Changing the color of the French flag

President Macron of France changed the blue color of the French flag. He made the blue darker again, after it was set to be the same blue as that of the European Union flag back in the 1970s. (Then president Giscard d’Estaing thought the different shades of blue clashed during photo ops).

I agree with Macron, the darker blue looks better, flags have a history, and i don’t think the two shades of blue clash at all. When doing design work, pay attention to flags. They have very specific colors (like logos), and very specific aspect ratios.

Organized randomness

This is a tricky thing to do: create a layout of seemingly random elements that look good together. I need to deal with this now for the new venture I am setting up

It is a process of constant iteration. Put one type of elements, put another. Add text and titles. They shift the weight of the page, so everything has to move around again, different screen aspect ratio, another shuffle. Repeat, repeat.

Subconsciously, your brain is scanning for anomalies in the unwritten rules of a layout. You don’t know what they are, but you see it when you break them. For example, including one angle in the path above that is “sharp” (i.e., smaller than 90 degrees, would stand out.

Architects have to deal with this a lot, or painters laying out the “random” elements of a still life painting.

In the end, we are all artists.

On-screen app demos

I just went through a live on-screen application demo, some things I learned, some things I knew already.

• If the meeting is very short, consider doing a demo using screenshots on slides. This prevents losing time in technology glitches and the less interesting part of your app (logging in etc.). Have a live version of your app running on your machine as a proof that the real things is there.

• Rehearse the exact scenario you will be running. Which demo users will log in, what will they do, in what sequence. Again, this will eliminate technical issues, but also makes sure your story fits with the overall pitch (no dead ends, no duplications, repetition of things you already explained using slides).

• Make sure that the app looks right. For some apps, this is a full screen rendering on a very large monitor, for other apps this might be rendering of your app on a smaller screen on the big monitor. In the latter scenario, remove visual distractions from your laptop desktop.

• Pay attention to the details of your demo environment. Add avatars for your demo users that fit nicely with your app colors. Fill out optional text (even with lorem ipsum) that might not be crucial to your app, but make the whole screen look more balanced.

• Laptop track pads feel strange when you have to look at a giant monitor at the other end of the room. Consider bringing a mouse so you can ignore your laptop all together, or mirror your screen.

• Pay attention to your monitor configuration when using dual screens. If the big screen is to your right, make sure your computer thinks it is there as well. Every time you have to “think” where your mouse is, you take your attention away from the pitch.

• Think of your “background screen”, what is the view of the app you want to be sitting on the monitor when the demo is not really running. A blank login screen, or a blinking cursor of your localhost server does not do much to pitch your app…

The genie is out of the bottle

I was a bit worried about Unsplash after the Getty acquisition, and the current home page of my favorite photo site confirms some of these worries, 50% of the space above the fold is devoted to promoting iStock (scroll down and they take another chunk at the bottom of the page). I think the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to free, open source images. And this page actually shows that there is no quality difference at all between images for which you pay, and images that are free. Unsplash has a responsibility to all the photographers that made their images available under a certain expectation of the spirit of the site. Hopefully it can find a suitable business model that will work for everyone. If Unsplash does not succeed, a new Unsplash will emerge somewhere.

Changing the engine while driving

This is the approach I take when making drastic changes to computer code, a presentation, or a spreadsheet. When you decide to turn a big piece of work upside down, you can’t simply tear up the whole thing. Instead, you change things carefully, constantly monitoring whether the program keeps functioning, and/or the spreadsheet still produces more or less the same answer. When it does, take the old stuff out bit by bit.

This is the only way to manage mistakes. If you changed 5 things and see that all of a sudden your average price per bottle is way off, you cannot tell which of the five is the culprit.

What if all of a sudden your boss, customer, or user wants an intermediate new version of the model. If you are mid-way in some major rewrite, you cannot produce it quickly.

Or, maybe you discover halfway through that the 2nd change of the 5 you pushed through actually does not make sense. Unwinding everything is hard.

Another slide makeover

McKinsey’s social media activity provides an excellent stream of slides to work on. The one below could have come straight out of SlideMagic.

