It takes more than the slides

The Internet is full with research reports on any subject you ever wanted to explore. In theory therefore, it should be easy to Google together a pile of slides on a certain subject, "Frankenstein" a deck together and go on stage as an expert in a particular field.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. The audience will figure out very quickly when your knowledge of a subject is exactly the amount of content that is written on the slides. It shows in the way you answer questions, it shows in the way you present your slides.

This can often happen when an executive in the technology industry gets invited for a conference to speak about "the latest in [fill in technology buzzword]". People take too little time to prepare their talk, and the result is a stumbling performance that recycles some cliches about the subject.

The same is true in consulting firms, where a junior analyst gets charged with "pulling some slides together" on a subject and gets sent of to present to client at the last minute to stand in for a more senior consultant who could not make the slot.

What to do?

Option one is to adjust the topic you are speaking about, often conference owners will be open to this. Speak about something that is really close to what you do day to day. Even if you do not answer the big question on this huge issue everyone is thinking about, that very personal, very specific experience that you have will be very valuable.

The other option is to do the homework properly. Go beyond the fluffy research reports, dive in, become an expert. See which reports are smart, which ones contradict each other, which ones are just buzzwords. My experience as a management consultant shows that in 1-2 weeks of hard work you can reach a knowledge level that becomes interesting for an uninformed audience to listen to.

(Side note: a 2 second slide created in my presentation app SlideMagic to illustrate the concept. The exact spirit of the app: sketch something simple quickly, that explains the concept, and move on. You can do better things with your time than sweating over complicated presentation design software)

Size creep

Super high resolution images of small slide elements can inflate the size of your PowerPoint or Keynote file without you noticing. A common culprit is an innocent looking page with 30 customer logos. Compress your images often to keep file sizes in check.

Another common file size mistake is to include high resolution images in the slide master to make it easer for people to understand template slides that are meant for photos. As a result, even a simple text slide will create a huge file as the slide master gets saved as an integral part of the document. This can add up in a company with 10,000 employees.

Image compression in PowerPoint can sometimes produce unpredictable results, especially when you tick "apply to all" and you have a presentation with a lot of photographs. I often see cropped images going haywire, the only rescue is to compress images one by one. Always save a copy of your file before attempting to compress the file.

Handy link: how to reduce file sizes in Office

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Two visual languages

Slightly off topic today. I am into F1 racing and was watching the Italian Grand Prix at Monza yesterday on 2 screens: the regular TV program, and a mobile app that provided me with every statistic I possibly needed. They are 2 languages that cover the exact same event.

The TV program covers things the way people are used to: camera mainly on the leading car which was up to 30 seconds ahead. Reporters chatting casually in the background. Close ups of supporters. Audio of roaring engines.

The data screen gave a completely different picture. You could see which driver was gaining, losing, when they might come in to swap tires, how long they might last on their tires. It takes a bit of practice to be able to interpret everything, but the weird thing is that when you get there, you could pretty much imagine, actually "see", a car race without actually seeing the camera feed.

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Getting through to busy people

Most of the presentations I design are to support a 30 minute discussion with an investor. The hardest part of the fund raising effort is often to get to that 30 minute meeting. Some thoughts on elevator pitches via email.

Most people understand that these emails should be short. But people make the mistake of making the email short by cramming in the entire pitch in as few words possible. The full story gets put on a boiler plate, but the fire is left on too long until there is nothing left: big market, great team, strong user traction, multiple business models.

You don't need to put the entire pitch in 2 lines, your objective is not to land the investment, it is to be invited to a phone call. You want to intrigue enough that it is worth 15 minutes on the phone.

Start with a strong connection. "Your portfolio company CEO [x] thought you might be interested in this." "We are in a complementary field to your other investment"

Bring a new insight, or a surprising fact, without going into the details. "In 2017, nobody pays for dating sites anymore, but 90% of our users do". "Everyone knows that electrical cars will only sell if you can get 500 miles on a charge, our batteries could just enable that". "Google just spent $400m on acquiring a company that we can beat easily"

Avoid empty buzzwords, generic statements, superlative adjectives (300% month-on-month user growth). Keep it human and surprising.

Writing with a typography mindset

When you write text on a presentation slide, the way the text looks is almost as important as what the text actually says. All the time, consider the typography, the layout of your text when crafting titles and headlines.

• Orphan words that drop to the next line
• Filler words, passive verbs that fill space but don't any meaning
• Uneven distribution of words across boxes with similar visual priority
• Etc.

