should be able to express the customer benefit in one (and only one) sentence. Many have picked up on this habit. The mistake they make is to use that sentence directly for customer audiences. These statements are intended for the marketing strategists. Writing the sentence forces you to think who you are, and who you are not. Springing that marketing jargon directly to the consumer will lead to confusion.

• The customer might not understand what it means: it is too vague / general
• The customer might not understand what it means: it contains technical jargon
• The customer might not believe it: it uses language that is overused by other products that have disappointed in the past
• The customer might not believe it: it makes promises that seem too good to be true

Good marketing slogans / texts usually have 2 components:

1. A very clear description of what it actually is you offer
2. Some humorous, interesting twist that makes you remember what it is all about (after you understood number 1.)

AirBNB is a nice example. It does not talk about the ever changing world, increasingly busy life styles, premium relaxation, cross cultural enriching experiences, discerning travellers, price comparison versus hotels. 

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Art: detail of "Blah, blah, blah" by studio Louise Campbell 

More than one captain on the ship

Writing presentations with multiple people can be challenging. Everyone has their own perspectives. Here are some ideas to stay productive:

1. Quickly hack together a preliminary story flow as a check list that you have all required content on the radar screen. Resist the temptation to argue.
2. Separate the work on the content charts, and the final story flow. Whatever the story flow ends up being, you need to those competitive positioning charts, P&L forecasts, team bios. Allocate responsibilities and get this work done.
3. Once the building blocks are completed, sequence and stitch the flow of the presentation together. This is the point where you can argue and debate. Charts that summarise the flow can be designed after you have agreed what that flow is.
4. The person who actually has to stand up and give the presentation has the decisive vote. If not, chances are that she will deviate from the group story flow while on the stage anyway. "What we really wanted to say is this" [click to page 15].

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Art: James Tissot, Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, 1870

Presentation designers vs. other designers

Every other project, I encounter other designers (web, print) at clients, and sometimes we end up having discussions about my project. Feedback I often get:

• I use very basic fonts
• I use old fashioned shapes, I do not use icons
• I frame images on slides rather than letting them "bleed" of the page

Part of this is personal taste, part of this has to do with the world of presentations, which is different than other design disciplines

• Fonts:
  • Presentations get edited by many people, on many different operating systems, all the time. These machines are unlikely to have the required custom fonts installed. Brochures are designed once and sent to print, presentations are live documents edited by groups of people.
  • Presentations are business documents that need a calm and professional look. Cute fonts might look nice on one page, but 40 pages in (once you got down to next year's budget data), you get tired of tehm
• Shapes and icons
  • Icons work in UI design, or on small mobile phone screens. Icons work if the user can remember them, see them often, repeatedly (the floppy disk to save a file for example). Icons that are less clear (a factory to visualise business), or cliche (dollar signs to show revenue). These icons take up space and do not add much value
  • Basic shapes without sophisticated borders and straight angles are calm, easy on the eye, and are very efficient to hold text and can be edited by non-designers
• Framing images: there are a few types of presentations slides. Big images is one. But there are also tables, graphs, text pages, and girds of images/text boxes. While big images might look good bleeding of the page, it makes the design look less consistent with the other pages in the deck. Hence that I frame them most of the time, to make the title pop out of the slide without the need for semi transparent text backgrounds. Have a look of some of the classic graphic designers from the 1960s, they often frame images as well in white space.

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Art: Jan Steen, Argument over a card game, 1625

Line breaks deserve your attention

When you write a block of text, the editor will insert line breaks without you noticing. Fonts are relatively small and the resulting text blocks look always good.

Designing presentation slides is different though. The position of every word and every line break counts. You face similar problems as the headline writer of a newspaper, or the designer of a poster.

• Make sure important words that need to be seen together, stay together: "blue [break] ocean strategy" breaks the connection between critical words
• Make sure the text is balanced across the page, without weird right paragraph endings. If required, change the font size to make words just fit, or drop to the next line. Add line breaks manually if you have to
• And if it still does look weird, rewrite that headline into one that does look good

Yes, contradicting myself: my blog engine sometimes makes a mess of blog titles on certain screen sizes. I cannot control line breaks here...

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Art: The Cliff Walk at Pourville, an 1882 painting by Claude Monet.

The new stack chart UI

I have recently deployed a new user interface for the stack chart in my presentation app SlideMagic. You can now edit things live on the screen rather than in a separate spreadsheet.

Stack charts are the biggest UI challenge of SlideMagic. How to keep them simple... It is getting there but not perfect yet, I still need to fix the suggested rounding algorithm and make it easier to create a legend. Let me know your thoughts.

Do you need a 101 section?

Some presentations are highly technical, and are mostly designed for highly technical audiences, investor presentations for advanced biotech products for example. The question is, should you include a "101" section in the presentation that explains the technology to the layman?

My answer: yes.

One, it is useful for non-technical investors, but even for the die hard pro, it is good to frame the overall story in the right context. For these specialist audiences, this part of the presentation will only take 10 seconds, for novice audiences you will have to spend a lot more than that.

An added benefit is that the 101 analogy, freed of scientific detail, is often a better way to describe/visualise what the problem is you are actually solving, and why - until now - it has been so hard to crack by others.

Colour schemes that work in PowerPoint

I am still breaking my head on this, but some colour schemes look great when you see them presented in a brand guideline, but look dull/boring in PowerPoint. More and more I think that this is because what PowerPoint is: basic slide compositions and boring/neutral Arial/Calibri fonts (especially to keep things readable on mobile devices).

• Colours that come out poorly: earthy tones: brown, olive, curry, faded red, faded blue
• Colours that come out great: bright and fresh purple/red, pink/blue, mint green, used as accent colours in compositions that are dominated by grey shades and big black contrasting typography.

One of the nice things about design is that you cannot always explain/rationalise why something "just is not right".

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Art: Peter Paul Rubens, Rainbow Landscape, 1636