I created a proper SlideMagic version with a few improvements:

• Emphasized the “from to” theme of the chart with arrows, and two contrasting colors, and a bigger distance between the two options

• Lighten the colors a bit, especially the dark top row of the original puts a lot fo weight in the chart

• Actually reduced the font size a bit to give the text more breathing space in the boxes

• Re-shuffling the bars to get a more pleasing overall composition

• I eliminated the left column, the audience can guess the description, to add more balance to the composition and gain some extra space

SlideMagic users can use this chart, simply search for a relevant keyword (operations, consulting), and it will pop up for you to adjust to your own project.

Dynamic layouts

For my next venture, I am actually getting into a lot of “slide” design work: displaying financial data in a web browser with totally unpredictable screen sizes and screen aspect ratios. This problem has been solved for traditional web sites with text and pictures. (That is pictures where you do not really care how they are cropped).

For financial information, this is not the case. Spreadsheet-like tables that look good both on a 27” widescreen monitor and a smartphone screen, for example. All this layout work is not the core of what this venture will be about, but I am learning a ton that can feed back into SlideMagic. And vice versa, the SlideMagic chart engine, could take data from this new system and create presentations pretty much on the fly.

To be continued.

McKinsey slide makeover

A saw a slide by my former employer coming by:

It has a very sophisticated image effect: look how the background of the bars in the chart are part of one image. Still, there is room for improvement. I quickly replicated the chart in SlideMagic with a few changes.

• I brought back the more traditional, very in-your-face alternate coloring of the bars, blue for 2021, grey for 2020 and a legend, instead of the repetitive text labels with the years.

• I increased the size of the industry sector labels

• By replacing 910b and 582b by 0.9 and 0.6, I could get rid of the “t” and “b” in the bar label.

But the analysis of the slide can be pushed further. The main point of the slide is how markets have bounced back over the past year, which is independent of the ranking of the market capitalizations of the sectors. As an alternative, I constructed the combined table/bar chart below, de-emphasizing the absolute value of the market capitalizations, and using the bar chart to highlight the % increase in market valuation. The inside here is that all sectors grew more or less the same over the last year (except fashion, probably reflecting less dressing up for work.

I have added the slide to the SlideMagic slide library, look for “COVID” and they will show up. Emails subscribers: if the slide images don’t show up in the email, please open the link to the full blog post.

Selecting the right photos

The photo shoot from a few weeks ago delivered almost 900 images. We are still selecting the ones to use. Here is the approach I take to go from 900 to 10…

I uploaded all images in a good photo organizing app (I use Google Photos). This enables me to scroll really fast through lots of images. (Desktops are slow to generate thumbnails). Also, it easy to mark images and share those. Trying to copy file names is a pain. Finally, I uploaded all images in full size, so that the photographer can download them in case touch ups are needed.

The I take different zoom levels: zoomed out, which ones have a great composition that pops out as a small picture, without seeing the fine details. Which images have lots of white space that I could use to overlay text. Zoomed in, which images instantly “speak to me”, where is the camera gaze just right, without paying too much attention to details. In a short period of time, I mark a lot, a lot of images.

Then the selection process switches to the “favorites folder” and it becomes a matter of “deselecting”. Take out the obvious mistakes (closed eyes, etc.). When images are similar, force yourself to pick one. If you really like an image, go back into the big pile to get all the images that were made around that time to get the best one. Step by step, you get closer to your 10 final images…

If possible do all of this on a desktop machine with a very large monitor and mouse with fast scroll wheel.

Messaging group avatars

“Upload a profile picture” is the question you often face when creating a new messaging group for an upcoming event, a school parent group, etc. Most people go for a relevant picture, for example the class group photo of last year’s end of school year party.

But avatars are tiny and often have a circle shape. What jumps out most to the user is the dominant color of the image. So the best solution for avatars for these temporary messaging groups is a big bright colorful square (will be come a circle after uploading) with a big bold letter or number. “52” on green for the birthday party, 2 on purple for the 2nd grade parent group. Easy and effective.

(Pro-tip: use SlideMagic to create your avatar…)

Not a very good Apple slide....

This Apple slide from a recent product launch event looks very non-Apple…

• Busy, lots of information

• Font sizes all over the place

• Big 13x, 11x, 2x, but hard to read what is improved

• Rounded edges are too rounded

• The grid is broken

• Imbalance: some boxes have heavy dark images, bleeding off the edge, others have no images..

• Look at the font styling used for “thermal”

The people and design budget at Apple can do better than this…

A team photo shoot in 2021

My wife and I organised a team photo shoot for the web page of our upcoming business. It had been a while since I did one.