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Dramatic reduction in stock image use

Stock image sites were a great discovery when I started getting into the presentation design business in the early 2000s. In fact, they might have pushed me over the edge in becoming a designer. All of a sudden, I discovered that combining McKinsey-style professional slides with carefully chosen stock images you could make some powerful sales and investor decks.

All of this happened at the same time when very fundamental books by the likes of Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte were published, TED talks were taking of, presentations were changing!

Looking back, and looking forward, I see that my presentation style has changed. The biggest change: far, far fewer (premium) stock images. How come? Post-rationalizing:

• I got much better and assessing the setting in which the presentation would be delivered. And very rarely do I design presentations for a massive keynote or TED Talk. Most of the time, these are decks that will be presented in a small conference room, to a small audience. And more importantly, the first "punch" that these decks need to deliver is in the email inbox, when an investor or potential customer decides to keep on clicking (or not). More and more, I am starting to design these presentations for the impatient attachment clicker, and less for the live audience. This means: fewer images, and yes denser content. It is cumbersome to maintain 2 versions of a document (one for sending, one for presenting), so in practice the live audience is suffering a little bit at the expensive of the email attachment reader.
• Investor and sales audiences have evolved. Pitches have a high degree of similarity, they all follow a similar pattern, companies are addressing similar types of problems, pitching similar types of technologies (investors are increasingly specializing), so I see less need to "wow" the audience with dramatic new concepts (self-driving cars) but rather focus more on the nuts and bolts of an innovation. Investors are clued up, and look for the substance, quickly clicking through the pretty pictures. 
• The premium stock image sites are collapsing under their own success. Image banks are diluted with designs that are somewhere between an actual clean photo and a finished design concept. Quality is technically good, but artistically "cheesy" and staged. Opening these sites as a designer makes you instantly feel that you are "in the wrong part of the Internet" And I am sure that even the layman designers gets totally confused when browsing these image sites.
• Free alternatives to paid stock image sites are popping up everywhere. If you need an image of the tip of an iceberg, you can find pretty decent ones on Google Image search (use the labeled for re-use option), WikiPedia or one of the many free stock image sites (that try to lure you into buying premium images that are often not better). 
• And finally, I think it is a matter confidence and experience, where I somehow found a personal design style that involves fewer images.

Working in Google Slides

Recently, a client insisted on using Google Slides for our presentation design project, especially because of its good collaboration features. Instead of starting a presentation in PowerPoint, then converting it to Google Slides, I took the native approach, and created a presentation from the ground up in this application.

The design of Google's office user interface has improved a lot over the years. Things look beautiful and work fast and snappy. Still, the Slides product is full of little issues that 1) slows down a pro-user like me, and 2) makes it harder for the layman designer to make good looking documents.

Because I invested my own hard-earned money in my presentation app SlideMagic, I feel a bit hesitant here to spoon feed a ready made upgrade suggestion list to a multi-billion dollar software developer with the world's smartest programmers ready to implement them....

In 2017 - leaving minimalist SlideMagic aside - I think PowerPoint is again/still the best slide design software out there (also on Mac), better than Google, better than Apple Keynote. The main criterium here is not feature set, but workflow.

There have been many of these types of posts on my blog over the past 9 years, and I am sure there are many more to come as products continue to evolve.

App demos

There is one particular customer segment that often requests a quote for a pitch deck: productivity apps (my own app SlideMagic falls in this category).

• A reasonably complex user interface
• Taking on long established solutions (Microsoft Office, etc.)
• Does not require a huge development investment (relatively to other startups)

In most cases, I advice these clients not to invest in a professionally designed pitch deck: the story is usually pretty clear ("PowerPoint is a pain, and we are going to end it") and investors could spot easily whether this is a VC-type investment (something where they can deploy a significant amount of capital and generate a big exit), by looking at the early customer traction numbers.

What can you do without a professional presentation designer:

• Make a careful budget and see what sort of investor you need, when. If you have not found product market fit with stellar user engagement numbers, it might be too early to splash on customer acquisition, and it is better to continue to boots strap product improvements.
• Rather than investing in the design of the presentation, invest in the design of the app, and make a killer demo: lots of nice screen shots with commentary, in an intuitive flow that show the magic of your creation.
• Present a well-thought through budget and release pipeline, showing the stages of development work.
• Invest a lot of time in understanding your early user base, which segment of your users get hooked, which not.

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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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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.