An alternative to a logo

When you need to list a handful of companies on a presentation slide, the main visualisation people use is a logo. It always looks great. Make sure you have the latest one (they tend to change rapidly), and pick one in a nice high resolution. If the colours clash too much, consider toning them down by making them black and white.

But the alternative to the logo, is actually getting an image of the company in action. An ad on the street, the neon on the corporate headquarters (no, not the HQ reception desk), a store front, etc. Make sure you don't have any copy right issues. I usually search for photographs on Google Image search that are "labelled for reuse" Below an example for Vodafone:

Image by Moyan Brenn on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aigle_dore/15754634911

If you need to deal with a lot of company names, there is no escaping to the logo page. My presentation app SlideMagic makes lining up lots of logos very easy. Use the black and white toggle to mute logos if the colours get too busy.

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Banner image from Wikipedia

Corporate language simplification is next

A lot of the progress of humanity boils down to improving and simplifying communication. There were huge wins when we figured out how to speak and coordinate hunting strategies, learned how to read/write/print books, speak long distance instead of taking the ocean liner, video, etc. etc.

More subtle improvements happened as well. Clear, simple language impacts the premium/position that bosses, priests, doctors, lawyers, politicians, can command. Long-winded corporate memos and formal letters made way for informal emails and now messaging to get to the point, quickly.

What we lose in style, we gain in efficiency and clarity. Gone are the beautifully hand-written letters without grammatical errors. Now we have the universal "business English" with a tiny vocabulary, full of mistakes, and pronunciation can be whatever you see fit. The English might not be perfect, or sophisticated, its meaning is crystal clear.

The same happens to corporate language. Management consultants took a first stab at making memoranda logical and structured. The exhibits in these documents slowly become more important than the written words themselves. And now presentation software/slides has become the main language in which we do business.

We need a crisp, simple, visual language to get a business concept across. Everyone can understand it, everyone can use it. That's what I am trying to do in the presentation app SlideMagic.

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Art: Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Tower of Bable, 1563

The market and company history - you care, they probably not

It is interesting to hear/see that when older startup companies (let's 5 or or more years) always start with a background of the market and the company. Back in 2005, this happened, we did that, then this, then we got acquired, then this.

The audience is probably not really interested, they want to find out about today's products or investment opportunity.

So why this habit? It is hard to change your company pitch once you have gotten used to it. Back in 2006, that intro about what happened in 2005 probably was really important to the story. In 2016, it no longer is.

Contradicting myself, this is probably not true in all cases. The company Slack, for example, was born out of a side project for team communication of a failing game development company. That's an interesting detail to bring forward. Keep it short though.

Lining up text, lining up text boxes

A post for the purists today. In PowerPoint, a text box and a rectangular coloured shape with text line up the same way: you hover them across the slides and "snap" lines appear that encourage you to line things up with items above or below. To do it correctly though, you need to make a small adjustment.

A text box with a transparent background: line up the edges of the text (without padding) to the object below

A text box with a coloured background: line up the edge of the box with the item below

With my presentation app SlideMagic, you don't have to worry about this. I remember "arguing" with my developer why this was an important feature :-) 

A new way to organise my presentation templates

I am experimenting with a new way to organise SlideMagic presentation templates and started adding them to www.slidemagic.com/templates. I will be adding more over the coming days. Please let me know if you have request for specific slide concepts I should add and I will see whether I can help you.

Overdoing the animations

This animation (GIF alert) shows the distribution of music sales over time. Wait a few seconds and you see the pie chart changing for multiple years. This data can be represented much better by a series of stacked column charts. The animation takes too long, and the audience does not have the overview of all the years. 

I copied this image from a Tweet that did not include the reference to the source.

There are other problems as well with this chart, gradients, standard Microsoft Office colours, drop shadows, small data labels, and ambiguous labelling ("Internet", "mobile", "video", etc.). 

Keep the CEO in the loop

Investor presentations usually start with the CFO (who naturally puts a finance spin on the story), then the Marketing Director adds product positioning, the Sales Director puts in a highly detailed benefit analysis: the result 3 presentations.

