4:3 or 16:9?

"What, it is 2017 and you design a deck in 4:3 format?", I got these questions a few times. Here are the pros and cons of both formats.

A 16:9 or widescreen aspect ratio will give you a nice image on an LCD conference room monitor or desktop/laptop screen with the black bars on the left and right

A 4:3 aspect ratio will look better on projectors, which are still used in many larger presentation rooms. Also: 4:3 looks better when decks are printed, a habit that is still very common in the financial services industry where people like to take notes, look in detail at data tables, (and probably want to take an opportunity to quickly flick ahead if the presenter is slow/boring).

And personally, I like the design freedom of a more even design canvas (4:3) better than the wide screen version, which forces me to make horizontally stretched slide designs. (A cheat: put the headline across a number of lines to the left of the slide and use the imaginary 4:3 canvas to the right of it for your slide content.

So, here you have it. I don't think 4:3 is old fashioned for presentations (it is for movies), it just depends on the most likely presentation context you expect.

In my presentation app SlideMagic, I used a 4:3 canvas, but use the extra horizontal space of a 16:9 screen to add your "explanation boxes" that you can slide in and out. When set to "out", the presentation becomes 16:9 with a more detailed description of the slide in case you send the document ahead of a meeting and the recipient will open/read it without you being there to explain it.

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Bringing it together in a P&L

Nobody can accurately predict a P&L five years from. But, most entrepreneur have a pretty good idea about the cost of running the business over the next 12 months. Product development, giving a free 1 year subscription to new customers, designing the marketing materials, hiring an investor presentation designer, etc.

Still there is value to putting all these floating numbers in a coherent P&L. In the short term, you can fix the exact timing of your expenses. "Free subscription to new customers" is a zero entry in the budget, but in a P&L becomes a real cost. Thinking about year 5 forces you to do the check whether your business is actually vaguely plausible. Can you recruit the required 10,000 enterprise customers with a 5 person sales force? Is it viable to have $500 server cost per customers if they are only paying $400 at best, before even getting to R&D and marketing costs?

The P&L is a thought exercise, not a tool to calculate your $20m profits in year 5.

My standard page layout

The empty template in my presentation app SlideMagic uses pretty much the same layout as my bespoke work in PowerPoint/Keynote for clients:

Big slide headline that can run over 2 lines (I like elaborate titles, similar to newspaper headings), without any graphical elements (lines, banners, logos)

• Small logo in the bottom right, I compromise here and give in to most companies insisting that the audience should be reminded to whom they are listening on every page. Many clients want to move that logo left, which creates a graphical imbalance: the bottom right logo balances the weight of the left-aligned title in the top left. Also, a logo at the left creates problems with footnotes.

Build your image library

It is surprising to see that most of my clients have very few images of their staff, their products, their client installations. The result: very poor product image shots, and a set of inconsistent headshots of the management team in the presentation.

Make it a habit to build your image library constantly using your smartphone. Snap a picture of the management team meeting (when everyone is in the same room together), the product demonstration, the big shipment of product that goes out of the door, maybe the strategic partner visiting.

In that way, you always have a rich library of images to chose from.

Small changes

Design is hard because there are many small decisions that lead to a great-looking page. Everyone knows the concepts: white space, big images, good-looking fonts, but even with that knowledge it is hard to get it right. Pretty much like composing music: everyone can master music theory or playing an instrument with a little effort, very few can compose master pieces.

Very often, I email a deck back to a client at the end of a project and say "I might a few very small changes, you probably won't notice them". But, these small changes added up can make a big difference to a layout.

So what is it I do in the final stages of a presentation design project? It is hard to capture.

The main thing I think is completely stepping away from the actual content, i.e. the text that is written in boxes. Instead I see black/light grey patterns of characters, boxes in different shapes and colors. Almost "squinting" at the page and making adjustments until this "cubist painting" looks right in terms of proportions and balance.

Most of the times, it work but yes, there are pages where even me as a professional simply cannot get it right. 

