Slide layouts and aspect ratio

The aspect ratio of a slide influences the type of layout you come up with. Over the years, presentation slide aspect ratio tend to follow the dimensions of computer screens. The first computers typically had a 4x3 screen ratio (80 x 25 characters of a punch card, sort of resembling an A4/letter format, and probably easier to design when you need to redirect electromagnetic beams in pre-LCD traditional televisions/monitors), while modern machines have wide screens in 16 x 9 ratios (the preferred format in movies).

A 4x3 canvas is very different from a 16x9 canvas when it comes to design (spoiler, I prefer the 4x3).

Most diagrams and frameworks work best when width and height are about the same. When you look at many of the classical management consulting frameworks, you can see that they were originally designed in a 4x3 aspect ratio. Modern interpretations simply stretch them out, making the whole thing look unbalanced.

Process diagrams and tables on the other hand, work great in widescreen format. There is a lot of space for left-to-right steps or columns with information.

What to do?

• There is nothing wrong with white space. If your diagram needs a 1x1 aspect ratio, put it in the middle of your 16x9 slide and resist the temptation to fill the left and right sides with text or other distracting clutter

• Alternatively, consider putting the titles of your slide on the side, creating a mover vertical canvas for the body of your slide (SlideMagic can switch seamlessly between different slide title layouts).

Photo by Mattia Astorino on Unsplash

CMMI template

One of the users requested a template for the Capability Maturity Model Integration framework (more information on the site of ISACA’s CMMI Institute).

I worked of the following original (not created by CMMI):

Next to the general layout, there is also a lot of improvement possible in the text. Overlaps, and jargon can be removed. Here is the template that I added to SlideMagic, search for “CMMI” and it will pop up in the SlideMagic app.

This is my interpretation of the framework, and not endorsed by the Institute. But this reflects how I think you should treat all these diagrams by consulting firms, academics, and business schools: use and adapt them for your own situation. If the jargon does not make sense for you, take it out.

Legends can be confusing

Some perspectives by @clauswilke:

Slides on redundant coding.https://t.co/miqrLROikZ#rstats #dataviz pic.twitter.com/m1H34F2Zuk

— Claus Wilke (@ClausWilke) April 14, 2021

He is right. Legends can be confusing and are prone to errors, when possible, put the data label immediately next to the line.

Communication culture

Most presentations are not IPO roadshows or TED Talks, so it does not make sense to invest a lot of time and money in them (i.e., hiring expensive designers). But that does not mean that they need to look horrible and boring.

If almost all the documents a company’s employees work with are hacked together, poorly structured, boring lists of bullet points, you start eroding the place’s culture. The energy of a meeting is zapped by a quick glance of the PowerPoint slide sorter (“oh no, 90 minutes of this coming up”). Young trainees learn that this is the standard they should aspire to. At the same level of office supplies running out, poor cleaning, crappy laptops, cheap coffee. Everything points to the work environment where it is OK to cut corners, and only give things your best when you leave the place in the evening. Eventually, it will impact presentations and documents for an external audience as well.

The idea behind SlideMagic is that these every-day presentations can still look organised, fresh, and inviting without a big investment.

Photo by Adrian Curiel on Unsplash

Forget about folders

Filing and categorisation systems are a pain. It is tedious to put things in the right folder on your hard drive, put the data of a file in year, month, day format to make them sort, and final versions always become final final, final final final, really final v2. Google replaced Yahoo’s internet categorisation with search.

Back in the 1990s there was a Partner in McKinsey’s London office who gave up on filing (mostly paper at that time) and simply shoved everything chronologically in his cupboard, all clients mixed. Finding something was as simple as looking into your calendar and going back to the appropriate time. Usually, you roughly remember. It takes a tiny bit longer to find something, but save a ton of time doing, and nothing falls through the cracks because of a misplacement.

The same strategy might also work for your digital files in 2021. Your calendar becomes the index to dig something up from the “pile”.

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

The five ingredients of a successful startup pitch

I added the slide used in this tweet to the SlideMagic library. In SlideMagic it is super easy to quickly create a grid with lots of boxes. There is a lot of redundant information on the slide, but the repetition on the other hand serves a purpose here.

There’s a lot of bad advice out there on how to pitch your startup.

Last year, I invested $1M+ and heard 200 companies pitch.

Every great pitch I've heard nails 5 ingredients.