Nice pictures can add greatly to the quality of your web site and/or presentation. Head shots are up to date, all look consistent, and best of all, you have an opportunity to take an image of the entire team together, given you the opportunity to show the energy that you are radiating as a group of people.

We decided to bring the professional photographer into our home rather than venturing out to her studio. Luckily, she was flexible enough to bring the required equipment. A photo shoot at home has the advantage that you feel more comfortable, and that you unlimited access to your wardrobe incase certain outfits/colours do not come across very well.

Ten years ago, many professional photographs were taking in front of the “gradient grey” screen. Fast forward to 2021, with Zoom calls in front of blurred bookcases, these backgrounds look very staged and dated. It makes the photo look like a high school yearbook picture.

They key thing the photographer brings is no longer the camera. It is the ability to engineer a relaxed pose of you, and even more importantly, get the correct light. A was amazed by how a modern “umbrella flasher” can give great image results in pretty much any lighting condition (so no longer the need for the studio).

While a woman can still dress up in a great outfit, I find that for men (me), wearing a full suit looks awkward, you get the “wedding groom” look on your corporate web site. Jacket/no tie, or a turtle neck work great.

Try convincing your photographer to make a number of photos without a composition, zoomed out, with lots and lots of white space around your image. This enables you to make your own crop in the presentation, and add text, or other visual elements such as logos later yourself. A good photographer will hate doing this, since it is very hard for a designer to make a picture without a proper crop.

Think of making some shots in front of a switched off monitor or screen, you can put text / images later on this. Think of making some shots of you delivering a (fake) presentation.

Ask your photographer to make some shots when you are not posing, i.e., in between sessions, when you are probably more relaxed and natural.

In any, we got some good material out of this day, and we are just getting started with sorting through the images. Ask your photographer to give you all the raw material in addition to the 20-30 shots she selected. You might not always agree which image looks best.

Prototype design

I am currently working flat out on a new business that my wife and I are putting together in the field of healthcare. With a bit of luck, we can take the covers of at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco next January. (Hopefully after that I can boost the SlideMagic product more, I have a few interesting ideas).

I am becoming better and better at designing web front ends, fusing what I am learning about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with what was already in my head when it comes to slide, spreadsheet, and data dashboard design.

I am surprised of the impact the look & feel of a prototype makes on early users. Investing in design can take a lot of time, and can be wasted when you are taking your product into an entirely new direction.

My approach is similar to presentation design. Focus on easy wins that make your product look professional and organised, and skip the “marketing design” for the moment.

• Minimal effort on the public facing web site

• No investment in “flashy” animations, videos, and other spectacular effects

• Instead get the little details right that make a big impact, and fixing them does not take a lot of time:

  • Layouts of screens

  • Lining things up

  • Colour contrasts

  • Font size and emphasis

  • Rounding of numbers

  • Etc., etc.

Having a prototype that looks good makes it also a lot more fun to work on.

Different types of language errors

Most business presentations in the world are written in English, most people who write them are not native English speakers. Different type of errors pop up:

1. Typos and grammatical errors that can be caught by a spell checker / other software

2. Typos and grammatical errors that are hard to spot by software

3. Mistakes in word choices, a literal translation from another language into English produces a result with a totally different meaning, or double meaning in slang

Number 1 can be avoided, no excuse here.

Number 2 are also made by native English speaker, they look sloppy but are not a deal breaker. To catch all of them, you might need to help of a professional editor.

Number 3 can be a big problem and really damage the credibility of your presentation. Having your presentation read by anyone who is an English speaker will catch these, also no excuses here.

"You had me at hello"

The quote from the Jerry Maguire movie. Some pitches go well. Maybe because the other side knows you, trusts you, knows the industry/competition well, and is ready to take things to the next step. No point in trying to pick up the pitch at page 15 with that very optimistic revenue forecast, and/or booting up that demo with potential bugs. That can happen in the next meeting.

Startup competitions

Startup competitions are different from regular investor pitches. Your are on stage to deliver a show to a crowd, not to a VC partner group. The jury members do not have to put their money where their mouth is. I asked a recent jury member for such an event to list feedback on investor presentations from the top of her head, without too much thinking. Here is the raw result:

• Have someone speak who masters the language. This is a back-to-back show, and if all candidates speak fluently, the one who does not will stand out negatively.

• Personality, attitude, enthusiasm, passion are far more important than professionally crafted slides.

• If you have to send a very junior team member to present, because the you, the CEO, has better things to do than to attend the startup competition, it is probably better not to show up at all.

• Contradicting myself, a presentation by (recorded) video was received remarkably well.

Startup competitions might suit some startups better than others. Things that score points for a big crowd: an unusual, non-typical, entrepreneur; an impact/green/environmental/healthcare-related company objective, a market that a non-technical audience can relate to, etc. etc.

When preparing for a startup pitch event, customize your slides and story and don’t bring your standard investor pitch to the event.

Update email versus update speech

Professional communication is getting more efficient, informal, and to the point. Long memos, turn into emails, turn into quick messages. Polite greetings that used to be the protocol in letters are left out.

In certain settings, the formalities of the past are still present. The dinner speech for example. We look back at the past year, summarise our achievements, thank everyone involved. A good speech can be inspiring and a joy to listen to. It can be great to see someone get the thank you she deserves.

A routine speech is boring though: running through a long list of names, waiting for a round of applause for each one of them, becoming softer and softer as the we read down the piece of paper. The audience is polite, but is probably secretly hoping for the thing to be over, and/or, curious to hear what the real news is that is coming at the end of the talk.

When writing an update email (or update-presentation-attachment), the politeness is no longer required, you no longer have a captive audience. People speed read through your paragraphs to the things that really matter.

Keep that in mind when writing it. Make the things that matter stand out. Make that thank you that you really mean stand out.

In the briefcase

Here is a very common presentation scenario. You have a good relationship with a middle manager in a potential client, and she meets the CEO next week and could take “a few slides” with her in her briefcase for a 30 second pitch.

What not to do? Send your full 30 minute pitch deck that you have used in so many successful Zoom meetings before. Especially that slide with just a golf ball on a green lawn always drives your point home.

You are not presenting, your friend does, and you don’t have 30 minutes, you have 30 seconds. But this might be good news. Thirty seconds of your friend with the CEO, is a better shot than 10 minutes with a purchasing officer who you do not know.

What to do?

Take the time to explain to your friend what it is you do, and then make a “placeholder” slide that she can use to give the pitch. It is not possible to go through a slide deck in 30 seconds, so the pitch is basically a verbal one. Your placeholder should look nice, and actually not distract too much so that the CEO can keep her focus on the audio track. (Typos, calculation errors….)

You need to rely on your friend to do the pitch, but you need to compensate for the fact that you are not in the room, nor on the Zoom screen to give the CEO the opportunity to use her intuition to answer the “who are these people?” Question. A CV/bio type slide with a picture could do the trick (again a placeholder) , “hey they also went to INSEAD…”.

Finally think of a very specific next step that can move the process further. You are unlikely to land an investment in 30 seconds, you could get an actual Zoom meeting though…

Good luck.

Table layouts

A boxy table caught my eye on Twitter:

Charting the US booster plan, a.k.a. how to model inconsistencyhttps://t.co/ddKg57PZJw by @nikasgari @FT https://t.co/PHqplyS9xv pic.twitter.com/f5rspWckUT

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) September 30, 2021

The biggest flaw in this table is the White House line, that suggests a separate group of people. Then, you can shift the columns around a bit, until you get this result:

Office automation

Automation is likely to take out a large share of middle-level jobs in the economy. Gardners, hairdressers, etc. will always be needed. Top scientists, managers, creatives, probably will not be automated anytime soon. In between, it is a different story.

“Automation” has made its inroad in the workplace as well. Most visibly in the area of storage and filing. But also in the way we work. Think of the amount of people that were employed typing up formal documents and memos, planning meetings, arranging phone calls. Back in the 1990s, running analysis on your business required armies of analysts, often sourced from external consulting firms (I was one of them).

The same trend is happening in presentations. Back in the 1990s, we would discuss interim project results using hand drawn charts, that then would be produced by professional graphics designers into a final document. The production of such a document could take weeks, where the sole focus was one communication, and the underlying analysis barely moved.

Bit by bit, the professional designers were replaced by analysts skipping the hand drawn charts and making them directly on their computers. Analysts first, followed by more senior staff. Every meeting now looked like a final presentation.

The trend will continue. “Presentations” will become simpler and quicker to make. In 10 years we will look back and remember the days when we used to spend so much time trying to put a complicated slide deck together for a simple decision.

SlideMagic is here to help.