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Image via WikiPedia

Frame guide lines

In PowerPoint, you have to option to display drawing guides that help you align objects on a slide. A common application is to have some sort of frame around your slide to make sure that you have the same margin around all your slides in a presentation.

I find these frames very useful, but there is a small issue you need to watch out for, when making compositions, my brain actually assumes that the dotted lines are part of the slide, and I start positioning objects accordingly. When you switch of the frames, or look at the slide in presentation mode, the whole balance looks wrong somehow.

So: always check your slide compositions with those drawing guides disabled.

PS. In my presentation design app SlideMagic, there is no need for drawing guides, since you are forced (kindly), to use a predetermined grid. Try it out!

Pitching your voice lower?

In a recent blog post, Nick Morgan advises to pitch your voice lower when presenting. When we are nervous, we tighten our vocal chords, which results in a high "shrieky" voice that radiates lack of confidence.

I see many people do this even in smaller meetings, and especially some women are dropping their voice pitch dramatically to come across stronger in a male/testosterone-loaded world. In many cases this sounds very artificial.

 Part of the exercise of lowering your voice is probably not related to your voice at all, it gives you something to focus on that simply calms you down. When you are in your mental low voice mode, you feel more confident.

I would treat lowering your pitch as a last resort, and hopefully other stress reduction techniques (including having tremendous confidence in your story) enable you to keep your own natural voice.

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"Do you have a standard process?"

Some clients ask me. The answer: "no". Each situation and story is different. I jump back and forth between high level story line design to graphics design details to numerical analysis.

Is this the best approach to presentation design? Probably not, but I can pull it off for a two reasons: many years of experience, being a 1-person operation, mostly having 1 contact person at a client, and having clients that self-select, i.e., if they uncomfortable with this approach they would not choose to work with me.

As soon as you deal with multiple people, at different levels of experience, and an agency that tries to scale up, there is no escaping to a formal process with specific end products at specific times.

Why has this not been done before?

I ask this question often in client briefing meetings. "Your approach seems obvious, why did it take humanity as 2017 to come up with this, why is it so hard to do?" It is a useful question to take the position of the outsider. For the expert/insider the answer is so obvious that it does not even have to be included in the slides. For the outsider, it might be the most important piece of information.

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"They want such details in the financials"

This is a complaint I often get from startups that deal with private equity investors. The analyst is asking for the number of customers, the number of sales people, the number of engineers in 2021. Who knows, right? Does this make sense?

Well, partially. Building a financial model for 2021 can be a valuable exercise in checking wither your business model makes sense. If you need to recruit 30 Fortune 500 customers in 4 years with 8 months sales cycles and head quarters which are based on a different continent, you cannot get away with 2 sales people and some search engine optimization in your marketing and sales budget. On the other hand, a consumer-focused company that needs to sign up 500,000 user does not need a huge enterprise sales operation.

It is this sanity check that investors want to do. Your "sales and marketing cost is 30% of our $100m 2021 sales" does not show - in most cases - that you have thought about what it would take to build such a company.

The minimal viable presentation

Everyone is constantly pushing you to make your investor pitch shorter, get rid of slides. And after a number of feedback rounds you are left with a very short deck: the summary bullets, an about page, team, IDC/Gartner market forecast, milestones, use of proceeds, for example.

These charts are all very generic, and you will find them in every investor pitch. The content is obviously important, but you have chopped out the charts that tell the story of your company. Why it was so hard until 2017 to tackle a particular issue, and why your company is so brilliant at doing it.

The tell tale sign of a deck that is too short is that you are not using it when presenting. You know your story inside out, so on page 1, you give the the presentation without using any slides, then you quickly click through the slides with the technical company information.

This works great when you are in the room, it does not work at all when you email the deck. Think about the MVP: minimal viable presentation.

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How to practice?

If you have a few hours left to prepare for your presentation, they are better spent rehearsing than fine tuning the design of your slides. 

How to practice? I prefer to run through a presentation as if it were the real thing. No stopping, no stepping back, no rephrasing. Present it once start to finish, think what went well and what went wrong, and do it all over again.

