What's new in version 21

Two big changes:

• More intuitive image cropping, where you see parts of the image that are not covered in the box as semitransparent when editing the image. (When you click away or go into presentation mode, the cropped image will show).

• I simplified the settings menu: now there are 2 screen modes, 4x3 and 16x9, and the explanation box slider will go to and from these screen ratios as needed.

Existing users will updated automatically, or you can download the latest version instantly.

Photo by sept commercial on Unsplash

Appearance

Wearing a mask in times of the virus (probably) protects you somewhat from catching the virus, (probably) protects others from you. Individually, the change in odds are probably not that big, but as a society as a whole (the perspective of the government), a small change in infection rate can have an incredibly positive impact (exponential mathematics).

But there is something else, a mask has a social function

• A mask signals that it is not rude when you don’t shake my hand

• A mask signals that you are probably a careful person in general and therefore OK to be with (from 1.5 meters distance)

• A mask makes others think (feel guilty) whether to do the same

The mask signals who you are.

This ‘appearance’ also applies to your presentation. You can have the perfect story line, slides with little text, clear and crisp headlines. But the look and feel of your slides says a lot about the culture of you and your company, irrespective of their content.

With SlideMagic, the look and feel is sorted.

Photo by Fran Boloni on Unsplash

URL juggling

Some readers noted that the slidemagic URL sometimes returns an error. As a result I am juggling the URLs fo the app, template store and blog once more. The slidemagic.com URL will now point to the main site and app, the newly acquired slidemagic.blog will point to the blog that I host with squarespace. The blog.slidemagic.com URL will be phased out.

I am putting redirects in place so that everything keeps on working as it should. My main focus is the 10+ year archive of blog posts. My SEO ranking might drop a bit, but this is not my main worry (yet), as I am still focussing on getting the users that are trying out the SlideMagic app to keep on using it, before ramping up marketing. SlideMagic is not a catch-convert-sell slide template business (there are thousands of those), but an attempt to find a way to change the way people make presentations, which requires some patience.

If you are interested in the details: squarespace does not really work well with subdomains (blog.slidemagic.com, instead of www.slidemagic.com), and does work well with the Cloudflare content delivery network + DDOS protection (Israel-based web sites are not always popular). Pointing a blog.slidemagic to squarespace, also means that you have to point the “naked domain” slidemagic.com to squarespace, which then clashes with my server etc.

Let’s hope it all goes back to normal soon.

Photo by Harrison Moore on Unsplash

What is the forward email?

The most effective introduction to investors is via a referral of a mutual connection. When this mutual connection is ready to put her personal credibility on the line and forward your pitch to an investor, the pitch changes. No small talk, no waffly market backgrounds, and actually, no (or very little) structure, they get straight to the point.

The forward email is likely to be something like this:

• I know this person from ….

• She did this in the past and delivered on all fronts

• Here is a new idea, it is something like an X for Y

• It looks interesting, the obvious question mark is Z, but W could be the wild card that can make the difference

• It could fit nicely with your other investment V

• Have a look and let me know what you think.

Maybe it is a good idea to already think about what your forward email is going to look like, before you ask someone to send it.

Photo by Matt Ridley on Unsplash

Working on improved image cropping

Working with images is turning out to be one of the most powerful uses of SlideMagic. The built-in image search gives access to an endless flow of great images, and the grid makes it really easy to layout these photos in a beautiful and consistent way on a slide.

Aligning images has always been difficult in presentation software (it is only worse in word processors), and that bit is solved by the SlideMagic grid. Next up is image cropping. Most design tools use some sort of overlay that allows you to mask/reveal an image. Even as a professional designer, I still struggle with this.

In SlideMagic, you simply drag an image around in a box to decide what part of the photo you want to reveal. I am working on 2 improvements:

• Showing the entire image in semi-opaque when you are editing/dragging it around to give you. a better orientation of what you are doing

• Creating a way to keep the image focused on the most relevant part regardless of changes to aspect ratios or zoom levels of the photo. At the moment, I store to image positioning versions (one for 16x9 and one for 4x3), but in future releases I want to automate this

The challenge here is to offer something that works without turning SlideMagic into a complicated photo editor. Work in progress.

