The right proportions in design

Certain layouts and compositions look right, others seem wrong. We can see it, but we can’t point our finger to exactly why.

This formula for the constant pi got my attention:

From John Wallis, 1656 pic.twitter.com/VXqTWGeLkO

— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) August 28, 2021

It is the so called Wallis product, a beautifully simple representation of a number that seems very random, the first 50 digits of pi are 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510..…

Pi governs the shapes of rounded shapes, , waves and much more. The elegance of a circle is simple. But it is governed by a complex set of harmonics and ratios that all relate to each other. Beautiful designs have them, beautiful music has them. In most cases, we only appreciate the end result without grasping the underlying logic.

Presentation Zen on YouTube

Garr Reynolds was the first presentation blogger in the world back in the mid 2000s. His book “Presentation Zen” is still the standard introduction into the world of presentation design. His blog has gone quiet over the past years, but recently Garr has been active on YouTube covering among other things how to improve your Zoom presentations. Garr might no longer be in your RSS reader, but it is worth adding him to your YouTube subscriptions.

Scaling of data charts in SlideMagic

In SlideMagic, you do not have to worry about picking the right scale for your data chart. The entire chart adjusts itself to the numbers you type in. See the example below:

To make sure that a consistent scale is used for your entire chart, you need to place all your data points in one shape, instead of using multiple shapes for example for each month.

P.S. I have added this monthly sales comparison chart to the SlideMagic slide library so you can easily use it in your own presentations as well. Search in the app for ‘sales’ and it will pop up.

How to punctuate bullet points

Dr Clare Lynch is “chief business writing expert” at Doris and Bertie Ltd and a University of Cambridge writing instructor, she has an excellent YouTube channel that deserves more viewers.

In a recent video, she explains the official rules for punctuating bullet points, full stops or not, capitals, etc.

She gives 3 options and a warning:

Colon: no capitals, no full stops

The long hand version with capitals, and full stops

For writing: semi colons

Don’t mix sentence styles

Back at McKinsey in the 1990s, we were taught to write paragraphs in bullet point form but starting with what we called a “clunk”, with a heavy paragraph sign as the bullet point anchor (a pilcrow), and leave the full stop out after the last sentence (but use them for other sentences in the bullet point paragraph).

In presentations? First rule avoid bullet points if you can. If you to include some sort of list to make your point on a slide:

• I try to keep the text super short (even shorter than Clare in the above examples)

• Try using some repetition: Higher sales, higher market share, lower costs (“business poetry”)

• And pay close attention to the length of the text I am writing, I want all text boxes to be roughly the same in terms of length. Yes, I admit that I sometimes “stuff” a super short bullet point with a non-essential word to make it look prettier…

Songs written in less than 20 minutes...

A clickbait link popped up on my phone with songs that were written in less than 20 minutes (I am linking to another post with the same subject).

Yes, these songs might have been written in 20 minutes, but I am sure that those 20 minutes are the result of years of practice, trying, and noodling by these musicians. All that effort that was built over a long time just fell in the right place.

I think this is true for every creative process, including presentation design and storytelling. In Hemmingway style: ‘gradually, then suddenly”, Seth Godin talks about it in “The Dip”, a tank filling up drop by drop until it finally bursts with great force.

Server move

I will be getting back to writing blog posts as we are slowly moving towards autumn.

Over the past weeks, I have been preparing a switch of cloud infrastructure provider for SlideMagic to Amazon AWS. The second (stealth) project I am working on requires a very high level of security that could not be delivered by the existing platform. It is amazing what infrastructures you can put together in 2021 at the click of a button.

I have just switched the SlideMagic backend over to the new servers (sweaty palms…) and everything seems to be working OK. I know that there many pioneer users among the readers of this blog, if you spot anything unusual happening, please reach out to me at jan at slidemagic dot com.

Shuffling

Another slide makeover. I will post the ‘after’ before the ‘before’, since the email delivery service sometimes does not render all the images I put in my blog posts…

And here is the original, created by The Information

What did I change?

• I shuffled rows and columns to get the biggest possible continuous space of similar blocks, this is visually more pleasing, and groups/ranks players in a better way. (Hmm, should have swapped Instagram and TikTok now that I look at it).

• I changed the colors, the traffic light analogy does not really work here. The “yes” and “testing” should be very similar in color, while the “no” should be a clear gap.

• I added a more punchy headline

• I calmed the whole chart down by simplifying the legend and taking out the logos.

I have added the slide to our template bank. Users of SlideMagic (try it, there is a free version), can access the slide by searching for “social” in the template bank.

Leaving the math to your audience

It is raining COVID statistics in Israel as we are the first country in the world to deal with a post-vaccination outbreak. Below is one table that was released by the Ministry of Health (I found it here).

I have translated it in a quick SlideMagic chart (it always puts a big smile on my face to see how quickly this can be done).

