De-cluttering axes

In scientific documents, there are chart making conventions that make sense, clearly labelled axes, titles, etc. etc. Use these charts in your article that you submit for publication in a prestigious paper. For an on-screen slide show however, you could deviate from this standard. Your objective is to communicate the findings as best as possible, referring to the paper for the details.

See the example below (source), lots of duplication in axis labels.

You can make the page a lot calmer be omitting some of these labels. I quickly cut and paste the elements in the image below. (This is not a makeover, just a super rough reshuffle to show you what I meant).

What, how, why?

I saw these headings of a well-known story line structure being put up literally on a website in a big font size. What? Paragraph of text, how?, paragraph of text, why?, paragraph of text.

I like to use these frameworks in a more indirect way. Use them as guidelines to set up your story. Use them as a checklist to see that you covered everything, use them as a starting point if you are stuck in writer’s block, and most importantly, if they don’t work for your specific situation, pick another one or use your own.

The same applies to visual frameworks (SWOT, etc. etc.). They are designed to help you get started with grouping ideas, but if you find yourself forcing things in boxes that do not really fit, pick another one.

Statistics: vaccine effectiveness might seem higher than it is

I love digging into COVID-related statistics. Recently, this paper was published that shows how vaccine effectiveness in local communities can be a lot lower than at the national level. Seems counter intuitive, but this chart explains the math.

I have added this slide to the SlideMagic library, so you could use it in your own presentations as well.

Public corona data dashboards

BI (“Business Intelligence”) dashboards with data used to be a corporate thing. Firms such as my previous employer McKinsey would advice clients what metrics to put on them, and how to display them. This is tricky, there is an infinite amount of data to choose from, and even more options to slide and dice the figures.

The COVID outbreak has created many country-wide public dashboard with data. In Israel where I am based, a large tribe of “amateur” statisticians has emerged that runs and discusses analyses on Twitter. The other dashboard I had a look at is the Dutch one (part of my family still lives there).

• Dutch board

• Israeli board (use the translate option that is offered by the Google Chrome browser)

The approaches are different, and I prefer the Israeli one.

• The Dutch board looks very pretty, has lots of explanations in text, and has useful maps of regions with color coding. The problem is that it stretches out over many, many, pages, and priotises static data over time series.

• The Israeli one is just one page, with lots of time series graphs, so you can see things develop over time. And not for basic statistics such as overall cases, benchmarks can get very specific. Benchmarks are normalised so you compare apples with apples (i.e., cases / 100,000 by vaccination status). Also, government policy and benchmarks are tightly integrated. The government wants to encourage parents to vaccinate children, so there are statistics specifically aimed at that target segment. Another example: after discussions whether to close the airport or not, stats about airport tests were published (split by country, so citizens can make the call to travel somewhere or not based on their personal risk appetite).

The biggest advantage of the all-on-one-page approach is that people start to understand it, and come back to it very often to get the latest data, even venting anger when it is not updated on a day.

Data visualisation to involve the public in decision making and/or influence day to day behavior.

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PS. Israel does a PCR test for every single arrival at its airport, so the arrival statistics on the Israeli dashboard are probably one of the best global indicators of what is going on in a particular country.

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…).