Real estate (fund) pitch presentation template

SlideMagic is very suited to make decks that promote real estate projects or funds. It is easy to manage pictures of properties and add boxes with information about square feet and returns. I have added a template for a real estate fund pitch to get you started.

Note that when searching for slide templates, you do not need to resort to keywords such as “real estate” (it will give some results now though), any layout that shows lists, or grids, or portfolios, or screenshots will do. Real estate presentations use very generic layouts.

A trick to make more relaxed portrait photos

See below the secret of a pro photographer (follow Scott). To get the most natural and relaxed images of people (for example your team) for your presentation, say the photoshoot is over, and then take a few more shots… (Click the arrow to see the next image)

View this post on Instagram

Today I’m going to share a little photography tip! Often when you ask someone on the street to take their photo (and they say yes) they are flattered but a little tense (especially if the photographer is wearing a mask and during a pandemic) ! I find if I shoot until I get an image I like and then tell the subject “great! I got it!! We’re done!” The subject then relaxes into a pose so much more natural! Quickly I shoot a few more frames of that genuine moment of relief! These two images I captured yesterday of @bashari.ansari are a perfect example of this , both capture a side of her personality in very real but totally different ways. Please don’t use this little trick to replace me!!! I love my job!!

A post shared by Scott Schuman (@thesartorialist) on Jun 11, 2020 at 7:03am PDT

A nice team photo is so much better than a page with headshots in inconsistent formats.

If there is no alternative (traveling to get everyone in one room is hard during this pandemic), there is always SlideMagic with lots of team slide templates that can help you make those headshots look as consistent as possible!

Photo by Uyen Nguyen on Unsplash

Organisation charts

Organisation cultures are changing. Traditional hierarchies becomes less important, and project teams often become the engine of doing things. Also outsiders such as freelancers do not fit in nicely in big structures. At my time in McKinsey in the 1990s, we could have full meetings about whether a line should be dotted or not, and who would have to be drawn slightly higher than someone else on a page. Mistakes here were especially painful in a presentation to the management team.

Organisation chars in presentation are tricky for two reasons: it is hard to get all the boxes right on the page from a technical point of view, and it is hard to make everyone happy that the hierarchy and lines of the boxes reflect reality.

At the request of a user I have added a few more organisation charts to the SlideMagic slide template database. Complex organisation diagrams are not SlideMagic territory (if they are. hard to draw, the audience must also find them hard to understand). Instead, I created a few simple templates that can lay out the structure of an organisation in simple way, cutting the amount of lines, and increasing the size of text boxes.

If you present your chart as a a rough summary of the organisation rather than an exact reflection of hierarchy, you might just get away with it. If you pretend to be precise, people will nitpick..

The “connector” element in SlideMagic is still the weakest drawing tool and I am thinking about a new diagramming user interface now that my front end HTML design skills have improved significantly over the past year. As usual, the problem is not technical. Also in PowerPoint with its more sophisticated diagramming interface, it is hard to get connecting. lines to do what you want. They always angle and bend in a different way than you want them to.

The SlideMagic grid structure comes in really handy when changing screen aspect ratios, or adding/deleting columns in your organisation chart. Everyone lines up instantly. In PowerPoint rebalancing an org chart is major surgery.

In the mean time, feel free to reach out and/or email sketches of organisation diagrams you think cannot be generated from the current template database, and I will do my best to add them to the collection.

TAM slides now in SlideMagic

A SlideMagic user could not find a TAM (total addressable market) slide and used a service I am offering that not many people take advantage of: request them to be added. You can find 4 new slides about TAM here.

About the layouts:

• Unlike most of the traditional TAM slide templates, I did not go for concentric circles. Yes, SlideMagic does not do circles (yet), but I find these hand drawn circles always misleading. It is very hard to get the circle size to be accurate. Hence the more simple bars.

• TAM is a bit of a buzzword, I hence I tried to avoid using TAM (available, or addressable?), SAM, target market, etc. and use normal English instead.

About TAMs.

Watch out with using TAM slides in your investor pitch. Yes, it is included in many template guidelines, but believe me, investors do not really respond well to the type of analysis where we identify a $15 billion universe, $100m or which we can address, and $200k sales we are going to get in year 5. Also, most of them do not like buzzwords.

A TAM-like concept is useful when you want to introduce a new market (i.e., a bucket that does not exist in any Gartner report yet). Rather than calling it TAM, or trying to relate it to any of these buckets, maybe provide a simple analysis instead of what people in the world could spend on services like this. Show the assumptions you made, bottom up. This does not try to create a new Gartner bucket, but instead educates the investor how to think about your market.

Do sanity check though against commonly know Gartner buckets, it might be an obvious question you are going to get.

Pretty template, ugly slide

Most corporate presentation templates are designed starting from an empty slide. The designer feels the urge to spice things up a bit with logos and other graphical elements. Now when you actually use that template (designed for a blank page) with everyday presentation content, things start to clash.

The same things must have happened to the designers at BMW, who forgot the license plate that would be plastered over the front of their new car design….

The next time you brief a designer for a new PowerPoint template, give her a full slide deck including content, let her create a design you like, then strip out all the elements and see what you are left with.

<!— Sponsored content: with SlideMagic, there is no need to worry about a presentation template that fits your corporate branding —!>

Some UI improvements

Version 2.3.18 went up with a few improvements including 2 noticeable ones:

• A much brighter app user interface colour. As you know, SlideMagic mirrors the colour you use in your presentation: if your presentation uses blue, the SlideMagic app accent colours (to show things you selected for example) will turn to its complement: orange. Up until v2.3.18, this was the exact colour opposite, creating problems for users with muted, very dark accent colours. In the latest version I forced up the brightness and saturation of the app accent colour so that it clearly stands out in all cases. Look how that orange is now popping out for my SlideMagic blue colour.

• An improved image user interface, where the crop modes “center”, “contain”, and “cover” are now clearly highlighted. Also, SlideMagic now shows the mega bytes an image consumes as soon as you select it. Sometimes, a very large image is actually not that big in storage, but the opposite happens as well, that tiny image on your slide takes up 10MB of space and as a result you are compressing down the entire slide deck. Now it is easy to catch these memory eaters quickly and compress the image if needed. Compression no longer “flattens” the image effects (greyscale, blur, flip), so you can re and undo these on the compressed image as well.

Download the latest version of SlideMagic for Windows or Mac to try it out.

"We are never going to invest, but how can I help you?"

If you hear this from an investor as the very first sentence she says, this could either be:

1. A gutsy negotiation tactic to get the valuation of the shares in the B-round preferred equity shares down

2. She will not invest in you but wants to be helpful anyway

In 99% of the cases it is scenario number 2, so launching with full energy with your pitch (page 1/50, “market developments”) might get you cut off.

In these cases, I would still clarify, ‘OK, but why?’. The answer is probably: “You are in stage x in market y, we invest only in stage w and market v, but we have a friend in common so I agreed to take the call”. No chance of scenario 1…

All is not lost though. Switch tactic immediately and find out what this investor can do for you. Useful contacts. Ideas for investors who would fit the bill. Time is probably limited (she is doing you a favour, so hold back with arguing or discussion, take notes and put all the feedback in the perspective of the person it is coming from.

The notes might actually contain something that is new to you, and you will have left a very good impression for when you guys meet again in a situation where there is a better match.

Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash

Preserve image positioning when switching between 4x3 and 16x9

SlideMagic swaps instantly between traditional and widescreen aspect ratios. The slide content stays nicely in the slide frame, everything stays aligned and you can revert instantly.

Because SlideMagic does not distort aspect ratios of images (no stretching or squeezing), the positioning of an image changes slightly if you switch between a narrow and a wide screen layout. This can be annoying for images where positioning is a big deal (compare the lined up eye lines of a series of portrait images versus a long-distance shot of a mountain range). If you switch aspects 5 minutes before your meeting, your presentation is misaligned. (This is obviously still a lot better than PowerPoint where everything would stretch and move to unpredictable places when picking a different screen format)

Well, SlideMagic fixed this last hitch as well. I just released V2.3.17 (download SlideMagic here for both Windows and Mac) which now keeps 2 sets of image size and crop frames, one for each slide aspect ratio. You switch back and forth, so will the image positioning. Make sure to double check each image once in both aspect ratios, and the settings will be saved together with the presentation.

For future releases I am studying more advanced image analysis, where I could automatically recognise a face in an image for example, and lock in the position of the eyes (maybe the first true “AI” application in SlideMagic).

Dynamic slides generated on the fly

Version 2.3.16 of the SlideMagic presentation app went up last night (download it here for either Mac or Windows). The major new feature in this release is the dynamic generation of slides (at least, the first steps).

There are different types of template search queries entered on the SlideMagic server. People look for a specific framework (e.g., ‘BCG matrix’), a specific layout (‘3 bullet points’), but then there is a whole lot of more descriptive queries to are a better match for an image search site (‘house’ , ‘diabetes’). While I could populate the database with hand-made slides for each of these terms, it is more efficient to let technology do the work for you.

So at the moment, when the server gives up and returns a “no slides found” message, the user gets offered the option to run an image search instead with the same keywords. After picking an image, the SlideMagic app turns it into a framed slide with proper image credits that can form the basis for a new slide design. This slide is created on the fly, without the need to store templates on my server. So the number of slides that SlideMagic can produce now goes into the millions rather than hundreds.

The screen shots below give an overview of the flow as it stands at the moment:

Obviously a slide with a simple image is still pretty basic. I am looking into expanding this approach with colour matches, and more interestingly analysing images for white space, with suggested pre-population of text placeholders on the image.

All these slides can be converted to editable PowerPoint files with a simple click. At the moment, this feature is implement in the app, not yet on the web site.

Work in progress.

Being too eager might not always work

Most sales have 2 pitches:

• The first is the seller pitching to an employee of the client

• The second is that employee having to make the case to her colleagues

(A similar situation: first the startup pitches a partner of a VC, then that partner has to convince her other partners)

I never discuss that second type of pitch here very much. In most cases an employee or VC partner probably has a deep conviction that a certain deal needs to be done (otherwise you would not put your reputation on the line for it). So all of a sudden, these people are the ones pitching the idea to a potentially unenthusiastic audience.

In these situations it is important to keept that impartial distance from the deal. A colleague who is aggressively countering every possible small objection to the deal loses a lot of trust and credibility. “Hmmm, she must have been brainwashed”. Instead, layout your case objectively. Point out the strengths, but also show the risks, doubts, and possible elephants in the room, and make the case why you think these can be overcome and this is a good bet to take.

P.S. This shows startup/product pitchers who the role of their contact person at a client/investor is changing. First you need to convince them, then you need to coach them how to pitch your idea themselves. If in this second phase of the process, you get a question, she is no longer doubting the idea, but collecting evidence to convince her colleagues. It also shows that bypassing that junior analyst and calling her boss directly might back fire instantly, you just lost your major supporter.

Photo by Wade Austin Ellis on Unsplash

The typos that matter

The tweet “ruin a band’s name by changing one letter” is spreading at the moment. Everyone makes typos, including me on this blog. And typos are hard to spot, especially for people who are totally immersed in their writing efforts. They stop seeing the individual words, they somehow become a placeholder for a specific thought. “Ah, this paragraph covers the competitive positioning”.

In my early years at McKinsey as an analyst, it was my task to correct graphics designers who were working on the team’s slides. I was never really good at it, and always wondered why the senior partner could walk in, look over my shoulder, and catch one. I would never have been a good lawyer.

Certain typos are more important than others. Typos on page 1, sit there for everyone to see on the projector when the room fills up over the course of 30 minutes. Typos in the potential client’s name are never helpful. Typos that turn around the meaning of an entire sentence (forgetting ‘not’ for example) are an issue. And typos in financial data can be catastrophic.

If these financial typos are completely disconnected from reality, you probably get away with them. Buying an oil refinery for $25 rarely makes sense. But if values are close $3.3b versus $3.5b (oops, number from the previous model), it gets trickier. It’s “just” $200m… (That same senior McKinsey partner would always go to the last page to check the fee number in the project proposal).

Always double check that acquisition bid or price list and maybe cover yourself with some small print somewhere.

Checking can be “dumb”: comparing the number in the deck to the number in the spreadsheet. Or “smart”: running the numbers on a page through a calculator, manually, and see whether everything is consistent (totals add up, price/share matches, etc.). This is how computers check whether a download made it across the ocean without any glitches, a certain check sum needs to match).

There must be some typos in this post…

Photo by Elena Koycheva on Unsplash

Even better image search

I made improvements to the image search interface in version 2.3.15. Removed clutter from the side bar, and you can now switch between Unsplash, Pixabay, and the Noun Project (icons) from the image search page. Search keywords are carried over to the other image provider. Existing users should see the update automatically on your machine or can download (like anyone else) here.

Make any presentation look better

I took a recent draft presentation that came across my desk (in PowerPoint) and took out all the specific / confidential information and images, replacing them with dummy text and boxes.

This was by no means a final deck, but it highlights something that most people get wrong when creating a slide deck: tidying up your layout.

Some slides have a white frame, others having images bleeding off the page. Icons are different sizes. Things are not properly aligned. Get all these things right, and your deck will instantly look good, even without fancy fonts, graphics, colours.

This is easier said than done. In PowerPoint, you have the freedom to place anything, anywhere you want. You realise in the last minute that that particular text needs to go in, well it will always fit.

SlideMagic will not let you get away with this. Grids are strictly reinforced. Many users complain about that lack of freedom. I need that 5th box, and now the whole slide layout cannot handle it. And this, exactly, precisely, the process a professional designer has to go through. Unlike you, she does it instinctively and switches the slide layout. With SlideMagic, you will be reminded (kindly) as well.

Here is a quick layout of what a deck like this in SlideMagic should look like. This is not “super design”, SlideMagic helps you make a decent looking deck in the minimum amount possible. “Super design” requires a lot of investment (time and money), which gets you a great looking deck, but one that is sort of set in stone, it is very hard hard to make changes to it. Great for your IPO road show, less so for an every day presentation.

SlideMagic converts instantly to PowerPoint, here is the same deck ready to share with colleagues who are not using SlideMagic yet.

You can download the latest version of SlideMagic here and check it out yourself. (Notice the little SlideMagic logo that is sitting in my PowerPoint toolbar, it is the beta version of the SlideMagic PowerPoint plug in)

Microsoft does not consider SlideMagic templates compelling...

The SlideMagic office add in for Microsoft PowerPoint got rejected for a second time. There are still some technical issues with getting it to work in Office 2013 (I cannot install this old software anymore to test things), but there were a 2 other reasons given:

• “your offer demonstrates insufficient interaction with our service”. While the Javascript API for other Office solutions (Excel, Outlook, Sharepoint) is very extensive, the only thing you can do in PowerPoint is add an image, add a text box, and add an entirely new presentation in a separate file or browser window. (The latter is what I am using to serve my template, Microsoft does not give me the option to insert slides into an existing presentation.

• “Our product team have reviewed your offer alongside our validation team and believe that should your offer contain more compelling templates, it would be possible to allow the offer to be published without interaction with the open PowerPoint presentation” I think what Microsoft means is that if my slide layouts were more interesting, users would not have a problem that (the more interesting) layouts would open in a completely separate presentation.

I will continue to try to fix the technical issues where I can, but it is hard to change the fundamental characteristic of SlideMagic: offer really simple templates that save you time to make presentations…

Anyway, the workflow of simply downloading slides from the web site is actually not that bad. Also, Many users actually use the current version of the PowerPoint plugin, the only difference is that it does not appear in the official Microsoft store. I had a quick look at the Google Slides API, which is far more flexible than Microsoft’s one. I think Microsoft leaves a big opportunity untouched by de-prioritising PowerPoint when it comes to the Office Javascript API, hopefully it will change its mind.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

All the way back to 2008

Now and then I dive back into the 12 year archive of my blog and see some or the early slide layouts I made. This Google image search pops up many of them.

While many of these layouts are now still available as templates in SlideMagic, some of them, especially the early ones are a bit different:

• “Slides that stick” orange and brown

• Lots of hand written fonts

• Unusual visual analogies

• Most of them are definitely not for the layman designer…

Yes, I made have been a bit more “daring” back then (and remember, most of these designs actually were taken from actual client work), but I still think that I am on the right track with my current sober, simple, easy-to-make layouts. Less artistic, but far less time wasted by smart people that can use their energy to do more useful things that creating presentation slides.