In this thread, we'll go through each to help maximize your chances when fundraising

Let's dig in👇 pic.twitter.com/FBaUUWHz8L

— Romeen Sheth (@RomeenSheth) April 10, 2021

Search for “pitch” in the SlideMagic app and it will pop up for you to use (alongside some other investor and musical pitch related slides).

Pondering SlideMagic 3.0

Over the past month or so I have been slightly ‘distracted’. My wife (a life science investor) and I are working on an exciting new business that can change the way the pharma industry works (and cure a lot of patients in the process).

It is amazing to see how quickly I can now put things together compared to when I started the work on SlideMagic 2.0. Product development and prototyping is now really fun, as you can try out different things, make 180 degree design changes overnight without the need to re-brief large development teams.

This new confidence, combined with taking a step back from everyday development on SlideMagic is sparking some ideas that could ultimately turn into SlideMagic 3.0. Unlike 2.0, ideas are no longer held back with my ability to implement them, which is an interesting freedom to experience.

The gradual SlideMagic development process might not be a textbook startup case, but I believe this tinkering is the only way to get to a credible alternative presentation design tool. I am convinced that it will get there slowly, and then suddenly.

Photo by Allec Gomes on Unsplash

Live demo in presentations, should you?

It is tempting to show a live demo of your product in your pitch presentation: look, we have a real product, this is not just “slideware”.

There are downsides too though. Murphy’s law, if a technical issue could happen, it will happen, especially in important pitch presentations. Demoing a product involves all kind of time consuming steps that are not really adding to your pitch: log-in screens, clicking through various settings pages, loading dummy data. If you have only 20 minutes, each and every minute is very valuable. Fifteen minutes of demo might be too much.

So, what to do?

• Include a series of relevant screen shots in your pitch deck that show the key features of the product. The objective is not proof of technology, just educating the audience what it is that you actually try to build. Choose the screens wisely and put them in the right sequence. Add arrows and markups to make things clear if needed. (App screens are not presentation slides).

• If possible, have a live demo of your product running on your machine, and in that first 20 minute pitch, simply click through a few screens. The objective is not to use it to explain what you are trying to build, but proof that there is actual technology. “Look, here it is!”

• If the audience is interested, schedule a second meeting that is entirely dedicated to demoing your product, leaving sufficient time for solving technical glitches.

Photo by Rhett Noonan on Unsplash

Blocked! Fifteen puzzle slide

The fifteen puzzle was a popular download on the legacy SlideMagic PowerPoint template store (RIP). It is easy to recreate in SlideMagic 2.0 and I have just added it to the library of slides. Search for something like “fifteen” or “block” in the app and it will show up. This slide can be tricky to make in traditional presentation software as you need to get 16 boxes to line up nicely in a square.

PS: This is probably the only slide in SlideMagic so far where you have to make an adjustment when you switch aspect ratio. A wider slide layout will stretch the square into a rectangle. I added 2 versions of the slide to the library.

Image by Micha L. Rieser

Will the designer change your text?

When I started making pitch decks 15 years ago, there were not many people who called themselves “presentation designer”. Now the world is flooded with them. But “designer” is a very broad term used by people with varying skills.

Most “before and after” examples on designer’s web pages are beautiful makeovers of slides. Better fonts, better colours, a nice image. It all looks a lot better. But makeovers are makeovers: the fundamental layout of the slide almost always stays the same, and the text always stays the same.

Maybe this is the question you should ask a potential presentation designer: do you rip up the slide, change the headlines, round up numbers, regroup boxes (these 4 points are actually 3), etc.

The text changer is a very different designer from the makeover artist. And very often the text changer might not be very good at design. (The SlideMagic bespoke design pitch was the unusual combination of skills in one pair of hands).

There are different types of designers, but there are also different type of projects, and different types of clients. I had clients who were not that happy that the first draft of their redesigned pitch deck had almost no resemblance to the original.

The SlideMagic presentation software is designed to reduce the dependence on a makeover designer. The average corporate presentation creator can focus on structuring her story, putting the right messages in, and slides will look pretty decent without the need for a drastic cosmetic overhaul.

But, if you are looking for “presentation designer”: know what type of client you are, know what type of project you have, know what type of designer you need.

