Finding inspiration in CD cover images

More and more, I am trying to make each presentation in a unique style that is consistent on each slide. Paintings are a good source of inspiration, but so is cover art of CDs/LPs. Today I used this one from Remastered: The Best of Steely Dan - Then and Now
Steely Dan used an image of "Carhenge", an art installation by Jim Reinders, somewhere in Nebraska, a modern-day version of Stone Henge in England.
It provides all I need for a presentation with a consistent accent:
  • A slightly apocalyptic theme (this presentation was for a client in the asset management industry talking about changes since the economic meltdown of 2008)
  • Cars, especially vintage cars, a rich hunting ground for images expressing all kinds of concepts
  • The large bold font with a blank fill
  • Blues and yellow/oranges as colors.
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Book review - 1001 paintings you must see before you die

Paintings are excellent inspiration for presentation design:
  • Color schemes designed to provoke an emotion, often going against the rules of color theory
  • Lessons in composition and page layout
  • Ideas to give your presentation a distinct style or personality
The Dutch educational system plus graduate degrees in computer science and business administration have not contributed much to my knowledge of art history. I want to catch up quickly, but it turned out to be more difficult than I thought:
  • There are many web sites devoted to a painter or a museum, I have yet to discover one that cuts across artists, locations, styles and periods in time
  • The same issue is true for many art history books: one style, one painter, one museum.
  • More-over art history books (surprisingly) have usually more text than images in them. Text full of elaborate interpretations by the author, that is clearly written with student education in mind.
How happy I was to find this book: 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die.
Thousand pages of one painting per page, designed as a guide for museums to visit before your time on the planet is up (but then, there is no clear museum index, and many paintings are taken from private collections).
Leaving this small criticism aside, I found this book truly useful to digest a vast amount of images of paintings in a short time. Color picture, a bit of background on the artist, a bit of background on the painter. It contains both the block busters such as the Mona Lisa as well as lesser known works of art. Great.
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Chart concept - in the spot light

I saw this spot light concept in an invitation for an event. It can easily be recreated in PowerPoint, ideal for a chart to make a big announcement. Click on the second image for some more explanation about the shapes to use. And if you like those tiny eyes, you can read more about them in one of my previous posts.

Blending PowerPoint shapes into your image

A recent image I used for a cover page of a presentation provided some excellent opportunities to blend PowerPoint text and shapes into the image. Use the strong red light source to create matching shadows and colors. Click on the image with the boxes to get a larger picture.

In what order to display data series?

Look at the data of your stacked bar and column charts. I prefer to put the series that changes the most last, so it becomes very clear what variables are changing, and what variables not.

Da, da, da, it's OK to let go of the rules of design (sometimes)

Color theory provides us with a clear set of rules of colors that go well together. Kuler has them even built in: complementary colors, triad, monochromatic, etc. But hey the world would be boring if everyone would follow the rules.
Look at the world of music for example. Jazz drummers only really start to swing when they go slightly off-beat. Many R&B songs have their drum computers programmed with delayed beats, providing a punch a fraction of a second too late.
If not, the music would sound like a 1980s Casio keyboard.
In my presentation work I recently stopped using these color composition rules. Instead I often look at a beautiful image or a powerful painting to design the color scheme of my presentation. Find a painting that provokes an emotion, load it up in kuler, and use it as the basis for the colors of your next presentation, even if it does not exactly follow the rules of color composition..
Wassily Kandinsky. Church in Murnau. 1910. Oil on cardboard. 64.7 x 50.2 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany

Keep your text trapped in its box

The elaborate tornado illustration of this ad is pretty, but it looks like there was not much time left to think of a good place for the punch line and the dates of the event. Eyes and brains do not like reading text over fluctuating backgrounds.

Richer color textures for presentation design?

Colors for computer screens and printers are created by mixing primary colors. (See this background article about RGB (adding primary colors for screens) and CMYK (filtering primary colors for printers).
In theory, it is possible to create any color you want using the right RGB codes (more about the color wheel here). Still, I find it almost impossible to recreate the colors that some of the great painters are using in their paintings. Obviously they did not use tools such as kuler, but rather relied on mixing colors on a palate by hand.
Take this painting as an example: The Arnolfini Portait by Dutch painter Jan van Eyck, painted in 1434. It has unbelievable light effects and color textures. (Huge image here). How to recreate this fabulous green (some think symbolizing the hope of starting a healthy family) in PowerPoint?
Kuler does not do a good job, see the color codes below.
Zooming into the dress gives some clues about the answer. Van Eyck added bits of yellow and paint texture effects to give the dress a warm velvety appearance.
In the early days, PowerPoint had a rich set of patterns to fill objects with grey shadings. Based on this principle, and with increased computing power it should be possible to offer much more complex color textures to the presentation designer as well. Textures that go beyond the "plasticy", shiny, and glass-like surfaces that are available now.

