Most good presentations are repeats

It is extremely hard to put a presentation together from scratch on a completely new subject and make it interesting. Come to think of it, most (maybe even every) good presentation you see, hear, read is a repeat: it has been given hundreds of time before.

Not necessarily with these slides, or in this format though. The startup founder starts building the story of his company the moment he puts the first line of code down. The CEO of that Fortune 500 giant has been selling cars since she joined the company 25 years ago, now she is selling the whole company to investors. The job applicant is pressing play on the story he kept on telling himself when he left his job to study an MBA 2 years ago.

Repeating makes you get better at the telling the story, learning from the verbal and non-verbal reaction of anyone you told it to. A good story is hardly ever born overnight.

Photo by Namroud Gorguis on Unsplash

Staying focussed (2)

No post today as I am out with a small fever. It is interesting to see that in my previous, non-freelance jobs, you could simply plough on as a kind of endurance test with tasks that require less focus when you are a bit sick. Writing code or coming up with a new design concept for a presentation: forget it when your mind is not 100% there.

Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash

"The opposite..."

Many writers use this type of wordplay, for example Seth Godin in a recent post:

Just because it’s easy to measure doesn’t mean we should (and the opposite is even more true).

It can be a nice word play, but maybe it is me, I find it hard to understand. I actually need to reconstruct the opposite sentence, “read it to myself", and then go back to the original one.

When you use it, use it as a last sentence somewhere (like Seth did), to give the audience a little brain teaser.

Photo by Andrew Shiau on Unsplash

Staying focused

In my work as a designer, and now as a founder-coder, I have the luxury that most people working miss: hours of meeting-free, uninterrupted time to get things done. I think anyone who managed to build a career in this working model has proven to be able to stay focussed and disciplined, when there is no boss around who can remind you that watching Netflix episodes during work hours is not what you are supposed to do.

Still, my work is not an endurance test to resist temptations. I tend to group my work into different types and switch between them when I am stuck, bored, tired, energetic, full of inspiration, suffering from the downstairs neighbour who is drilling in the ceiling.:

• Cracking a complicated problem (fundamental code architecture, the visual approach to a new presentation)

• Just making something look pretty (user interface, that competitor slide)

• Googling for solutions for that nasty, but actually unimportant, bug

• Doing accounting

• Writing a week full of blog posts in one go

In my time as a consultant when I was working with lots of people, I could not really set my own working schedule. Now that that noise has disappeared you start noticing there are huge differences when you do certain things during the day, and in what mood.

Photo by Raj Eiamworakul on Unsplash

Can you pull it off?

That is a key question every investor is pondering while you click through the slides of your investor deck. But it might also go through the mind of a CEO of a big corporation who listens to the final results of a consulting project that talks about let’s say a major reorganisation.

There is often infinite amount of logic and data about how people should be grouped together, and when the the coin can fall right or left, it is probably the gut feel about you as a person that leads to the decision.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Visual mathematical proofs

Like coding, mathematical language needs to be precise and as a result looks super scary to the outsider, turning of many people that might have had an interest in exploring more. Here is a great picture that should be an inspiration for the rewriting of mathematics education:

A visual proof why 1+3+5+...+(2n-1)=n²

⚫
⚪⚫⚫
⚪⚪⚫⚫⚫
⚪⚪⚪⚫⚫⚫⚫

=

⚫⚪⚪⚪
⚫⚫⚪⚪
⚫⚫⚫⚪
⚫⚫⚫⚫

— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) January 23, 2019

Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash

Subscriptions update

I started the subscription slide template store almost a year ago, and the first subscribers will soon receive an email alerting them about the upcoming subscription renewal. I must admit that over the past few months I have not added as many new designs to the store as I had planned to, since I am investing a lot of time in developing the next generation of the SlideMagic app.

I have lots of ideas for new slides, but the underlying platform makes it very cumbersome to maintain everything, especially in multiple slide formats and aspect ratios. The Shopify platform I am using is built for selling t-shirts in different sizes, and is less suited for digital downloads.

A 1 year unlimited download is still a tremendous deal with the current library, but I understand if people decide not to roll over the subscription into a second year. The site should give you the tools to stop the subscription, if you need help please reach out. Obviously, you are invited to continue to support me as I am trying to change the world of presentation design.

The new app will include a better solution for accessing templates, now that my coding skills are reaching a point where I am less dependent on out-of-the-box platforms. Eventually we will get there.

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Split infinitives?

Back in the 1990s, as an “alien” Dutch person working in London, I got constantly corrected for my habit of splitting infinitives. Doing some more research now, I found that it basically does not matter what you do. They should have told me earlier…

There is one thing to think about though. There are still many people around who have not read this blog post and/or done the research. If you need to write something to someone you need to impress and don’t know very well (a job application for example), maybe splitting infinitives deliberately is not the best idea.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Learning from UI designers

After diving into JavaScript, Electron, and Node.js to refresh my coding skills, it is now time to get into front end design. I never followed developments in this area very much and now discover the similarities between slide design and interface design. This article by Steve Schoger has recommendations that apply to presentation design as well:

• Lots of grey shades

• Only one real primary color, but use it with restraint

• Super contrasting accent colours to highlight things

• No lines around boxes

• Make sure your color saturation palette looks good, and use it consistently

Photo by Harpal Singh on Unsplash

The dark background effect

Dark or light background, it is a choice, and both can lead to overcrowded, ugly slides full of bullet points. For some reason, people do a better job when working on a dark slide background. Possible reasons?