Photo by Hannah Lim on Unsplash

Getty buys Unsplash

Getty Images who is in the business of licensing photographs to professional media is acquiring Unsplash, the open source image library (which is also powering the image search on SlideMagic). I remember how Getty acquired iStock as well back in 2006. With VC investors coming on board in the Unsplash Series B financing an exit would eventually happen.

The press release states that Unsplash will remain an independent unit inside Getty. Only the future will tell how this pans out. It would be a shame to see “suggested” (maybe more cliche) Getty or iStock premium images alongside Unsplash search results. Or open source photographers being lured in some sort of licensing-only revenue model.

Two things make me optimistic:

• The current photographers on Unsplash submitted their images under an understanding about how they are allowed to be used, it is not possible I think to change that across the board retrospectively

• Now in 2021, it is very easy for “another Unsplash” to pop up if the culture and spirit of the current site changes.

But some well-known photographers on Unsplash think differently:

Happy for Mikael & team, but I would be getting off Unsplash platform. I cannot be part of a platform owned by @GettyImages which has been a terrible web citizen & has a history of squeezing the creatives and customers. It was great to be part of @unsplash but time to say goodbye https://t.co/THSOlHK5bH

— OM (@om) March 31, 2021

Let’s see what happens.

"Producing yourself"

I just returned from a short Passover holiday, a first in a year. (Hotels, restaurants, here in Israel are now completely open while virus cases continue to fall towards zero).

During the break I watched a Master Class series by Alicia Keys about “producing yourself”. In music production there are usually 2 roles: the creative contribution of the artist, and the editing and arranging part by a producer. They usually happen in 2 spaces, the artist is in the recording part of the studio, the producer sits on the other side of the glass in the control room.

There is an interesting parallel to presentation design: I think most presentation designers are producing themselves, doing both the creative and the editorial part, pretty much like Alicia does.

At least, they are supposed to do so. In practice, when it comes to presentations, people are more arrangers than creators.

How does Alicia go about balancing both side of the process?

• She creates to completely different mindsets, amplified by the different locations: the vocal booth, the control room

• In creative mode she lets herself go completely, mistakes are OK, crazy things are OK (similar philosophy to corporate brainstorming sessions)

• But, she actually prefers to be totally alone, in order to “embarrass” herself freely, and to avoid being put in the position of an artist who has to entertain and perform (completely the opposite of a corporate brainstorming session).

• She records and captures everything, if you want to capture a creative idea in the flow / moment, you are too late. (As opposed to the brainstorm flip chart where someone else tries to capture and rephrase ideas that multiple people are “shouting” out).

• After all this, she takes a break, goes to the control room, and listens back with a completely different mindset.

I have helped clients on a number of occasions where they needed a presentation for a “risk free” internal audience. We could go for bolder visuals, colors, concepts. In the end, that bolder presentation often ended up being the backbone of a presentation for an external audience.

Do you need the table headings?

Spreadsheets and databases need table headings. Humans not always. Look at the two slides below

We know how to recognise car brands, colors. Pretty much every car has 4 wheels. Think of replacing the boring tables with cards or labels, making the slide easier to read, and creating more space for information that is more important to show.

Photo by Valdemaras Januška on Unsplash

Everything to the front page

So you got some feedback on your pitch deck: “You need to ‘hit them hard’ with your strongest points early in the presentation”

Ok, bring this to the front, bring that to the front, this the front as well. Hmmm, now we have a lot of pages at the front, maybe summarize all of these messages on the first page, then we get to all of them really early.

The result: a dense, boring bullet point page. And it will take you 20 minutes to go through it, since it contains the entire presentation.

Most investment ideas have very few ideas that are truly distinctive, or better phrased: ideas that do not sound like all the other pitches an investor listens to. Be very honest and selective. Often, you might have to deal with an “elephant in the room” early in the presentation. Addressing competition from Google if you are building an internet search engine on page 27 is not a smart idea.

Photo by Georgi Kalaydzhiev on Unsplash

The mood of an image

Paintings and other piece of art affect your mood. Happy, depressing, scary, cute, funny. Often you cannot pinpoint why, but it happens.

The same is true with photographs. When selecting images for your presentation, go beyond the functional specs of the photo: it needs to contain a self driving car, a person on a mobile phone, a clock.

How does the picture make you feel? Colors, perspective, proportions. Pictures can be beautiful and depressing at the same time. When given a choice, maybe the slightly less pretty but more uplifting image is the one to go for.

