Perceived quality

The real quality of a car is expressed in how little time it spends in the repair shop. You are unlikely to be able to figure this out in the showroom, or in a test drive. Problems will only show up after a few months of driving.

The perceived quality of a car is a different story. The sound of a door closing, little rattles. They might have nothing to do with the actual quality of the car, but have a huge impact on how we perceive things.

Car manufacturers spend a lot of time and money on ironing out this little imperfections. Testing, testing, and testing at different speeds, different surfaces. As soon as the tiniest noise is heard, take out the statoscope (the passenger tester), locate the sound source and fix things. (A heavier material, some padding, a different screw).

There is a parallel here for your slide deck. The actual quality of the raw story, and the perceived quality of its presentation.

Being too bold

Smart use of bold text can help make a slide clearer. Overdoing it takes out the whole effect.

Why do people fall for this? If you start at your own chart for hours, rereading it, changing the line breaks, bolding and un-bolding text, you become convinced that the text is super clear. It is, for someone who has studied it for a long time. Not for someone who looks up from her phone and sees it for the first time.

P.S. Use ctrl-B (Windows) or cmd-B on selected text in SlideMagic to make things bold.

Template request: process maturity

A SlideMagic user requested additional templates in the area of organization design and benchmarking. I added these two upon request. (Don’t tell anyone the secret that these slide design request are usually put up within 24 hours after asking for them.)

Simply searching for ‘process’ in the app will reveal them, or search online via this link. Pro users can convert them to PowerPoint (students, did you see the free SlideMagic Pro plan for you?).

The quick start guide

Most appliances come with a “quick start guide” in addition to a detailed manual. A good quick start guide:

• Is not a dumbed down version of the manual

• Has an order that is natural to the new user, tackling issues as they come up

• Has a clear objective to get people going

The manual is the exhaustive reference guide written by the product engineer, the quick start guide is the pitch to the user. Think of your presentation as the quick start guide of that huge strategy document that is open in your presentation software.

The safety instructions (that no one reads)

Safety instructions, terms of use, privacy statements, safe harbor statements, nobody reads them. Lawyers have diluted them so much that it takes a long time to reverse engineer the original message. In addition, most people more or less know (or assume they know) what is written in them.

The same is true for mission statements and other corporate “standard “ texts. They all sort of say the same, many of them are not credible, and in most cases do not add anything to the story of a presentation. The audience switches off until something more interesting pops up.

In the worst case, you might have lost your audience all together. “Ah, it’s going to be one of these decks”

Streamlined signup for the free student plan

Students can get free access to SlideMagic Pro. The signup and validation process is no longer cumbersome, you can get started straight from the pricing page:

Grouping data in tables

In spreadsheets or databases, things should be clearly labeled. Every column has a heading that describes what’s in it. When it comes to slide design, you can allow yourself a bit more freedom. Look at the 2 slides below

In the second slide, I omitted detailed descriptions of data that is probably clear to the audience, and grouped things together in one box. Easier on the eye.

AI image generators

Dream Studio uses machine learning to create images based on sentences and keywords a user enters. Unlike searching for an image based on a keyword in a big data base with tagged pictures, Dream Studio would generate pixels from scratch. Some results are stunning, others have surprising errors (faces that are not finished for example).

You can also mix and match art styles (the image below is a mix up of Mondriaan and Van Gogh).

At the moment these type of services are a gimmick. People try a few creations, share them, and move on. But in a few years from now, this might be the way image “databases” work. No need for that database anymore as photographs are created on the fly,

(Another similar service is DALL-E, but it has a waiting list)

Rhetorical techniques for memorable sentences

This is a nice Twitter thread:

This line is so memorable for a reason.

It's a perfect use of antimetabole: the repetition of a phrase in successive clauses, but with its word order reversed.

Here are 8 more rhetorical devices to make your writing or speaking more memorable: pic.twitter.com/orYXa3jTZp

— The Cultural Tutor (@culturaltutor) August 21, 2022

1. Polyptoton The repeated use of words with the same root, like destroy, destroyer, and destroyed.

2. Anadiplosis The repetition of the last word of a clause at the beginning of the next.

3. Anaphora The use of the same word or words at the start of successive clauses or sentences.

4. Epizeuxis The immediate repetition of a word or phrase.

5. Epanalepsis The repetition of a word at the start and end of a clause.

6. Antithesis The use (and contrast) of two opposing ideas in a single clause or sentence.

7. Aysndeton The omission of a conjunction (e.g. and, or) from a series of related clauses.

8. Anastrophe The inversion of normal word order.

Read through the entire thread by @culturaltutor to see examples.

Automated student verification

Students are eligible for a completely free SlideMagic Pro subscription, and I have now automated the validation process for a number of markets:

• Austria

• Denmark

• France

• Italy

• Germany

• Spain

• Sweden

• The Netherlands

• Turkey

After you have registered a free account with SlideMagic, you can visit this link to start the validation process. If your account is based in one of the above countries you get instant approval. Clicking the “I am a student” button will take you to the login page of the university or school you are currently studying at. After a successful login, your SlideMagic Pro subscription will automatically be switched on.

For other countries, we are still using a partly manual approval process.

All this was made possible through a partnership with InAcademia. If you run a web site that needs student validation it is worth checking them out.

Hearing the entire band

It is hard to communicate an idea for a new song without the help of the full band.

• When you play the basic idea on one instrument to someone else, that person misses the context that it is in your head: the result a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.

• The same can happen to you. You had that brilliant idea, but when you get back to your note book the next day, the scribbles sound like a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.

The same is true for your presentation. Your audience is missing the context that is in your head, and the slides / your story is the only thing they can rely on.

"The hidden benefits of stage fright"

A nice video by Adam Neely who talks about stage fright from a musician’s perpsective:

"I won't invest, but am willing to help..."

In some cases, an investor might take a meeting or call with zero chance of investing. The investor liked you, the investor is returning a favor to a friend….

The opening sentence of the meeting is likely just that: ‘Zero percent chance that I will invest” followed by a pretty good reason “You are a medical device company, and I only invest in drugs”.

After such an opening, some startups might still try. The result: still no investment, and an investor who is slightly annoyed and cuts the meeting short.

It is better to change objective, and see where this person could actually be helpful.

If it does not fit on a page, it is not good

Celebrity investors often joke that if your pitch cannot fit into a napkin, the pitch must be bad. This is feedback from a super famous investor, who receives dozens of pitches each day, gets pitched everywhere she goes. Yes, if you happen to bump into this investor in the corridor, launch into a 30 minute pitch and get cut off after 45 seconds, you are probably not good at adjusting the pitch to the environment you are in.

Each presentation setting is different. If you meet the celebrity investor’s team in a follow up meeting, and you give a super high level, superficial pitch that is over in 1 minute, you will not have scored many points to get you to meeting 3….

Free SlideMagic Pro for students

SlideMagic Pro (including PowerPoint and PDF conversions) will be available free for students! I have just updated the web site and its pricing page. To apply, create a free account, verify your email, and visit www.slidemagic.com/web/student. At the moment, application processing is partly manual, but in a week from now, the automated system will go live, where students from certain countries can directly log in to the web site of their academic institutions, after which SlideMagic Pro gets turned on instantly. Watch this space.

The one with the orange shirt

In big conferences you see a lot of presentations, and meet a lot of people, and it can be hard to be remembered after a quick corridor chat. For each conversation try to remember something unusual or memorable that happened. “I was the one that pointed you to a local vintage guitar shop”.

Windows app close issue fixed

V37 of SlideMagic had an issue on Windows: closing the last window with the top right ‘X’ did not completely close the app process and as a result, SlideMagic would not reopen again. This issue has been patched in V39 which should automatically install.

You can force an installation in 2 ways

1. Reboot your machine to close V37. Run SlideMagic V37, wait for 5 seconds until the ‘update available’ notification appears. Close SlideMagic V37 via the ‘Exit’ command in the file dropdown manu. Restart SlideMagic which should now start as V39.

2. Or download and install the latest version from slidemagic.com

This issue does not apply to Mac users.

Trying to take full control of the blog

The blog post updates are not going well after the Google Feedreader shutdown. Images don’t get copied correctly, etc. I am trying to get the blog to run on my own servers, with my own email update service. This will also allow me to check and fix all broken links over the years. The challenge will be the 10 years back catalogue with all the image files. Let’s see how it goes.

Getting the same question all the time...

Writing emails to busy people is hard. One thing to keep in mind is that they usually get the same type of question.

• Can I meet you for a coffee?

• Do you want to be on my Board?

• Do you want to invest in me?

• Do you want to buy my software?

If you are asking one of these questions, stand out from the others

If you are actually not asking one of these questions, make it very clear. Your email might get eyeballed very quickly and rejected with “no, I don’t have time for more Board seats”…

Should the fonts of your logo and presentation match?

No.

Now that mobile devices are becoming the dominant screen on which we look at brands, more and more logos become text-based. The font is the key design aspect of the logo. To set your whole presentation in a funky font would not make sense.

Having said that, the fonts of your presentation and the logo are very close, but just a bit different, a design nerd might find it bothersome. (Arial - Helvetica for example). This would only be an issue for big, bold headlines. Though.

Some brands do force the match between logo font and text font. Think of the ads produced by the Absolut Vodka brand. Slogans and headlines are in Extra Bold Futura Condensed all caps and it matches the brand exactly.