• The dark slide is a clear break from the colour format of most project working documents., there is less temptation to just copy/paste that spreadsheet and call it a slide?

• The minimalist dark Apple product launch presentation is just etched in our brain and serves as an example?

• Dense bullet points are actually harder to read on a dark background than a light one?

Who knows, but if it works, it works…

Photo by Good Free Photos on Unsplash

"We just need a quick fix up"

I get these type of requests to improve a presentation a lot, first when there are budget issues, and now more recently when I say that coding my app consumes 100% of my time. Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes in good freelance design work:

• Doing quick fixes will turn you into well, a quick fixer, you join anonymous army of freelance designers that do patch work and compete on price. If not you, we will find 1,000 alternatives exactly like you. The race to the bottom as Seth Godin would call it.

• Fixing slides is the last step in the process, first comes understanding someone’s story. That is a big fixed cost investment that you need to put into every project, even if the draft slides look decent.

• Presentation design work can only be really effective when you have the creative freedom (and budget) to tear up the entire draft design and pick your own consistent approach.

• Quick fixes always need to be completed quickly, doing a lot of these projects means you always will be extinguishing emergency fires and never get around to doing your real work. It is more productive to be able to plan your work over a longer period of time. Quick fixes actually impacts the quality of your overall work.

• Substandard work creates a self reinforcing loop: you will attract similar types of clients, and you are no longer proud of the work you show when someone asks you for recent design work that you did.

For bigger design firms there is a business model for quick fixes. If you can work offshore in countries with lower wage costs and a 12 hour time difference so you can work overnight. You need a large, flexible pool of people that can respond to sudden work loads. To make this work you probably have to work with larger clients that can guarantee a steady work flow (consulting firms etc.), and have some sort of subscription / retainer pricing model. This is an entirely different business from that of a 1-person freelance design agency that is trying to build a global quality micro brand.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Investor pitching: more and more like movie/dance auditioning

I recently watched the documentary “This is it!” about Michael Jackson again and remember the scene in the middle where the director is picking the handful of lead dancers for the MJ show from a line up of hundreds and hundreds of highly talented people that made it through the first selection filters and made the journey to the stage.

The parallels with pitching for an investment to experienced investor are striking:

• He does not need to see an entire performance start to finish, he has seen it before

• He compares every dancer to every other dancer who is on stage, but also subconsciously against all the other candidate-dancers he has seen and picked before.

• His mind and eyes wanders all over the place without a clear structure or script

• He uses a heavy dose of gut feel

• He is looking for someone who has that bit of “something special”, both in terms of objective capability, but also drive and ambition

• He know he probably makes mistakes (picking the wrong dancer and not picking the right dancer who standing in the back row)

• He probably forgives a newbie who makes a rookie mistake in auditioning and actually enjoys discovering a new talent (or the opposite discounts the talent of the “auditioning pros”)

This does not mean to throw all the rules about presentation design out of the window: the context is just different when you for example pitch a crypto startup to a crypto fund who has been funding crypto companies for the past 2 years.

Pens!

I love investing in good writing instruments. Here is the current line up (with a new addition):

• Apple pencil for notes I need to keep (meeting notes, important concepts for my app development, ideas for new blog posts)

• Mechanical pencil for sketching disposable charts, diagrams, concepts that either need partial creative erasing and/or a ruler (read the review of my trusted Lamy 2000 mechanical pencil here)

• And now: a nice roller pen for other “disposable” notes.

Since I started my career at McKinsey back in the 1990s I have been using pencils for everything. Back in the day, all charts and slides were sketched by hand before being produced by a graphics designer who understands PowerPoint (or Solo before that). But, pencils leads break easily when writing enthusiastically and have low contrast, hence the addition of the pen.

The Lamy 2000 roller pairs nicely with my pencil. The design is almost identical to the classic fountain pain, but with less staining (I am left handed), and the need to get that writing angle perfectly right. I think a roller is better for short notes than a proper fountain pen. The Lamy has a perfect balance (wit the cap placed on the back), and somehow the plastic that is used in the pen gives it a really nice brushed feel, and a perfect weight. Only drawback, those two tiny grips that were part of the original design and produce that satisfying click when the cap is closed.

Matching text and image colours

Full colour images can clash with the colour palette of your presentation colour scheme. Three options:

• Pick a different image (search for “orange” in Unsplash for example)

• Use grayscale images

• Or.. adjust the text colour to the image (see example)

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Personal story

While battling the rendering of images in PowerPoint via JavaScript I remembered that my ver first piece of software was actually a “presentation design tool”. Back in 1985, in the final years of high school, I submitted a program as an entry to a programming contest.