Why is it so important to have the CEO involved early in the process? She is the only one who has a view on the story that cuts across finance, marketing, sales. An equity investor audience is different from a client, is different from a tech conference, is different from a traditional bank that provides loans. More importantly, she is likely to have to make the pitch herself, and so she better is in sync with the slides.

You cannot delegate the investor pitch design, or give the super high level input "you know the story, pitch that we are more flexible". Time to roll up the sleeves.

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Art: Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers, 1876

Full circle

Most presentation design processes go through the following circle:

1. You scribble  a clean, crisp, story on a white board
2. That scribble gets translated into the first series of charts/placeholders
3. Now the dilution starts: lots of data, backgrounds, footnotes, and story line restructuring until we have a bloated, generic collection of charts

The successful presentation design project goes further: cutting things back to reach that level of freshness of stage 1. But there is a danger of cutting too much. Throughout the process, the team has gotten so familiar with the material that they have lost track of the starting point of a cold audience. Things that might seem totally obvious to them (after 2 months of work) are not that clear to a first time audience.

Was all the data digging a waste of time? No, it is good to get your facts straight, as long as you don't lose the creativity you had in that first kick off meeting.

As a professional presentation designer, I usually come in in stage 3, lots and lots of data, and my kick interview brings back the thoughts that came up in stage 1. An unfair advantage of the outsider...

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Art: Kandinsky: Circles in a circle, 1923

The old tricks won't work anymore

Because they have been used so many times, or maybe better, disappointed so many times, some of the old (and often expensive) tricks of presentation design are not at all that effective anymore.

• Complicated language. Buzzwords, complicated sentences, clarifying footnotes. This person must know what she is talking about, better believe her.
• Scientific frameworks. Management consultants loved these. It looked complicated, scientific, they were delivered by smart people. Even if you don't understand the framework, the message must be true.
• Excel-generated hockey sticks. The highly complicated spreadsheet produces the $500m revenue in year 5 number, all assumptions seem sound, it must be true
• Noisy/flashy/spectacular videos. Stuff is flying in, drum rolls, this looks professional, these people probably tell the truth.
• Stunning images. "Yes! We should follow the guy who jumps of a a building with a parachute!" That sun set looks amazing.

I am afraid we are back to humble, human communication again.

And here is the pitch for my presentation design app SlideMagic: make it easy to create slides that look pretty decent/professional, and let you spend the majority of your time creating your story.

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Image: fake cathedral ceiling in Rome's Sant Ignazio Church

Counting the boxes

The first thing I do for almost any slide is "counting the boxes": how many points does each argument have, how many people are there on the team, how many layers to the technology, how many steps in the process.

This drives the layout of the slide: 2 columns with options and 3 arguments each, a 5-step value chain, a 6 x 4 grid of logos, 5 management bios next to each other, 10 columns of sales data, etc. This layout will make sure that your slide looks evenly spaced out. You are also see that in most cases, the (bullet point) list grid structure is actually not the one you need.

PowerPoint and Keynote do not have very strong grid capabilities. Spacing out equally sized boxes across a slide is a pain, and table editing is not much better. And that is why I made the grid structure the central feature of my own presentation app SlideMagic, try it out!

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Art: Perspective box, Pieter Janssens Elinga, 1623

Stale PowerPoint templates

User interface, web design, and presentation are moving quickly. Graphics that looked fresh and new a couple of years ago, now look really stale and old. Look at old version of Windows and Mac OSX operating systems, a mobile phone home screen in 2008, and the PowerPoint template you are still using today.

A large part of this is driven by screen technology. Ten years ago, monitors had lower resolutions and fonts had to be fatter, and rough gradients could still look smooth. Also documents that long reasonable on a 4:3 aspect ratio become harder to read on wider 16:9 monitors as sentences streeeeeetch over the entire screen. Harder to read, and it looks out of balance.

What can you do to your PowerPoint template to make it look less like the 1990s? Here are some steps:

• Switch to a lighter font. Calibri light looks OK and won't give you any compatibility problems on Macs and Windows.
• Stop using drop shadows and gradients
• Remove the old low resolution JPG graphics from your slide template. If you or your corporate communications department insists on having some branding on the slides, but a tiny high res logo at the bottom right
• Don't use bullet points
• If you have to use bullet points don't use a hierarchy of bullet points
• If you have to use a hierarchy of bullet points, keep them all the same font size, and use a dot, dash, smaller dot for the levels (no squares, or other funny characters)
• On 16:9 screens don't run long sentences in small fonts across the full width of the screen. If you have a lot of text put boxes next to each other (a horizontal list, versus a vertical list)
• Restrict the use of colour, use the accent colour in your company's logo, well, to make an accent. Stop using bright red, pink, green, or yellow
• Stop using underline and italic
• Legal disclaimers, footnotes, and page numbers can be really, really small somewhere at the bottom, only readable for people who press their nose against the screen
• Get someone in IT to program all these changes into a idiot-proof new PowerPoint template with all the right default shapes, fonts and colours

Another alternative is to starting my presentation app SlideMagic for your presentations!

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Image from WikiPedia

How to present pros and cons

A question came in on Twitter the other day:

@ideatransplant How to discuss pros and cons of 4 things? What sort of layout would you prefer?

— Yoni Tantra (@yonitantra) January 3, 2016

My answer is: a simple table, like this one I prepared quickly in my presentation app SlideMagic (you can clone it to your own SlideMagic account in the presentation template file that contains on the slides I have used on this blog).

The difference between a good pro/con slide and a bad one is not the design in itself, it is how your present the argument. A presentation slide is a tool to get a decision, it is not a laundry list of pros and cons that you evaluated in your analysis. Put your analysis aside, and design from a blank sheet of paper:

• Group similar arguments together, if an argument is sort of the same, combine them
• Sort the rows in the table in such a way that things visually line up. For example you start with rows where both options are "good" (all blues), then do the "OK/good"s, then the "OK/OK"s. etc.
• Isolated and focus those arguments that are going to drive the decision and/or are controversial. "Option 1 is cheaper, option 2 is faster but the what will make the difference is whether we think [criterion 3] is important.
• Cut words rigorously until you have a page that is still meaningful but does not look cluttered.

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Art: weighing of the heart versus the feather of truth

The impatient audience

When I am reading I switch in different modes:

• Losing yourself in a novel and forgetting the time
• Digging through an article to find the acquisition price that was paid for a company
• After having failed to resist the click bait title, looking for the answer to the question it raised
• Absorbing every background aspect of the making of a certain music album

"Newspaper" journalists often get this wrong. They think they are writing for a person sipping a glass of wine and sitting in front of a burning wood fire, while most often they are not.

Hardly any business presentation is digested in the lounge chair. The audience:

• Has no time
• Is constantly distracted by calls, emails, messages
• Thinks that they know it all already and tries to put your idea in a box that is familiar
• Is clicking down and clicking down and wondering when they get to the point already

The captive TED Talk audience is in the lounge chair sipping wine. The venture capitalist is scrolling down your slides on her mobile while wondering whether the elevator button "1" or "0" will get you to the lobby.

BTW: Happy 2016 to everyone!

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Art: Edouard Manet, Young Woman Reclining in Spanish Costume, 1862-1863

Back to pencils

I have tried many tablet note taking apps, but have gone back to the pencil. And of the many pencils I have tried, the Lamy 2000 propelling pencil is my absolute favourite. It is made out of plastic, but has a great feel to it, it has the right thickness, the right balance in the hand and looks great! The origins of the pencil go back to the mid 1960s when the Lamy pencil called in the help of a Gerd Mueller who has previously been designing for the Braun electronics company.

Know the risks

In yesterday's post VC Fred Wilson gave another interesting peek inside the brain of an investor:

• Investors are in the business of taking calculated risks
• Any investment has risks attached to it, you just need to manage/mitigate them
• And here is the key point: an entrepreneur who does not see (or does not want to talk about) the risks is an absolute no-go.