But this data is horrendous to understand. Percent of what? What is 100%? The audience is left to do the math themselves. Compare the categories to the breakdown of the population, look at differences between 3 and 7 days ago, look at the ratio between mild to severe, etc. etc.

Using bars instead of numbers (another smile) makes things a bit clearer.

But in this case, it would have been clearer to release the data in absolute numbers and let people construct their own charts.

I have added the charts above to the SlideMagic library, search for COVID in the app and the slides will show up (see the search here).

Summer break.

As usual, I am dropping the frequency of blog post for a few weeks in summer, I hope you all have a relaxing holiday.

"Empty" images

When looking for images for your presentation (SlideMagic has a great built-in image search engine), consider searching for images that are relatively “empty”, i.e., images with a lot of white space. This allows you to set them as the background for your entire slide. See the example below.

Pick your keywords to find these type of layouts: empty, background, wallpaper, sky, cliff, horizon, etc. etc.

Photo by Zoltan Fekeshazy on Unsplash

Cheating with statistics

The chart below (source) is a good example of “axis”. The drop in life expectancy looks huge, but upon closer inspection, we see the the vertical axis starts only at 72.

There is another problem with the chart: “the sharpest since World War II” is not supported by the data.

One way to bring out the significance of the message, and support the WWII point is to show the annual change (not the absolute number) in life expectancy since 1940.

Different levels in presentation templates

A “presentation template” is usually a PowerPoint file that new employees receive on their first they of work. There is more to a presentation template I think.

1. Your corporate visual communication style/culture

   • Consulting firms: lots of complicated diagrams and frameworks, meant for solving a problem rather than presenting

   • Investment banks: dense text and tables with graphs, meant for reading rather than presenting

   • Consumer goods company: product packaging shots and bullets

   • University: list of bullets

   • Etc. etc.

2. The actual software file that holds the basis layouts, logo, and colours (this is the one you get on the first day of your employment)

3. Running versions of important presentation documents that get constantly updated and tweaked

   • Sales presentations, each for a different lead or a different customer segment

   • Quarterly results presentations with - well - different quarterly results

   • Strategic planning presentations, each one for a different product group

   • Etc. etc.

Most of the day-to-day presentation work in companies is in step 3, the tweaking of existing documents to update it for the latest sales meeting or board meeting. These presentations are in fact the “templates”, not the empty file.

In most presentation design software the tweaking of an existing slide is tricky and over time a slide degrades after many iterations where users insert the wrong fonts, colours, and trip up a decent slide layout that worked for 5 boxes, but not for 6. (“Template rot”).

The above is true for both existing corporate presentations and shiny new templates purchased online. The latter look amazing fresh off the press, but it shows when a non-designer tried to fit it to her needs.

With SlideMagic we are trying to fix this. Make it easy to create decent looking presentations from scratch, but even more importantly, make it super easy to tweak this presentations, keeping everything aligned on an brand.

By fixing step 2 and 3, we hope to fix step 1 as well…

Trying to understand vaccine effectiveness

Here in Israel we are ahead of most other countries in terms of vaccination and the prevalence of the delta variant. After almost zero cases, the count is starting to creep up again. There is a lot of confusing data going around and it is surprising to me that the scientific community does not have a generic approach to evaluate the effectiveness of vaccines.

Last night the following table appeared on the TV news. Severe cases by age category and vaccination status. But these absolute numbers cannot be taken at face value.

Source: https://twitter.com/arad_nir/status/1416832997597265933/photo/1

“Open source” statisticians went to work and made some adjustments. The population categories are not equally big (there are more young people than old people), and the vaccination rate is not the same (older people vaccinate more). So the correct approach is to look at severe cases / million, split by vaccinated and unvaccinated. I put the results in the graph below and added the chart to the SlideMagic library.

I put the results in the graph below and added the chart to the SlideMagic library. Search for “vaccine’ in the SlideMagic app and the designs will pop up, either for use in a COVID-related presentation, or maybe something completely different that requires a similar layout.

Lost in translation

Many presentations are good because there are many steps involved between the “source” and the “receiver”

1. You have the story in your head as a complex set of ideas that are entangled and interdependent

2. You start writing it down in short hand, which require you to “flatten” the multi dimensional story into a sequence.

3. The sequence of bullet points now becomes a visualisation of your story. Instead of listening to a complex verbal argument, your eyes glance through the points and you can change the order at lightning speed. Cut, paste, slice, dice, until it looks good to you (without taking into account how it sounds).

4. Many people stop here and jump to stage 6

5. Now, chunks of this “visual” bullet point story get translated into visuals, another transformation: sentences, words, paragraphs get turned into visual compositions and graphs.

6. The presentation to the audience is no longer your story, it is you translating the visuals back into sequential verbal text.

