Back into AI and machine learning

I looked briefly at Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for SlideMagic a couple of years ago, but never really pursued specific ideas. Recently, I revisited things and was surprised by the amount of progress that has been made. Not so much the actual technology itself, but more how accessible it is for anyone to use.

“AI” and “ML” are big buzz words at the moment and many of you are probably be wondering what it could mean for the industry you are working in. You read some blogs, books, watch some videos, but don’t really get it.

I would recommend to actively dive in and follow an online video course. The actual coding knowledge required is now very minimal, it is all about learning how to select and apply models. Sometimes, all the “AI” you need is basic statistics and regression. Sometimes, highly advanced image recognition software has already been cracked and can be used and accessed with a few lines of code.

Such a course is great fun, helps you understand what these technologies could really mean for your business, cuts through the buzzwords and makes you a better manager in case you are hiring people or service providers to build things for you.

To stack or not to stack?

Two charts about a new sub-Omikron (BA.2) variant in Denmark. This line graph shows 3 variants as a % of all sequenced samples in Denmark.

Source: https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1485456877723045891

The chart below shows the total number of variants found in the samples. The stack approach does a much better job to give the full picture of what is actually going on,.

Source: https://www.covid19genomics.dk/statistics

With just one data series, showing a share of the total as a stack or line (column) is the same chart. As soon as you have more than one, pick a stack chart so the audience can see the data in context.

Opportunity for freelance presentation designers?

Many of you readers are independent presentation designers. Having done a large number of online courses now, I think these udemy, coursera, etc. instructors could be great potential clients for you. Most of them talk through a set of poorly designed bullet point slides with a picture in picture video super imposed on them.

• These slides can obviously be improved, by a lot

• The narration and creative brief is there for you: the instructor gives verbal instructions as audio and often in a transcript

• These presentations can have a huge audience, and the overall visual quality can make a big difference in their marketing strategy: if the free sample lessons look really good, students will convert and buy the course

• As a presentation designer, you can specialize in a certain field: you start a self reinforcing loop: you understand the subject area better, you do better work, you can attract more work in that same speciality area as a result.

I myself don’t have the time to all this design work, therefore I leave it up to you :-)

A smart online instructor can do 2 things:

1. Outsource design work to a great freelance presentation designer

2. Do the slides herself, but in SlideMagic

Template: binary confusion matrix

I am dusting off my knowledge about machine learning and data science, and stumbled upon this handy definition of false positives, false negatives, and a bunch of definitions (I always find it hard to keep them apart). I turned them into a slide template that is not part of the SlideMagic library for you to use in your own presentations.

(I use this course if you are interested)

Backgrounds

Some of the best images you can use in a presentation are those with lots and lots of white space. Photographers tend to crop images to make their subject stand out. Great for the image, but often less ideal for the layout of your slide.

Instead of searching for functional or descriptive words such as “car” or “bucket”, search for “background” or “wallpaper” in SlideMagic and something unexpectedly useful might show up.

These examples are pretty straightforward to recreate in SlideMagic, with your own background images and text. Still, I added them to the library so you can use the min your slide designs

Extreme wide angle effects

Online, I currently get bombarded with “ads” that contain city landscapes for some reason. What they have in common are unusual perspectives: the pictures draw your attention. (At least mine).

What is going on? You are seeing familiar compositions and/or places you recognize, but the camera angle seems different. Most shots use an extreme wide lens effect, might have been taken by a drone rather than from a standing position on a building, add a very strong zoom, only using a very small crop of the center of the original image and put an object in the front (either photoshopped or real).

All interesting techniques to learn from, I think soon we will see these types of images more on open source image collection sites, so you can use them in your presentations as well.

I discussed this effect earlier in this post about the “Corona crop”, with extreme zooming, you can make almost any public space looked packed with people.

The... ...prof... ...writes... ...the... ....point...

Academics and other teachers like to write out their points in full sentences on black boards, so that students can copy them in their notebooks. This could actually be useful, the slowly spoken sentence, combined with the hand writing, gets burnt in memory easier. Also, that sentence becomes a sort of mental placeholder on the big collection of black boards. To refer back to it, you can simply circle the sentence, and the text itself reminds the audience what is meant, but more importantly, it is that “geographic location” of memories around that sentence that creates the right context.