Screen drawing was in its infancy then, and I noted that all programs were “destructive”, you drew something on bitmap canvas and could store the end result, but there was no way to edit / undo your master piece at a later stage. My program stored individual actions which had 2 benefits: you could edit your drawing, and it took far less tape space to save the file (a line just takes 2 points to store).

The program was written in Basic on a TI-99/4A (which had a screen resolution of 256 pixels I think). Unfortunately, I did not win the contest. I think the winner was a shopwindow advertising application written by the son of the local butcher that enabled horizontal scrolling of the latest entrecote prices in big characters on the screen. (The butcher himself seemed to know more about the intricacies of the program than his son though). I think the jury thought this had more practical application than a presentation design program.

Image via WikiPedia

Rewriting the headlines

A memory from my life as a consultant in the 1990s. Creating a document with dozens of people giving input and changing things is hard: analysts correcting mistakes in numbers, graphic designers insisting on following the house style, partners reshuffling the entire deck, fax machines breaking down, cleaners dropping the entire deck (without a staple and no page numbers) on the floor, copy machine operator shifts ending, etc, and all of this under intense time pressure.

I remember one introvert project manager who had his own survival strategy in this overflow of stimuli: towards the end, simply take all the charts, retreat in his office, and start reordering and rewriting every single headline completely. The headlines would be long sentences and in the right sequence would tell the whole story of the project’s conclusions. Sometimes the link between the headline and the chart beneath it was not 100% on every page, but as a whole the deck made sense.

That’s one approach, which would have worked even better if he had done this 24 hours before the deadline instead of 2.

Photo by Francisco Arnela on Unsplash

Changing the use of images

I use images very differently now in presentations then 10 years ago:

• Zero stock images that look like stock images (fake models, staged compositions, cliche compositions)

• I no longer feel the urge to find an image for every slide I produce to avoid forced visual analogies, and get left with a set of images in a presentation that are completely unrelated and inconsistent

Instead:

• Most of the time, my images reflect something real: the actual leadership team, the product, a factory, a city, a screen shot, the cover of a scientific publication, etc.

• I am still using commercial stock images if I need isolated objects (a bucket, a hammer, etc.)

• Sometimes I might go for a visual theme and try to find images that fit with the concept on virtually every slide (flowers, 50s, record covers, etc.)

• Most of the images I use come from the free site Unsplash. As a result, I don’t even bother saving images to disk anymore, if I need another one, I will search for it again.

• I often make all the images in a presentation black and white, to make the look and feel of slides more consistent, and let the accent colour of the slides (often just one) pop out more.

Photo by Math on Unsplash

Finding a flow for your presentation

Your text book story flow might not always be the one to use in tomorrow’s meeting.

• A 60-minute/75-page final Board presentation of a 3-month consulting project

  • Sequencing is important to take resistant members of the audience from common ground, via cold logic and facts to the conclusion that option 1 is preferred over option 2 and 3 that equal to “fall of the cliff”

  • In some business cultures it is important to establish the credibility of your work (assumptions, models, importance of people in the organisation you spoke to), before getting into the actual crunch

  • Meeting timing, having the whole meeting explode with a debate on page 3, while that highly insightful analysis is on page 7 is not helpful

• A 5-10 minute investment pitch:

  • The order in which questions pop up in the head of an investor might deviate from the business school investment pitch flow template. First, the investor needs to understand what it is you actually want to do, then it might make sense to take out “elephants in the room” before moving on to more important issues, but which are less controversial.

  • Experience differs vastly across investors, some might need the proper 101, others dive straight into the detail, derailing your carefully laid out story

No, I am not saying to throw that perfect storyline out of the window, and in 90% of the cases it is the right thing to do, but think whether your meeting might be part of the other 10%.

Photo by Julian Lozano on Unsplash

Tried and trusted

Sometimes, the good old way is still the best.

One of the main “side effects” of my new giant iPad is that I start reading magazines again that cannot afford/did not invest in good iPad apps, the screen is big enough to flick through PDF-copies of the paper format. It is great to broaden my news sources again (French, German, Dutch) beyond Anglo publications focused on a small number of issues.

I must say, the simple user interface of just swiping between pages without zooming, multi-directional navigation, pinching, multi-finger swipes, actually works pretty well, and is exactly the mindset I am in when developing my presentation app: 99% of business presentations do not require a fully immersive interactive experience.

Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash

Update on the development efforts

The past few weeks have been very interesting for me in my new role as a developer! I have switched platforms 3x now: first starting to explore plugins for PowerPoint (Windows Forms), then moving on to coding an application straight onto windows (Windows WPF), but now I am back in the world of Javascript that in combination with the Electron platform can produce software that runs natively on Windows, Mac, and even Linux with just one code base to maintain. The first intermediate end product will be a local presentation “presenter view” tool that does not require internet connections to deliver/show SlideMagic presentations (it is all a bit clunky still in the web app), and a 100% accurate PowerPoint conversion tool for SlideMagic presentations that runs on both Mac/Windows, and is totally independent of PowerPoint itself, my software is generating the converted files directly without the help of the rendering engines of PowerPoint (plugins).

This whole process is absolutely fascinating. Now that I go through things myself I have come to realise how important it is to master (at least part of) the actual core technology yourself as a founder.

To be continued.

Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash