"What are the best presentation templates for business models?"

Some questions on Quora seem to be a setup for people with a solution to answer them. SlideMagic is not in the business of selling slide templates, still, I could not resist answering:

I think it is the wrong question to ask first. You should start with “What is my business model?”

A business model can have an endless number of options, no one is the same, hence it is hard to fit into a standard template. Even worse, trying to fit your business model into a PowerPoint template that actually does not fit gets your audience confused of what your business model actually is.

Once you have decided on your business model, you can find a suitable template, and it can be very simple and straightforward. For example, if you charge a set up fee, and an hourly rate, that is a table with 4 boxes… Clean simple, unambiguous.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

"Why are 2x2 so popular in consulting firms?"

I answered a question on Quora:

Read Jan Schultink's answer to Why are 2 x 2 matrices so popular at McKinsey Consulting? on Quora

I can think of a number of reasons:

1. A 2x2 is a nicer way to present options than a slide with 4 bullet points, a 5 dimensional space can get very complicated

2. It forces you to think things through thoroughly for holes and overlaps, maybe you start with 2 options, add a third, take a step back and think what actually defines these 3 options, come up with the 2 axis, and then realise you overlooked option number 4 to be complete

3. A 2 dimensional framework allows you to think about what happens if you move things around, and makes it easy to visualise.

4. In most cases there are more than 2 dimensions to a problem, but it is hard to visualise (see point 1), and think about. The 2x2 forces you to choose the 2 most important dimensions.

5. Cultural habit, if you are in a place that uses a lot of 2x2s, you will use it more often, it is a language that people understand easily.

SlideMagic has lots and lots of 2x2, 3x3 and other matrices as slide templates for your to get started. Download the app and get started.

Making Bernie memes, and image positioning in more serious presentations

Everyone is super imposing the image of Bernie on other photos at the moment. Why do certain images look realistic, others not? Some pointers that might help with your Bernie creations, but can also be useful when you need to make more serious presentations.

• Think of the size of Bernie versus reference objects close to thim. Putting him next to other people makes it easy to get it right. In the absence of reference people, focus on other objects to compare the size to. The size of Bernie versus objects that we know the size of, tricks the brain in getting the perspective of the image right.

• See at what angle the image of Bernie is taken. The legs of his chair show the angle at which the floor should run. Bernie’s image is taken from a long distance with a zoom lens, therefore you will see that most compositions that you took with a phone (lens 1.7m above the ground, subject probably 5-10 meters away) will not work.

It is hard to get these right. Simply move and zoom the image around a lot until you see that it fits right. Here is Bernie in my living room keeping Grifin company, In SlideMagic I put the living room as a ‘frame’ image, and made one big grid box as the foreground for Bernie. Then, I switched off the titles.

(@taber has already done the hard work for you, download a Bernie image with transparent background here).

"This is the part I always skip..."

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If you always skip that part, maybe it is time to reshuffle your slides to a flow that comes more natural to you.

There was probably nothing wrong with the original slide flow you used, but things can get stale:

• You switched from a project flow, where the series of charts reflected the sequence of the project work, to the story that sells the outcome

• You have a much more powerful presentation opening with a real life customer story than the usual market data slides that are sitting there

• You are still using the same slides that you put in 3 years ago

• The audience of your presentation has changed, they either have caught up and know more things now, or you are presenting to different people.

Time for spring cleaning of your pitch?

Photo by Jeremy Sallee on Unsplash

A faster way to edit slides

I have made more improvements to the SlideMagic user interface. Is is now easier to select multiple cells, especially in fine grids.

If you select a column marker at the top of the slide, all boxes in your slide that “touch|” the column will be become selected, and you can apply formatting to them in one go (for example, make them all blue).

The same applies for rows, click a row marker, and all relevant boxes in the row line up.

Finally, you can select whole areas of boxes by first clicking a top-left element, then clicking a bottom-right element, and SlideMagic will light up all the boxes that are in between. See the example below.

New 'no-title' layout

SlideMagic works with fixed positions for slide titles, subtitles, footnotes, and logos. Each slide looks organised, consistent, and the same.

Some slides call out for a slightly differently layout. Tracker pages for example. A simple text box that sites right in the middle of the screen. Up until now, SlideMagic would push these text boxes a bit down or to the right because of the required space for the slide title.

With a very simple check mark, I now created the option to remove titles from the slide on a slide-by-slide basis. It is a tiny adjustment to the user interface that can improve the look of layouts significantly. I am still putting a high hurdle when it comes to complicating SlideMagic. This is definitely not a complication!

While the user interface adjustment is easy, behind the scenes, there is a lot going on. Removing the the titles from a slide requires recropping of all the images on a slide. With SlideMagic’s new automatic cropping algorithm, this has now become possible. Imagine doing this for a slide with 40 client logos in a regular presentation design software, after which you come to the conclusion that the slide looked better with a title: re-cutting, re-cropping, re-distributing 40 images again. In SlideMagic, this is a button click.

You can check out the new features as of version 2.6.9

Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash

Should you put 'confidential' on every slide of your presentation?

For years I tried to resist the pressure from lawyers to fill every slide with legal disclaimers. They do not look very pretty. But SlideMagic aims to be practical and as of version 2.6.8, you can do so, if you have to.

To make them still look OK:

• I made the font really small, in all caps, so the disclaimer looks more like some sort of a document id

• All disclaimers are exactly the same and at exactly the same place

• The placement of the disclaimer changes based on what sort of aspect ratio / slide layout you are using

Should you put disclaimers? (Warning, I am not a lawyer). There are certain situations where you probably should. Certain confidentiality agreements state that information needs to be marked as being confidential to be covered by the agreement.

But, if there is no such agreement in place, I am not sure how much leverage you have if people are sharing pages despite all the scary warnings on the page. Also, if you are using slides with a big TED talk or product launch, the whole world can see them, making the disclaimers pretty useless.

Most investors do not sign NDAs, and you actually you want the junior VC to forward your pages to a partner in the firm. Assume that when you send your slides to investors, there can be leaks, so be careful what you put in there. In most cases the actual content of your super secret technology will not make the difference when it comes to evaluating your pitch deck in the early stages of the investment process.

So, consult your lawyer, push back if she insists, and give in if she has a reasonable argument.

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

It is all about box counting

One of the biggest issues in business presentation design is adjusting frameworks to the amount of boxes you need. You had this great slide that fats 8 things, but thing number 5 and number 6 is no longer relevant, so now you need to rehash the whole slide layout…

I think this “bug” in the design process might be one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of bullet point lists: it is super easy to add and subtract things on your slide. And this is also the reason why pre-fab PowerPoint templates are so hard to use. The designer made that super pretty 8-box slide with sophisticated shapes, and 5 minutes before your meeting, you need to get rid of one without destroying the design of the slide…

In SlideMagic things are super easy. Option one: it is easy to adjust the grid layout to match your new box count. Or even better: a new box count might merit an entirely new slide layout. In the latter case, you will have to copy-paste your boxes, but at least SlideMagic takes care of the fiddly task fo lining things up.

Here is a pro tip: box counting is the first thing I do when staring a new slide. How many items, how do they spread across horizontal and vertical dimensions? Can we consolidate points? Should we break them up across multiple slides? Once you have your count, it is easy to find a matching design.

Some advice for a seed investment pitch deck

A nice collection of startup pitch deck wisdom by Hiten Shah and Marie Prokopets:

Chart make-over: the US restaurant industry

A slide came flying by on Twitter:

How interesting. pic.twitter.com/lO3BtRgHUr

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) January 11, 2021

The original chart:

Below a the same chart, but now in SlideMagic style. A few modifications:

• Toning down the colors

• Switching to regular bars instead of the stacked bars for the detailed sector breakdown. The boxes are more or less equal in size, so the stacked bar does not really add that much information, while making the whole thing much harder to read.

• I cleaned up the categories and totals, they did not add up properly. This is probably the result of the analyst who had to work with multiple conflicting data sources. I am a strong believer of pushing through one, consistent, view of reality when it comes to a final presentation. Either you add your own interpretation to multiple sources and come up with a new one, or you stick 1-on-1 to a consistent source. The in-between ambiguity is useful when you do the analysis, it is confusing when you make the final presentation.

• The segment concentration numbers are actually very interesting in this chart. In the original, they are very hard to read and compare in the boxes. The SlideMagic chart gives them much more space

I added this slide to the SlideMagic template database (download it here), or simply search for “restaurant” in the desktop app and it will pop up.

Making SlideMagic more Zoom-friendly

Up until now, playing a SlideMagic presentation would trigger a full screen view of your slide, plus second full screen window on the presenter machine (if available). Switching back and forth to full screen, swapping monitors can be a bit disorienting, and in the area of Zoom, it does not work well when you want to share your audience window, but not your presenter view.

As of version 2.6.3, entering a presentation will now always trigger 2 windows (not in full screen): the slide and a smaller presenter view with timer, counter, and a thumb of the next slide coming up. You can re-rearrange them to monitors as you see fit, and go to full screen manually if needed.

This also ‘solves’ the issue of deciding which screen is the audience screen, and which one the presenter’s when many on screen projectors (not replaced very frequently) have lower screen resolutions than most computers.

How to crop headshots in your presentation

The ideal design for a slide that shows your team is a group picture, all taken together. Unfortunately, these are almost impossible to produce. Teams change, and people are hardly ever in the same room (especially now with the virus).

The next best thing is a collage of headshots. Professional graphics designers have a specific approach to line these up properly:

• Make sure that the eye line of all the head shots is more or less the same (at 25-33% of the image height

• Make sure that the sizes of the heads are more or less the same

In PowerPoint and Keynote, this is an absolute pain to do. Getting different images to have the exact same size is tricky. Cropping images to position eye ines is tricky to do, and might undo part of the work that you did to get them to be all the same size.

In SlideMagic, things are easier, because it works with fixed shapes and smart cropping.

Below I plopped in 3 portrait images from the built-in image search engine of SlideMagic. In 2 of the 3 cases, the “AI” smart cropping algorithm did already a reasonable job, in the last case, totally not. But first things first, all images have the exact same size, and are spaced out absolutely perfect.

Next, we are going to drag the central dot at eye level for each of our team members and drag the images inside their boxes so the eye lines line up.

Now we can zoom the headshots to the right size by dragging the zoom slider at the bottom of the slide. SlideMagic keeps the eye line at exactly the level you set it to when zooming.

SlideMagic remembers the layout and crop of your image, for example if you change the aspect ratio of your slide to 4:3, the image still looks OK

SlideMagic, now with "Artificial Intelligence"

SlideMagic is getting smarter. As of version 2.6.4, the software will analyse images before pasting them in a slide and suggest a good crop, taking into account what’s in the image (which you can always change and override later). if your image is in “auto crop” mode, it will continue to adjust things when you change the aspect ratio of your slide, or make changes to the slide layout.

For example, if you start of with a 3 x 1 grid of images and move to a 5 x1 one (you added two new members to your team for example), the images will have a narrower aspect ratio. SlideMagic now tries to re-crop your images automatically to make sure everything lines up properly.

Below is a search result when you search for “portrait” using SlideMagic’s built-in image search engine. Various images show up in different aspect ratios. See what happens when you select one with a horizontal and vertical aspect ratio. SlideMagic puts them both more or less correct in the shapes of the slide. (The crop is pretty good, the sizing of the headshots could be slightly more uniform, you can fix this manually by fine tuning with the zoom slider).

Auto cropping is not always perfect, but at least I have put in the infrastructure in place now to upgrade its capabilities over time. Results are best with images with a very strong separation between the subject in the foreground, and the background in which it is placed.

New focal cropping now out of beta

I released version 2.6.1 as a regular SlideMagic app update, which includes the new focal cropping image rendering engine. I have been testing it extensively over the past few days and things are working smoothly.

If you are working on slide decks that you made a long time ago with SlideMagic, briefly check whether the image positioning is exactly as you intended it to be. (Including a possible logo image at the bottom right of the slide). An image that you thought was cropped “fill” or “fit” might just show a tiny gap around the borders. Hitting “fit” or “fill” again should solve the problem.

Seth Godin chart make-over: Venn vs. 2x2

Seth Godin opened the 2021 blog with a post that argues not to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to picking projects. (You could argue that my own bespoke presentation design projects fit in the “rut” category, and the SlideMagic software is a “lottery”, but on balance the risk of the overall portfolio is small with an option to win the lottery, even if it is modest).

To illustrate his point, he used a 2x2 matrix.

The 2x2 works, but when looking for these type of charts consider a Venn diagram as well. In many cases, the low-low option is not really realistic (in this case picking projects with a low probability of succeeding, and with a low potential upside).

I added 2 charts to the SlideMagic database to show the 2 options, in a different colour scheme this time. Download them from the web or search for “seth” inside the desktop app to access them.

Weave effect in slides

See the slide below. A weave effect shows how vertical and horizontal things are interconnected (in this case stuff I did back at McKinsey). It is impossible to weave shapes in programs such as PowerPoint or Keynote, they cannot be on top in one spot, and at the bottom in another,.

One way to get around this is the visual trick I applied here. Stick to a flat grid of boxes and colour/connect them to fake the visual effect. Super easy to make, super easy to change (adding, removing rows and columns). Below is the basic grid structure I used for this chart:

In PowerPoint and Keynote it can still be fiddly to line up all the boxes, especially when you want to make changes to a grid. You might have to resort to tables with very fat white margins between cells,. In SlideMagic it is super easy and even fun to create these charts. (Pro tip: SlideMagic converts to PowerPoint and can do the hard work for you).

I have added a variant of the slide to the SlideMagic template database (find it here, or simply search for “weave” in the desktop app)

Saving time when making slides

Yesterday’s slide about the UK’s vaccine priorities is a good example of the SlideMagic philosophy to creating presentations: making something that looks decent, very quickly, so you can get on with more important things than making slide decks. SlideMagic is for every-day-presentations.