7. The audience listens to the sound track of your slides and tries to reassemble the story that was in your head when you started the whole process.

Photo by Eirik Skarstein on Unsplash

Your presentation "secret weapon"

We are doing some SlideMagic user interviews and the term “secret weapon” came up. One user, somewhere in a big office tower, is a lone user of SlideMagic and uses the build-in PowerPoint conversion to share slides with colleagues. People start to notice the difference in the slide the person produces.

Here are some situations where you can use SlideMagic as a secret weapon, a starting point for setting up the beginning of your presentation. Most of these slides are very time consuming to set up in PowerPoint or Keynote:

• A perfectly lined up, massive grid of logos (you finished the 10 x 4 grid, and now you need to move to 7 x 6 because you got 2 more logos)

• Data tables with bar charts that need to line up (oops, 12 rows instead of 10)

• 2x2, 3x3 matrices, other consulting style matrices

• A diagram with boxes that are connected with arrows

• A team chart where all the headshots need to have more or less the same size, with the “eye line” at the same height

Nobody needs to know / find out that you use SlideMagic, but we would not mind if you spread the secret…

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Think of image colour

Image libraries (including the ones that are available in within SlideMagic) have become so huge that you can afford to be very picky when it comes to image searches. Next time, don’t just use a keyword, but also pay attention to colour. And not just your accent colour of your brand book, but also complementary colours. We will add this colour filtering to the feature pipeline of SlideMagic.

I am in the process of a total overhaul of the SlideMagic web site and using this principle myself, focusing on images that fit with SlideMagic blue, or its opposite, orange.

(Still great to see how SlideMagic’s automatic image cropping gets it right in most of the cases)

A bit less logic, a bit more story

Most project or research result reports go like this:

• Objective: what were you trying to do?

• Approach: how did you do it?

• Results: what is the data you got?

• Conclusion: what did you find?

This is almost a chronological recording of your work. Logical, organized, exhaustive. Your peer scientist, boss,, teacher, will approve, you did the work thoroughly and got to some interesting findings.

It is not the most exciting structure though. Most novels or movies do not follow a chronological timeline. To make things more interesting, you need to take your audience through a story, which might mean breaking the logical flow a bit.

• Conclusion: what did you find?

• Objective: why was this so special, why was it never found before?

• Results: what is the (tiny) subset of all your data that proves your point?

• Approach: why was this so tricky to achieve, what hurdles did you overcome to get there?

The key to story writing in business is to pick off the questions your audience is likely to have next. The biggest one first (often surprisingly: “what are we talking about?”), which leads to the next big one (“Isn’t Google doing this already?”), which leads to the next one, (“That does not sound like a big deal to me?”), etc. etc.. The sequence of questions are different for each situation, depending on your topic and your audience.

The results upfront approach works well in business: leaving your audience guessing will just distract them. When it comes to movies, you might want to leave the plot reveal to the very end…

Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash

Making it personal

Audience or customer segments can be very abstract. Mid thirty women in socio economic class C… C-level executives with operational responsibility.

To make things more personal, you can replace the abstract definition by someone you know that fits the segment. A friend, a colleague. What if I had to present to her?

Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash

Changes to the commenting system

After more than a decade, I switched of the commenting system on the blog. In a world with Twitter, commenting volume was relatively low on the blog and often abused by spammers posting below posts from years ago. The Disqus commenting engine I used started off great, but has turned into a huge burden of tracking code over time after the company was sold by its initial owners. The SlideMagic blog now loads a lot faster and offers more privacy.

Photo by Margarida CSilva on Unsplash

Explained: vaccine 90% effective, vaccinated still expected to be 50% of infected

There is a lot of confusion here in vaccinated Tel Aviv, now that around 50% of people infected with COVID appear to be full vaccinated. Newspapers are heavily quoting the “64% i.s.o 90% for the Delta variant” which does not seem to be based on the correct calculation of vaccine effectiveness.

I used an explanation by Dvir Aran to make a slide that explains how it is expected that 50% of infected people are fully vaccinated, even with a 90% vaccine effectiveness.

The logic is as follows:

• Take 100 people who are seriously exposed to the virus

• Assume a 90% vaccination rate (the case for the at-risk population in Israel at the moment):

  • A small group is exposed: 10 people

  • A big group is protected 90 people

• Assume a 90% vaccine effectiveness:

  • 10 out of 10 unvaccinated people will get infected

  • 8 out of the 90 vaccinated people will get infected

• Of the total of 18 infected people, 8 will be fully vaccinated, so around 50/50

Of those 18, the majority of cases with symptoms and serious complications will be unvaccinated of course.

I have added this slide to the SlideMagic library, search for “COVID” and it will pop up, or download it here. Pro subscribers can convert this chart to PowerPoint, if you have to. (Students, you can claim a free membership!).