As I ‘sat' through’ a 1.5 hour video on encryption technology of an academic lecture last week, the teacher took it to the extreme though: not making his big point before starting to write it down…. “That… makes… it….”, what will it be “possible” or “impossible”?

I would pop the suspense, before writing things down…

Bar versus column chart

The chart below could have been made a lot better using a bar chart. You can avoid the many legend labels, which have a 1-to-1 relationship to the columns

Image source

John Mayer's marketing video

Guitarist John Mayer starred in the launch video for a more affordable version of his signature guitar for PRS Guitars. Some interesting presentation lessons in here.

• It worked, the video gets even linked to on a presentation blog

• A naked and vulnerable pitch. A bare bone background, just him and the instrument, putting his entire reputation at stake by recommending this guitar. “Skin in the game”. Different from celebrities wearing a watch, driving a car, or holding an espresso cup.

• A very nice use of the “best of both worlds” storyline. Up until now you had to choose between A or B, but as of today, you can have both.

• Very clever addressing of target audiences. Hard core guitar players that admire John for his skill, and die hard fans that admire John for his songs are included implicitly. But parents buying guitars for their kids (and maybe secretly for themselves) are addressed directly with a clear excuse to go and get one.

A great sales pitch

Understanding something tricky...

For another project, I had to get a better understanding of the blockchain and various encryption algorithms. This summary helped me a lot, how it is possible that a total “stranger” can verify the validity of a digital signature without sharing confidential information.

Still this explanation suffered from an issue with almost all explainers and technical presentations: certain critical steps that are blatantly obvious to the expert, but very hard to get for the novice get skipped over. The big online YouTube stars in education are masters in getting it right: anticipating what an audience is likely to struggle with.

Anyway, in the process, I added a chart to the SlideMagic library with the very basics of encryption:

Search for “encryption” in SlideMagic and it will show up as a slide template.

Furniture ads

Why does furniture always look great in ads? The beautiful castle or villa as its backdrop is only a small reason. The big visual trick is space: lots of it, not only square meters, but also very high ceilings.

Most houses and apartments are designed functionally, rooms with just enough space to put a sofa and chairs against the wall to sit a normal sized family with a few guests. If there is more floor space available, we tend to add rooms rather than giving the furniture more space to breathe.

The same is true for museums. Huge open spaces with big white, clutter-free walls. Paintings are made to look good in museums. Put that masterpiece (or a copy) on your kitchen wall, and it looks less impressive.

When making presentations, you are not constrained by white space, so add it freely.

Eyeball the thumbnails

The thumbnail strip to the left of most presentation software is not only useful for switching to other slides, it also is a good feedback mechanism for slide layouts. It is like sitting in the back row of a big auditorium, or viewing the slide in a small preview window on a Zoom call.

The short repeat break

I took my daughter to Paris a few weeks ago (just before the new COVID wave) for a very short trip (Thanks Giving). She found it far too short, while I agreed that it was short, but still felt it was a nice and restful break.

The probable reason? I have been to Paris many times before, even lived right next to it for a year. For me, going back to it simply triggered a memory of all the stories and experiences I had there before. (A tip for prioritizing short holiday destinations).

The same happens with a presentation slide. For the person / team that made it that bullet point sentence (or even word) makes perfect sense, because it packs the entire 3 months worth of effort. For the first-time listeners, it is a cryptic sentence.

Out of the frame

If you are daring, you can consider letting shape go off the page, or tilting text in them to make your slide look more alive. And/or tilt things a little. Text could even run a bit out of the page frame. The good thing about circles is that tilting text does not impact your overall slide layout.

(Yes I know, no circles (yet) in SlideMagic.)

Typography is everywhere

The building manager finally installed a house number on our building, to reduce the amount of desperate calls I get from couriers. Still, I wished he had asked me for a suggested position where to put it. “Bleeding off the page” is not the right concept here…

Your pitch deck on the home page

Happy 2022! I am returning to blogging after the holidays. Over the past week I have been busy designing the web page of our new medical startup (still in stealth, so I cannot show it to you yet…).

The more I thought about this page, the more I came to the conclusion that the web presence of this company at this stage should be a pitch deck to potential partners, rather than the usual feature list and headshots of the management team.