In this way, you get used to the feeling of being on the spot, and that extra mental challenge will help you prepare better for your presentation. 

Back from a break

I just returned from a wonderful sailing holiday in Greece. I have been disconnected from social media streams most of the time, but the few times you check in, I was reminded of the stream of "verbal fillers + click bait headline" the content marketers of the world are writing. You don't seem to care/notice that much when you are in the middle of it all day, but when in relative quiet, it really gets to you. I will continue to try to write things that do not fit in this category.

Summer posting schedule

Work will slow down a little bit over the next few weeks, so expect posting here to be a little bit less frequent as well. I hope you are having a great summer as well!

Robo photo shoots

I was always wondering why it is that whenever I look for images of the exact same person, in the same outfit in different positions, I always end up with a search screen full of Asian models. Via Petapixel.

Fusion chart

In the 2 images below you can see how to create a "fusion chart" where lots of stuff flows into something central. In the second image, I changed the color of the white triangles to grey and drew strong border lines so you can see what shapes are involved.

UPDATE: You can now download this slide concept from the SlideMagic store

Building image grids in PowerPoint

Making a grid of images in PowerPoint is tricky. Images never have a consistent aspect ratio, and when you place a lot of them on a page, the guide suggestions always snap in the wrong place somehow. Here is a survival guide.

• Copy all your images inside the page and select them all
• Right click and go in "format picture"
• Tick the "size" icon, and click "size" 
• Hit "reset" to kill any aspect ratio distortion
• Hit "lock aspect ratio"
• Now select each image one by one, hit "crop", hit "aspect ratio" and pick one
• After this, select all the images again, and give them the same width with a numerical value
• Position the images on your grid
• Take each image in turn, select "crop" and move/zoom the image mask for the right composition

The above was a major consideration when designing the image grid system in my presentation app SlideMagic.

Tech research for the outsider

"Oh, [tech research company] must have a chart on that!". Many startup pitch decks features charts, forecasts, and quotes by Gartner, IDC, Forrester, and others to back up their market claims. Here is how a potential investor looks at these charts:

• Every deck they have seen over the past 10 years probably includes a $1b market forecast by one of these. Most of these companies are not $1b businesses.
• These research agencies do a reasonable job at mapping out what people are spending today on technology, forecasts are based on this picture of today, where an analyst applies different growth rates in an Excel sheet to get to a number that is 3 years out. It is an extrapolation of market trends, not a thorough research about how IT could change fundamentally
• Research relies on a categorization of the IT market with ambiguous names, it is never clear what is included, excluded, where a new technology fits, whether markets are double counted
• Overall IT spend grows at a steady pace, that's how corporate IT budgets work. So a revolutionary new technology cannibalizes investments in other technologies. Research reports hardly ever show sharp drops in the size of market segments. Rather, when a new technology emerges, people relabel, redefine the market segments to reflect the new reality. So again, not a helpful basis to forecast the future.
• The quotes in the research report are loaded with jargon, but most importantly, all sound the same. A product manager might be really excited that a Gartner quote includes "it will definitely think about considering making my IT infrastructure more scalable next year by investigating [technology X]", but for an investor this sounds all familiarly vague. 

So how to use this type of information? Treat it as just another data point, but don't make your entire pitch dependent on it.

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Image via WikiPedia

Soft edges around images...

...never look good. At least, I have never seen ones that do. Soft edges are right up there with standard PowerPoint colors, low res images, clip art, and distorted aspect ratios: all tell tale signs that it is going to be "that kind of" presentation.

Leaving out some key statistics

Sometimes it can be tempting to leave out a key financial metric, because it does not look very good. So instead of "revenues", we show "bookings adjusted for inflation, excluding south east Asia and before sales commissions", which go through the roof in terms of growth.

Someone who sees the chart will immediately turn suspicious and ask "what about revenues?" If you are there in the room, you can explain things, if the person is reading the chart as part of cold email, you probably won't have the opportunity to recover your credibility and integrity. 

If you show financials, you have to show them properly. If there is a need to explain things, do it transparently. The alternative, leave them out in your first deck and save them for meeting #2.