Fast. Easy. Beautiful.
We only have 5 minutes... I noticed that my best decks are often the ones that were designed for very short time slots, usually pitch competitions where a speaker would have 5-10 minutes to give it all. Why?
The deck for sending. The focus of my design work has shifted over the past years. The most important objective of my client's presentations is to make a good impression as an attachment to a "cold email". What is a good summary presentation that you can send ahead of a (possible follow up) meeting?
A list of presentation mistakes. Looking back at recent client work, the V1.0 briefing decks I saw, here are some of the mistakes I encountered. Not a complete list, not in the right order, just some examples that came across my desk the past few weeks.
How to create a 3D perspective in PowerPoint. Most of the time, 3D is not required in business presentations. But sometimes, it is. See how to position objects on a 3D canvas in this post.
Small differences in font size. Visual emphasis is important in graphics design: it creates a sense of hierarchy, what should be viewed first, and what are less important details.
An overview of the slide templates that are available in the SlideMagic template bank.
How to export PowerPoint slides as high res images on a Mac. See how by setting the slide width to 2998 things somehow seem to work.
But what does your app do? You have been thinking about your app for 2 years, before this moment when you are ready to talk to investors. You have grand visions of the bigger picture, and how your app could become a major platform in your industry. Investors have not gone through this process, and see many pitches that claim to be a platform in your industry.
Merging flows. Here is a chart that visualises the merging of different flows. See in the second image what components I used to build it.
Investor pitch in VR. It was bound to happen soon, a startup active in the field of virtual reality made an investor in pitch in well, virtual reality.
Referral fees. People in the HR business complain about this: a headhunter makes a connection between a candidate and a recruiting officer without asking them both first, and, when the introduction ends up in a match, sends an invoice for a referral fee. The same starts happening to me for custom design projects: an introduction, an anticipating client, and the request by the introducer to get paid in a separate email.
Sankey diagrams in PowerPoint. Sankey diagrams are tricky to make in PowerPoint, in the absence of a standard tool, you have to DIY the diagram from individual components. See below the approach I took to recreate a Sankey diagram in PowerPoint
Free templates (just for one day). I am experimenting with pricing on the SlideMagic template store, and trying to understand what sort of slide templates are most useful for you. So you can participate in another experiment: tomorrow you can download any template you want from the store by using discount code "Magic" (link). It is valid for 24 hours on November 17 Tel Aviv time (Black Friday came early).
Popping out of the box. Unlike many designers, I actually like framing my slides, leaving white space around the edges. Stretching your picture all the way to the slide boundary looks nice on one page, but creates inconsistencies with more traditional data slides, and reduces the readability of slide titles.
How to present the competition. The best slide to talk about competition of your product or company depends on your specific market. I will take you through a number of common slide layouts.
Windows is at par. Every couple of years I am installing a Windows machine on my Mac, either to check how SlideMagic looks on corporate computers, and now, because I need access to Microsoft Office development features that are not available on a Mac. I went through Windows 8, then Windows 7, and now Windows 10.
App demo slides. Doing a live app demo in a 20 minute pitch meeting is risky, the technology might go wrong, and probably more than half the time you spent in a 2 minute app demo could be things that are not really interesting: logging in etc. Instead, I usually prepare a series of screen shots with big explanation bubbles in my presentations.
Spacing objects on a circle. It can be tricky to distribute text bubbles evenly on a circle. To make it easier, you can put a temporary shape inside the circle like in the example below. Delete it after your bubble chart is complete.
How to create a waterfall chart. Waterfall charts are the secret weapon of McKinsey and other strategy consultants. They are great to explain the source of change between two values (last year, this year for example). In Excel they are tricky to make, especially if values zoom up and down the zero axis.
SlideMagic versus the competition. Today, I added a slide to the SlideMagic template store that shows how I usually visualise some sort of competitive comparison or product differentiation. I took SlideMagic itself as an example
