Fast. Easy. Beautiful.
This video of a TED talk parody was uploaded a couple of months ago and I missed somehow. Yes, it is a parody, but in the between the lines (the content is non-existent) it actually shows how body language, pausing and pacing can give you a better stage presence.
WebSummit was full of them. Apparently, there are 5 PR people for every journalist on earth. Each journalists in the tech world receives about 200 emails, pitches, stories per day. I listened to a panel with PR people and journalists discussing thing with each other. Here are my impressions partly driven by what they said, partly what I read between the lines.
Your product is actually not that interesting to them. Two hundred products per day, lots of copy cats ("Uber for X"). I actually think journalists don't have time, take the time to understand a technology, and hence don't find it interesting and/or write about it. It takes me a good 45 minutes to understand a company well, a journalist does not have that time, the reader does not have that time, and most journalists don't have an engineering background.
Big milestones are actually not that interesting anymore. Everyone raises $100m at a $1b valuation.
Other aspects of "your story" (becomes a buzzword) are more interesting. Did you come from an unusual background, does your company have some sort of social, environmental purpose (primary, or a side effect).
Do you actually need to be in a major Silicon Valley tech publication? If your target customers are in those circles, then yes. Maybe if you need to those "featured in" logos on your web page to strengthen your pitch to SV investors, yes. But otherwise, maybe spend your time and effort somewhere else.
"Social media" is becoming crowded and busy as well. With so many people creating noise, it actually boils down to a product that people want to use and talk about to their friends. Not so much social media, more building a great product.
So all of this is not to blame on journalists and PR people, it is just very crowded and noisy out there.
In one of the panels at WebSummit, a participant made a number of mistakes:
That was 2 minutes (be brief on panels) of a panel full of tech geeks who know this story (know your audience) with a hard to achieve advice: make your startup story as good as the One Dollar Shave Club video (the video, not the product).
When you start to mention a stale case example, and show that you are going to spend time explaining it, the audience knows what will follow in the next 5 minutes and you lost them. (The as an audience arriving at the bottom of a bullet point chart reading before you even finished reading out bullet point one aloud.
If you were not the first YouTube viewer who noticed the One Dollar Shave Club video an hour before you speak, use a more personal, original, case example. It is a great video though...
I set through a panel with partners from incubator/investor Y Combinator today here at WebSummit in Lisbon. The topic was about which advice is useful, which not, partly in the context of fund raising. Startup CEOs get bombarded with advice, while almost all advice sounds credible, not all the people who are given you advice (prompted, or unprompted) know what they are talking about.
As panels go, there was a lot of "noise" but these guys had a few pretty good points. Advice from these type of people might help you:
Keep it in mind when someone critiques or praises your slides.
One client told me the other day that a later-stage investor was interested in investing in his company, and the main interaction was with a relatively junior analyst who kept on asking questions about the numbers in the business plan, rather than probing the quality of the technology.
This can mean 2 things:
Option 2 is probably more likely. Although they keep on asking for numbers, does not mean that the overall story and context is not important.
I use visuals for presentations in 2 ways. One is the obvious use: put visuals on slides (duh). The other one is actually to design the story of the presentation.
Very often, pitches are about why something is better, why existing solutions don't work, why the market is focussed on yesterday's problems. I create a diagram for myself to create some sort of map where I can put all the elements, comparisons, and movements of a story. It starts simple, then gets really messy and complicated, then gets simplified again.
With that little piece of paper I go back to the slides of the presentation, and it is highly unlikely that my sketch visual and the visuals in the presentation have any similarity.
Image from WikiPedia
We put in a number of improvements to the user interface of my presentation design app SlideMagic.
Templates, regular decks, duplicating, importing, etc. was all a bit confusing. We made a number of improvements to make the workflow more intuitive.
The account, support, and logout links that used to sit at the bottom left of the screen have been moved up. These buttons caused issues on smaller screens, especially tablets. As a result, SlideMagic is now running pretty well on iPad. I am not a big believer in designing slides on a small screen/tablet, because you need a decent canvas to focus and be creative. But, it can be handy to have the option to make smaller edits on a mobile device and that is now going pretty well with SlideMagic.
Let me know if you have any more feedback on SlideMagic here in the comments or by sending a message to jan at slidemagic dot com.
Another good video by VC Mark Suster about how to speak when invited on a panel:
I would also add that pitch competitions are a form of entertainment. A pitch for such an event is completely different from a pitch to the partner group of a VC.
And most of the time, pitch competitions are far more entertaining than panels. In a pitch competition, the presenter is on the line, sharp. People in panels usually do not prepare and can hide behind the others on stage, making them a lot less interesting to watch.
Some people naturally sound convincing. They have charisma, they find it easy to tell their story, they are confident, they can wing the presentation, they say that they consider themselves good presenters. They sound convincing, but do they convince?
Many of the people who fall in this category are not very good at reading body language. Maybe the buyer or investor on the other side of the table is (slightly) introvert and does not push back that much. Maybe if the same type of question comes back for the third time (after 2x the same sort of answer), the answer was not very clear. Maybe there is a difference between a great meeting with great energy, and a decision to buy/invest.
As a presentation designer, I have built up another type of self confidence: not being ashamed to ask again if something is not clear, even if it is the fifth time. If I don't get it, the presentation I am going to design will also not get there. Investors and buyers won't be as patient as presentation designers
Image from WikiPedia
It is hard to forecast the size of a market that exists today in a few years. It is impossible to predict the size of a market for a product that does not even exist. Startups working on new products deal with this issue in every investor presentation.
My suggested solution: come at it from different directions to give a potential investor confidence that there is something there.
In most cases your "made up" numbers which are backed up by a transparent and logical analysis will be more useful than point estimates lifted from out-of-date, out-of-context research reports.
Image from WikiPedia
Apple launched the new MacBooks a few days ago, and designers are not happy. Read all the comments here for example. The competition makes more powerful machines, Apple still does not make a 4K standalone display.
But there is also a psychological element to this. We designers used to use our Macs to show to everyone that we were different. We were free to buy cool equipment while most of the "other people" were stuck with crappy machines supplied by the corporate IT department.
Maybe reality has caught up with us designers. For most graphics design application, almost any computer will do. PowerPoint being at the bottom of performance-intensive applications, I have stopped looking at horse power as the main buying criterium for computers.
Still Apple is dropping the ball here and there. No innovation in productivity software (I am trying to add my bit of innovation with presentation app SlideMagic), and a proliferation of adaptors to connect devices, even those that are within the Apple ecosystem.
All of this leaves the door open to a new super premium computer brand. If I were Microsoft, I would create a "Lexus" in computing and court those style-conscious designer elitists again.
The advantage of being a small operation is that decisions can be executed quickly. My branding has moved from "Axiom One", "Slides that Stick", "Sticky Slides", "Idea Transplant" to "Slide Magic".
SlideMagic is the name of my app, and Idea Transplant stayed the name of my professional presentation design business. I am now retiring Idea Transplant. The name is fantastic, and says exactly what I do, but it is not very catchy "can you spell that email address one more time please?", and is confusing to clients. My presentation design app does not get any "brand aura" (buzz word alert), and most importantly, the blog name SlideMagic does not add value to my professional presentation design business.
So to keep things clean and simple, Idea Transplant will be come "Slidemagic Bespoke" with the same look and feel as the app. In practice, people will call it "SlideMagic" with the bespoke bit mainly used as a small tag line on the web site.
I am now also going through the clean up of all my social media accounts. Bare with me as I cleaning up all the correct URL redirects etc.
This Tweet caught my attention:
The future of computing isn't editing PPT status reports with a pen. It's replacing it with a live SaaS dashboard, ML analysis and messaging
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) October 26, 2016
Yes "status reports" are a distinct category of presentations. Some sort of weekly, monthly, quarterly updates, that follow more or less the same template. A lot of time is spent (wasted) on creating these. In the short run, you can do a lot with workflow automation. For example create the entire presentation in Excel, which has the same drawing and charting capabilities that PowerPoint has. And yes in the end, SAAS dashboards might replace them all together, if, and that is a big if, the dashboard is designed well.
The "other" type of presentation, the one in which you pitch an idea, a budget, an investment, is here to stay. Each story is different, each pitch is different. Still, people spend too much time on PowerPoint to create them (hopefully my presentation design app SlideMagic will change that), but the creative process will not be automated anytime soon.
Image from Wikipedia
Both Microsoft and Google launched new screen-based devices over the past few days.
The Microsoft Surface Studio is a desktop computer with a very large touch display. It can be used in regular upright mode, or folded down, which turns it into a giant, almost-horizontal tablet. There is a new interface gadget, a cylinder that you put right on the screen.
I think this might be the future of desk-based design interfaces. Portable tablets are too small. Upright touch screens are to cumbersome. This hybrid looks great.
Google introduced the Jamboard, a big touch screen that is meant for white boarding in meetings. The main feature is the collaboration supported by Google software. You can upload, edit, move things, and people not in the room can join the conversation remotely.
The features look impressive, the size of the screen might still be a bit small though to enable really productive group collaboration. Time will tell.
"I just need an hour of your time to sit together to improve my slides. I know exactly what I want to say in tomorrow's presentation and all the slides are ready, they just need to be more visual"
I get this type of request often, and I usually turn it down. In one hour, 24 hours before the presentation, you can fix the layout of the slides a bit, but this is where it ends...
A proper presentation design process needs to go through a number of stages:
It takes more than 1 hour, it needs more than 24 hours, it is not a polish of the existing presentation, which will have vanished totally in the process.
Image from Wikipedia
Here is a picture of a bill board snapped by a friend on Facebook. Venn diagrams are very useful in presentations. But there can be a catch.
There are 2 possible interpretations:
Have you key slides checked by a few different people, especially if they go in front of many eyes.
I noticed this Tweet the other day of buzz words that are banned in the Conrad shop:
Banned words at the Conrad Shop!!! pic.twitter.com/s3MG8QUmrn
— Ben Page, Ipsos MORI (@benatipsosmori) October 15, 2016
"Visual story telling" is one of them. And I must say, there is something to it. (Yes, this is a professional presentation designer speaking). Yes, business presentations should be stories, yes business presentations should be visual. But when you find yourself in stuck in a meeting where 15 captains try to set the plot for a presentation, and you hear someone saying "let's take a step back everyone, and synthesize what we have brainstormed so far, so that we can spend the next hour doing visual story telling", you probably roll your eyes.
Buzzwords are created when you have seen useful concepts being abused too many times and visual story telling is joining the ranks of them.
This article on Vox tries to find statistics on voting fraud in the US. I will stay out of politics on this blog, but the 2 graphs it uses show the power of a good visualization.
A column chart shows the relative difference, but fails to communicate the large overall absolute value of the right column
The image does a better job to depict the statistics. It requires some math and Photoshop skills though to produce
The column chart is the correct representation of the 2 values, but it fails to communicate the huge amount of ballots we are talking about in the right column. The image does a better job, but it will be hard to construct for a layman designer.
Image from WikiPedia
In most big B2B enterprise sales dialogues the client understands the market, knows the key players out there, knows the issues she is trying to solve. They don't care about margins, market sizes.
In most investor pitches, the potential investor knows the broad market segments that sound similar to the one you are operating in, knows how big they are roughly, knows major competitors. They are less interested in specific feature comparisons.
Presenting your differentiation, what makes you special, is different to each of these audiences.
Image from WikiPedia
Microsoft has been adding a number of features to PowerPoint recently. One of them is Designer. In the Design tab of the ribbon, a new button appears on the right "Design Ideas". Clicking it generates alternative layouts of your slides on the right side of your screen.
The layouts are pretty nice. Microsoft has "automated" the design of 2 types of slides:
Both are useful. Layman designers usually have no idea how to crop a nice photo collage, and translating that bullet list into a horizontal sequence looks nice, especially on wide 16:9 screen.
But here comes the but.
Microsoft is on the right path, these suggested layouts look a lot nicer than the SmartArt objects. And, getting layman designers to use some sort of grid is the biggest possible improvement you can create in slide design.
But I think it will take some time before language interpretation will be so sophisticated that PowerPoint understands the meaning of a slide and can pull a suggested layout from its library. That's one step above asking Siri to book a movie for you.
Images get a nice suggested cropping
Multiple images trigger multiple grid suggestions
No suggestion to clean up this grid
No suggestions for these charts
Language interpretation concludes this is not a process
This is a process, text taken from a Microsoft post
(* Commercial start *)
This is why designed my presentation app SlideMagic with a forced grid structure, which is a fundamentally different interface approach from PowerPoint and Keynote, which are based on free placement and resizing of objects.
(* End of the commercial break *)
PowerPoint Designer is not 100% there yet, but from its look and feel and general creative direction you see that Microsoft is on the right path.