To share or not to share?

Every potential investor will probably reply with “sure” to the question if she is interested in a copy of the pitch deck. But what should you share? Some of your slides could be highly confidential, others might be too detailed. It is impossible to give a conclusive answer to this question, but here are some points to consider, given a number of possible investor profiles.

• Investor profile: angel investor who invests as a hobby and loves networking and being involved in the buzz of the startup world. She is incredibly friendly and wants to be helpful, but you don’t know her that well. She was asking fairly high level questions and you had to give her a 101 on the industry you are working in. Maybe a short summary deck with non-confidential information will do. She probably does not have a deep technological understanding of your niche, and is likely to forward material to many of her friends to see if they can help you as well.

• Investor profile: junior analyst at a specialized VC firm who keeps on asking about very detailed financial growth benchmarks. She is begging you to provide all the ammunition you can find to convince her boss. No, they don’t sign NDAs. You probably have to provide the details as it sounds like an all-or-nothing shot with a highly relevant investor.

• Investor profile: you happen to sit next to her at a post-COVID dinner party and find out she is actually an investor with a potential fit. The setting was not right for an in-depth pitch. Maybe here you should send a very short “business card” presentation, slides that look great, give a brief explanation of the idea, plus additional background on you as an entrepreneur. The objective is not to land the investment, but to get an opportunity to do that proper pitch.

• Investor profile: someone who makes it pretty clear that the possibility of investment is close to zero: wrong industry, wrong stage, wrong geography. Saying that she is interested in the deck is her being polite. Maybe better not to send anything at all.

The above is not a binding advice, just to let you think about that the fact that every investor, and every conversation with an investor is different. Do not simply “attach and send” your standard pitch deck.

Photo by Hello I'm Nik 🍔 on Unsplash

Dashboard syndrome

I am following a number of amateur statisticians here in Israel to get insight in how the vaccination campaign is going. This ‘underground’ information sources gives a for better picture of what is going on than the main news media can provide. A better explanation and earlier detection of trends.

Most of these statisticians use the same chart that they update every day. And I noticed that after a few weeks, you actually stop seeing how poorly the chart is designed, your eyes will zoom straight to that one figure that has been updated.

Stock brokers spot the latest share price instantly on a busy ticker board. Mathematicians see the crucial line in the proof on the blackboard.

You , the presentation designer, have become used to your own dashboard. It might be time to take a step back.

Photo by Neil Martin on Unsplash

PPT templates: adding 1 more person to "The Night Watch"

Prefab PowerPoint templates can look incredibly pretty. The problem is editing and customizing them. It is easy to change text, but if your message requires 5 instead of 4 bubbles, you need to make drastic changes to the layout of a slide.

• There are the technical skills of duplicating and placing that shape.

• There are design skills, “somehow the proportions of the slide don’t look right anymore and I can not pinpoint what causes it”.

• There could be a more fundamental problem, maybe a 5 bubble chart requires an entirely different slide than a 4 bubble one

• There is the problem of fitting things in with the right fonts and colors that fit your corporate identity (corporates usually do not use the cute fonts found in powerpoint templates).

Changing a PowerPoint template is a bit like handing a paint brush to a random person with the request to add one more person to The Night Watch on the canvas, and change the coloring from dark to light (the scene is set in the middle of the day, but got darker over the years).

What I am trying to achieve with SlideMagic:

• Lower the ambition on the complexity of slide designs, and make sure that the designs that do make the cut look pretty good

• Offer an editor that makes it easy to change layouts without leaving any traces

Limited time...

This chart lays out the philosophy behind SlideMagic: spend more time pitching, less time editing. There are only a limited number of productive hours in a day, it is a waste to spend them on slide design…

• If you are preparing for an all-or-nothing pitch, you free up time to really, really rehearse your story.

• If that quarterly report is sitting on the top of the to-do list and preventing your from doing other things, get it out of the way quickly.

P.S. I have add this slide to the database here, or search for ‘slidemagic’ in the desktop app to use it in your own presentation

Updates to the settings

As of version 2.6.27, the way settings are stored in SlideMagic. I rely on open source software and the previous engine I used to save settings on your machine was not maintained very well by its developer and started to cause more and more bugs over time.

If you are a pro subscriber, please log in again after you update. Also, you might have to re-enter your accent color to store it on your machine. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Photo by Rima Kruciene on Unsplash