Most “presentations” on web pages are either a static gallery of images/screenshots, or an embedded video., but this layout does not look very good across a wide range of unpredictable screen sizes. For a chart to look good on different screen sizes, and more importantly different aspect ratios (phones are portrait, computers are landscape), you need to break the fundamental layout of the page.

Most slides have the classical title-on-top, content-in-a-rectangle-below layout. For my site, I changed that to 2 squares, one of which takes the role of the slide title with a big written message, and 1 with a supporting graphic. The layout changes depending on the device you are watching the site.

This layout change is common on web sites, but it is used a bit randomly. Pictures and text blocks move around disconnected depending on the screen size. For a “presentation” you need tighter control.

Another major problem for a web designer is rapidly changing content. It is common to make small and big changes to pitch decks all the time, while websites are relatively static. To solve this, my experience with SlideMagic came in very handy. I wrote a simple chart engine that reads “slides” with their titles and shapes in a simple format, and then renders them on the screen in the desired aspect ratio.

Maybe this quick tool will turn out as the “Slack” of my venture. (Slack was born as an internal tool of a gaming startup…).

The bullet point trap

How do we end up with so many presentations that are mainly slides with bullet points?

A pitch usually has 2 types of slides. The clear cut ones: head shots of the team, columns with revenue forecasts, pictures of the product, screenshots of the app, table of the budget.

Then there are the ones that are less clear, the ones that need to tell the story behind your idea. When we start off,:

1. we don’t exactly know what they need to say,

2. we don’t know exactly what they should look like

These are 2 big challenges. It is not obvious to craft the story line with messages, and after you did that, it is not obvious to design a slide that delivers the message.

What happens? We open a slide editor and start putting in sentences on slides, move slides around. We can’t think about design, because we don’t know the content of the slide yet. As a result, the default bullet point list becomes the design that actually sticks.

We work really hard on the messages, get our colleagues to comment on them, get our boss to “sign off” that exact message (after we added the qualifying comment on line 3). And more and more, the presentation starts to make sense to us (the writer). The slides become mental placeholders, and in our bullet point frame of mind, every new slide will look exactly like the previous one. This is the mental model we are working with.

How to break the trap?

Maybe don’t use presentation software to make that story line. Write things in a Word processor. Deliberately use short, grammatically incorrect sentences (‘The “we are bigger” point here’) to avoid discussions among colleagues to finalize sentences (like you would do in a legal contract).

Once that is done and agreed, you take the whole thing away and really start thinking what is the best way to visualize everything you have just written down. As soon as you start copying the bullets from the Word document, you know that you are on the wrong track.

6 months, then 30 minutes

We have been iterating a presentation for our new venture for months and months, and then just before we had to send out the first deck to a very serious potential partner, I re-wrote the whole pitch in just 30 minutes. New format, new colours, new sequence, new everything.

Unfortunately, you need those 6 months of pondering in order to pull of 30 minute trick. There are no shortcuts.

But on the positive side: if you have been using a deck for a very long time, you could give it a try and come up with a completely new visual approach for your story.

Even better than I did

This Venn diagram is a great visualization of why you still see vaccinated people in the hospital.

I gave it a go myself a while ago, but this visualization is better. Source of chart: RIVM, source of image. One improvement suggestion: switch the colors red and green.

The case for not rounding numbers

In 99% of slides, it is better to round financial data. $1.9m is easier to read than $1,898,456.34. Also the rounded number is more in line with a financial model that relies on rough assumptions. If you project your company sales in 10 year down to the dollar, you lose some credibility with your audience.

In some situations, the opposite approach can work. Look at this poster below of an Israeli anti-vax group who makes the argument that the money that is spent on encouraging hesitating Israelis to get a vaccine, could have been used better in a different way. (I leave pro and anti-vax debates out this blog, although you might guess in which camp I sit).

Here the big number actually works. Anyone looking at this big amount of money instantly starts comparing it to other lump sums you know: how much do you make as an individual in a year, how much does a car cost, how much does an apartment cost. Also, the precision and suggested accuracy of the number adds to the drama. This is a similar effect that National Debt Clocks try to convey.

The correct way to look at these numbers is to relate them somehow: $ per citizen, % of total corona-related cost, compared to other government advertising campaigns, etc. etc. After that, you might still conclude that it is high, but you used the correct metric.