Tilt those Google maps

Google Earth is a wonderful tool to produce maps in your presentation. Select the area you want to cover, do a screen dump and crop your image in PowerPoint. Make sure to make the best use of the power of Google Earth. Tilting the map to a level that the horizon becomes visible adds a nice additional perspective to the chart. Especially when you visualize paths.

Chart concept - "Stuck!" (redux)

This ad uses a visual concept which I discussed in an earlier post. The easiest way to recreate it in PowerPoint is to stick to simple shapes with numbers, similar to the original puzzle with 15 pieces. You can go one level up and use an image (like in the ad). To do this, re-read an earlier post about slicing up PowerPoint shapes.

Frans Hals: 27 shades of black

It is thought that Vincent van Gogh once admired the Dutch painter Frans Hals (1580-1666) for using 27 shades of black in one painting. If you study the works of the Dutch masters carefully, you can see that they actually do use very little color. (Here is an example from Rembrandt: black, red, yellow) Part of this is due to space limitations on the color palette. Pink skin tones take a lot of space, leaving not much room for other colors.
Painting above: Frans Hals, The regentesses of the Old Men's Home in Haarlem, 1664, Oil on canvas, 170.5 x 249.5 cm
There is a similarity to designing presentation slides here. You use shades and tints of the same color to create a calm background visual, while directing the eye of the viewer with bright highlight colors to the important information on the slide.

Just listen to yourself

We've all been there. You're stuck. Analysis-paralysis. Writer's block. Structure-overload. Where to start? How to break the deadlock?
Imagine you're sitting in front of a really experienced investor (Warren Buffett?). You have 10 minutes.
Press record.
Just tell your story. There is no time for buzz words. There is no time for complicated frameworks to structure your story (first we do a SWOT, then we leverage our core competences to differentiate from our competitors and make sure we reach critical mass before the window of opportunity closes). Just tell from the heart why someone should invest in your business.
Press stop and play back.
What did you say? In what order? When did you feel the need to take out a pen and scribble a simple diagram on a piece of paper? When did you "see" Buffett frowning and felt the urge to explain something again? What metaphors did you use to explain the technology?
Now let's go back and re-do that PowerPoint presentation completely.

Why does Helvetica look so great on a Mac and so poor on a PC?

I like the clean Helvetica font in print material. I like the Helvetica font in presentations designed on a Mac. Somehow, the PC version does not appeal.
The answer is: it's not Helvetica. To save on royalties, Microsoft included the look-alike Arial with its Office software suite. The fonts look similar, but there are subtle differences. And they make all the difference.
Image designed by the ragbag, found via Swiss Miss.
I have not solved the problem myself. I think none of my clients have Helvetica installed on their PCs, and despite workarounds, I hesitate to create font issues with my presentations.

Motion graphics done right

Two days ago I posted about a motion graphics video that was designed beautifully but relied too much on text bullet points to compare quantitative data, the brain had to do too much work in too little time (before the next piece of information shows up):
  1. Read sentence
  2. "Visualize" numbers internally
  3. Interpret them
This is a better example of the use of motion graphics. Zooming is used to visualize the enormity of the number 1 trillion. It comes at a price though: this video is almost a full-blown animation. A bit of PowerPoint/PhotoShop skills and After Effects are not enough to produce it (unfortunately).
Video by Maya Research, found via Core77

Portuguese innovation in newspaper design

An interesting article in the NYT the other day: the Portuguese newspaper "i" that's breaking the rules of newspaper design. An example of a front page that I found on the "What's next: innovation in newspapers" blog.
Some interesting lessons that could also apply to presentation design:
  • Big images draw the attention of the reader
  • Interestingly, the newspaper abandoned the typical grouping of newspaper articles around specific categories. Research showed that people just scan for interesting headlines and do not need the structure of a detailed content categorization. Newspaper design does not need to resemble the organization structure of the editorial staff.
With regard to the second point: more and more I start to abandon the use of formal structures in presentation design. Simple use the structure or slide sequence that supports the way you want to tell the story. The brain is capable of dealing with a more creative story structure, as long as it is not bored. Novel writers are the ultimate masters in story line design creativity, but I agree that might be overdoing it a bit when designing your next pitch deck.