What is done right:

• You get the message instantly

• The design is preserved in whatever screen or aspect ratio you choose

• It is super easy to add/remove columns from the design without creating mayhem in your layout

• Fonts and colors are sorted and fit instantly with the corporate branding

What the pro designer would have done differently for a big keynote address:

• No duplication of shape labels

• Line up the shape labels 1-2-4-6-X in a straight diagonal line

• Nice L-shaped boxes by either creating a custom shape, using different padding margins across the slide, or using a clever stacked overlay of rectangles

• Label the columns between the breakpoints, rather than “>70” labels

Adding each of these finishing touches would have added a lot of time, and make it a lot harder to apply changes to the slide (“oops, we have a 45+ category now as well, please fix it, I am on in 5 minutes”).

Maybe I find ways to solve some of the compromises above in the future in a different way, but in the mean don’t be embarrassed by this result and get on with the work that is really important. Spending slides is no longer an excuse for procrastination.

I have added this vaccin priority slide to the SlideMagic template database. You can access this slide for free by simply searching for “vaccine” from within the SlideMagic desktop app.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Chart make-over: UK vaccine priorities

I took on the challenge from this tweet:

Admittedly a tricky challenge to visualise 9 bullet points when they're all very similar but is there a better #design?https://t.co/3romtz5hSJ pic.twitter.com/ElK7J3ajfO

— Jamie Garroch (@JamieGarroch) January 2, 2021

The embedded tweet is obscuring the image, here is the original taken from the BBC:

I think these icons are very cute, but are very hard to understand. I quickly put the following together in SlideMagic.

In the philosophy of SlideMagic, not the design of a pro, but very clear and very quick to put together. Notice how I kept things simple, by including the theoretical 0-16 years in nursing home residents, there won’t by any but the big horizontal bar shows the message “everyone” and maintains the visual harmony.

I have added this vaccin priority slide to the SlideMagic template database. You can access this slide for free by simply searching for “vaccine” from within the SlideMagic desktop app.

Focal point cropping!

******* UPDATE: The new focal cropping is now out of beta and part of the regular SlideMagic release ********

Happy new year to you all, 2021 has already an important feature update.

I am testing an exciting new feature for SlideMagic: focal point cropping. (I first spoke about this back in August.) For each image in SlideMagic, you can set a focal point, a dot on the most important part of the photo. This can be a face, a feature of your product, a quote on a screen shot for example. If you subsequently change the size or shape or zoom level of the image, SlideMagic will re-crop the image so that your focal point appears in the right spot.

I have seen many examples of focal crops in other applications, but no one did get it completely right. That small house on the mountain you focused still disappears on certain screen sizes, or pictures get completely stretched and distorted when resizing screens or changing the composition of your slide. In SlideMagic, everything stays in place.

A particular design decision in web technology standards made it particularly hard to do (without having to divide by zero). Over the winter break, I rewrote the entire image rendering engine of SlideMagic, which was a bit like replacing the foundations of a house while people continue to live in it.

A lot is going on here, in terms of underlying math and how the user interface works. I won’t spell it out in detail here, the app should respond naturally without you having to think about it. The basics are in place now, but I still see a lot of improvement opportunities to the image cropping algorithm including automatic object detection.

I have released the feature only as a beta version at the moment, it will not update for non-beta users. Before the official release I want to make sure everything works for new presentations, maintain backward compatibility for older presentations, that there are no hiccups when downloading templates from the SlideMagic template database. If you want, you can install the latest beta version via Github here, the next time you start SlideMagic again, the latest current version will install back.

Below some screen shots where you see the feature in action:

This new cropping engine also enables me to take out this “hack” to deal with different image aspect ratios and images

Winter break 2020

More or less every year since 2008 when I started this blog, I posted around the winter break that I would pause writing to enjoy a holiday with my family. This year is a bit different. I am currently completely rewriting the image rendering engine for SlideMagic with a number of objectives:

1. To finally enable proper smart cropping of images: if you scale an image, change its aspect ratio, crop, resize, whatever, SlideMagic will do the right thing and keep the item you want to be in focus, where it should be: in focus. The math for this is actually tricky, let’s hope I get it to work.

2. Improve the performance of the application dramatically, especially when zooming/resizing and repositioning images. I should be able to match “video game”-type response rates

3. (To remove a dependency on a very weird 1990s specification standard how images are rendered on web pages).

Non-beta SlideMagic users will not be guinea pigs for my plumbing changes, don’t worry.

Happy holidays everyone!

Photo by Mike Kotsch on Unsplash