Investors are potential future Board Members looking for CEOs they can work with. Act like one.

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Image: Painting by Tigran Tsitoghdzyan

The broken Apple Keynote interface, is it me?

I have now created many, many client presentations in Apple Keynote. And most of the clients who request a presentation in Keynote rather than PowerPoint are proud that they are willing to use more design-oriented products. For many years, Apple Keynote was ahead of PowerPoint: a cleaner user interface, cleaner templates, those alignment guides that pop up when you want to position an object. And in addition, you were using the same product that Steve Jobs, the master presenter, was using for his slides.

With the latest release of PowerPoint, I think both applications are at par. With each one of them, you can create both beautiful presentations, and horrible decks full of bullet point slides.

The workflow of Keynote though makes me scratch my head. While more complicated tasks are taken care of very well, it is the basic functions such as changing fill colours, font colours, aligning, that drives me crazy. Too many clicks, and I am always looking where to click. Initially I though it was me, but after month and months of trying things are still not getting better.

PowerPoint has a more cluttered interface but after some time working with it your eyes look on locations/icons and you instantly click without having to think. The solution for both programs is clear: create space for one user customisable tool bar. PowerPoint for Mac had one, but it disappeared with the 2016 update, Keynote needs one.

The above partly informed the design of my own presentation design app SlideMagic. You actually need very few functions to create beautiful charts. Most reviews of software tools are still 1990 style: a comparison of features. What you really should be measuring is how fast/easy it is to get a decent end product. Hopefully Microsoft and Apple are not reading this post, so SlideMagic can keep its competitive advantage!

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Image of an A380 cockpit from Wikipedia

Your audience has heard it before

You are only aware of your own sales or investor pitch. Your audience (investors, clients) sit through dozens of them. After 10 sales or investor pitches in a certain industry, they probably understood the key industry trends, and in their heads they are wondering how you are different from the others.

Have the "101" slides ready, but the body language of your audience should tell you whether you are the first presentation they are watching, or number 12.

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Image by Malcolm Carlow

Microsoft Excel versus Google Sheets

In spreadsheets, I have now moved from Microsoft Excel to Google Sheets as my favourite app.

• It is faster to fire up quickly for a small calculation doodle
• It also snappier in use to do the basic things, entering data and moving around
• It has some neat functions (like automatically cutting up a string and putting all words, numbers in subsequent columns)
• While I don't believe in online collaboration of presentations, for models it is actually useful that all the people in the team have access to the laters numbers 24/7
• Filing and naming of presentation documents is usually pretty organised. With spreadsheets however, I always lose that calculation I did, and the Google search function is really helpful here.

Part of this might be rooted in the way I use spreadsheets: basic functions only, even for the biggest models. I "grew up" with Lotus 123 and early on in my McKinsey career realised that errors in a valuation model can make a difference of billions of dollars. A simple model is far easier to debug because it allows you to see every step in the calculation.

"We need to add this bullet"

Group editing of a slide deck is difficult, especially if it involves a lot of people, and especially if some of the people editing dial in from a remote location. If you do not have the full view of the presentation (either because you are far away, or you have not been involved in the process that much), you should resist the urge to ask the junior analyst to add "an extra bullet to the slide that say [fill in message]". There is a good chance that that point is already made on another slide.

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Art: Dogs Playing Poker by C. M. Coolidge

Sales presentation versus strategy presentation

They are different.

• Strategy presentation. In most cases, the audience of a strategy project recommendation presentation understands the context. A large part of them probably participated in the project (steering committee meetings, interviews, doing analysis). Therefore, the presentation can be highly in your face, conclusions upfront, in a strict logical order. Pretty much like the classic consulting presentation.
• Sales presentation. Your audience will be less familiar with the background, you need to drag them in a bit slower, show that you understand their problem, etc. And, logic only is unlikely to lead to a sale.