Motion graphics overload

Xplane continues to develop beautifully animated presentations using motion graphics. After Did you know 4.0, there is now another video developed in cooperation with the Economist: The carbon economy.
I really like the effects, textures, typography and animation of this presentation, but I think we still have to learn how to use all this technology effectively. The video is relying heavily on text to explain and compare quantitative data (similar to what bullet points do). The pace is so fast, that I have difficulty processing it all (and I had my 10,000 hours of data processing training).
My early thoughts on how to make the most of motion graphics:
  • Be careful with background music
  • Use text animation only to highlight quotes with non-quantitative information
  • For quantitative data go back to the good old simple data charts, but feel free to leverage those beautiful textures and typography
  • Beef up the animated character animation: things morphing into another shape, things growing/shrinking (the rising water levels in this video is a good example), the blend of animated film design and presentation design is great
  • Think about pacing of animations like you think about pacing of words. Have the courage to pause, accelerate, talk loud, talk softly, pause again. The entire video does not have to be an information roller coaster.
I am curious to hear your thoughts.

Zooming in down to cell-level

I really like zooming presentation formats such as Prezi, but I am still struggling to find useful application areas. Steve Johnson pointed me to one: to put proportions in perspective. Have a look at this amazing visualization of the relative size of biological cells.

Dusting off the McKinsey business system

McKinsey has been posting a number of classic consulting frameworks under the title "enduring ideas" on the McKinsey Quarterly site. I discussed before: consulting frameworks are great for solving problems, but often less good at communicating solutions.
Recently, the business system was discussed. At McKinsey we used it to analyse the value chain of an industry (manufacturing, sales, distribution, etc.). The basic graphic concept of it (simple arrows) can also be used in another context: communicating a project schedule. See the example below.
Related reading:

Try to resist the tempation to over-do PowerPoint effects

I see them more and more. A bullet point presentation with now and then a spectacularly formated PowerPoint object inserted. Bevels, textures, drop shadows, 3D rotations, lighting angles, they have it all.
Try to resist it. Like with data charts, the fact that you have the ability to use sophisticated effects does not mean that you have to use them.
Oh, one more thing. If you hired a professional presentation designer, and the only thing she does is apply 3D and lighting effects to your diagrams, it is time to find another one.

The "what have I done in the past year" slide

This slide always comes in somewhere in the annual management review. Here are all the activities of me (or my department) over the past year. The bullets are coming out:
  • Organized the annual consumer event
  • Biz dev trip to Poland
  • Created a new planning tool
  • Put a trade symposium together
These slides do not justice to your efforts. Break each bullet point up into a separate slide and go through them really quickly, but add something interesting to each slide:
  • Slide: an overview picture of the 80,000 visitors of your consumer event (a rock concert)
  • Slide: an image of you having a flat tire in the middle of Poland on the site of a major new potential customer
  • Slide: head shots + name of the very well-known people from the trade that were present on your symposium
  • Slide: sceen shots of the new sales budget planning tool
Stories make the achievement look much more impressive and people will remember them better ("hey, was that you who did this?").
A second implication: always have camera (or a photographer) at hand during important events, maybe even a better one than the one built in to your phone. Think ahead about next year's annual review presentation.
This same technique is also really useful when making presentations that need to present your company and its activities to a major (international) customer or business partner. The only pictures of the company that usually makes it in these type of presentations are the one of the lonely receptionist waiting for a call to come in.

Chart concept - lost in translation

A client in the pharmaceutical industry had this problem: a competitor managed to turn a relatively weak clinical fact and turn it upside down into a forceful message that took over the market. The good old tins cans are great to visualize this. See the example below (sanitized to maintain client confidentiality)
Related reading: an earlier post about classic miscommunication in a project.

Israel, startup-nation, and how it turned me into a presentation designer

A slightly off-topic post today.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about how people are the product of the hours they put into something, plus the privileges of experiences they have been given. I am Dutch, not Jewish, do not really speak Hebrew, but ended up living in Israel somehow.
The Israeli startup environment was the main driver behind me becoming a presentation designer. Countless entrepreneurs pitching me their dreams and asking me to "put it in PowerPoint" gave me a rare opportunity to expand my presentation design skills from structured McKinsey-style Board documents to presentations that need to touch someone's heart (often the heart/wallet of an investor).
A short video about a new book "Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle" in case you are not familiar with Israel as a hightech center.
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