Presentation design blog Idea Transplant: June 2010

No point in arguing

Watching the disputes between players and the referee in the soccer worldcup reminds me of corporate negotiations. After the pitch presentation people start discussing the terms. Often, they are so preoccupied with their own viewpoint that they forget to listen or try to understand what the other party is saying. The same points get repeated, and repeated, and "let me explain to you one more time...". Nobody is listening, everyone gets annoyed.

Some RSS feeds with images

A reader asked me in the comments of my post on the Pulse News iPad app what feeds I put in there. Here are some sites for daily creative inspiration:

Please let me know what sources I am missing here.

But what is it?

Here is a big sentence on the front page of a new web site targeted at iPhone users:

[Company] develops real-time personal discovery and contextualization technologies that leverage semantics and social attention to make social streams more relevant.

Industry insiders might understand what it means, but most people will not. I am not a big believer in mission statements. Often, the big wordy sentence that covers all will be the most compact way you can describe your business to yourself, but as you suffer from the curse of knowledge, other people will not get it.

Immersing yourself in images with an iPad

Every day I like to browse through an enormous amount of images from photography, art, design, and advertising sites to get inspiration for my presentations. The iPad is making this a whole lot easier.

Applications for the iPad are still in their infancy. Many RSS reader applications are popping up, partly driven by the fact that Google Reader does not work very well in the iPad browser (scrolling down is hard).

One iPad RSS reader app, Pulse News, is making an effort to mimic the iPad user interface by rendering content "iPad-style": creating a stream clean headlines with images ripped from the RSS feed. For your regular feeds, this is a nice gimmick, but the draw back of the app is that you can only put in 20 feeds, by far not enough.

But for my image feeds this is brilliant. I follow less than 20 feeds and with the touch of a finger I can fly through days of content in a few seconds, just images! Try it if you own an iPad.

Unstretch that screen

More and more presentations are given on plasma/LCD screens with a wide aspect ratio. Most PowerPoint presentations are designed for a narrow 4:3 ratio (a traditional computer monitor). Most of the time, the screen will automatically stretch you image to create a bigger picture. I never understand this habit: the distorted proportions look horrible. (Judging by my own experience, this is how most people watch TV nowadays as well).

My advise: set the screen back to the narrow aspect ratio. Doing this on your computer is often tricky, the best way is to take the remote control of the screen and fix it there. A smaller picture is much better than a distorted picture.

The painting is Manet's Portrait of Irma Brunner.

Relating the oil spill to your city of choice

More maps today. This simple site ifthiswasmyhome puts the size of the oil spill in perspective... using a town of your choice. It would cover pretty much the entire Netherlands (the country where I grew up).

An excellent visualization, making people internalize what big numbers mean.

We need a good document browser

A week with an iPad has shown me how poor presentations and other documents get rendered on a PC (or a Mac). Leaving the touch screen aside, and even for a PDF viewer, navigating between pages is incredibly slow and the borders of the screen are packed with distracting menus.

Maybe this can all be brought back to the roots of these applications: they were designed for editing text line by line, changing data cell by cell. Each page is built up real time from its components. Editable text gets pet in the right font, the right size, aligned, images are scaled to the right size, colors added. All this takes processing time. The iPad (I think) converts the whole document to some sort of image and caches this image into memory. The result is lightning fast scrolling between pages in a document.

There is no reason why this cannot be implemented on a PC/Mac as well. It is bit like the revolution of the Firefox and Google Chrome browsers that were specifically designed to render content as quickly as possible.

OK - I ordered PowerPoint 2010

I decided to upgrade to PowerPoint 2010 (affiliate link) not because of the features that are discussed in most reviews, what interests me is the ability to create customer complex shapes (adding, subtracting), something that until now only was possible in Adobe software. Although I would be interested in the video functionality as well (the complexity of video editing software prevented me from getting serious with motion graphics).

On a separate note, the world of office software is changing. I used to be a loyal buyer of the "Professional" edition since the early days. Not any more. Excel has become so powerful that I see no need for Access anymore (99% of my clients do not know how to deal with this software), and I still get Outlook bundled with my Excel and PowerPoint, although I will probably never open it now that I have moved completely to Google for email, calendar, and contacts. (Another reason not to take the Professional suite: Microsoft has abandoned their upgrade pricing scheme.)

I will post my experience with PowerPoint 2010 in future posts.

Constantly checking readability

When I design my slides I usually leave the outline pane open on the left side of the screen, so I get a sense of what an audience member sitting in the back row might see when the slide gets presented.

Clip art comeback?

I have been avoiding clip art for many years in my presentations. The graphics look clumsy and cliche compared to a high quality stock image. (Sometimes I am longing for that screen bean though).

After reading a few posts on Tom Kuhlmann's Rapid e-learning blog I might change my mind though, maybe. All these big image, big text slides start looking sort of the same. Some ideas by Tom:

Edit your clip art to make it interesting. Dramatically scale them up, so they become huge on the slide. Ungroup the object and remove items you do not need, or even swap heads on characters.
Keep the style of your clip art consistent. I did not know that you can search for specific consistent clip art styles, this one for example: style 802. More examples here.
Clip art is a good source to make black silhouette characters.

Add Tom's blog to your RSS reader if you are interested in this.

Telling a story with an interactive map

This interactive map is amazing: click a US county and it shows you were people who live their move to, and from where people are moving into this area. This is a (very cool) tool, but some serious DIY analysis is required to tell the story though.

I clicked around a bit and discovered some patterns:

Lots of people are moving back and forth between big cities
In the mid west, people move within a short radius
Upper east coast people move (retire?) to Florida
Etc.

To use this in a presentation there is no avoiding to going back to a series of screen dumps to take people by the hand through the data. (I am not a big believer in live demos during short presentations.

Condensing dozens of pages of market research into one

Some market research agencies must be paid by the page. Reports are filled with pages of text describing the market: United States: segment 1, 2, 3, volumes, revenues, pricing, Asia: the same, Europe: the same. All in long full text sentences ("The U.S. segment 1 market was $1.345bn in 2009, up 3.125% compared to the year before. On the other hand, segment 2 declined by 3.54% versus 2008 and is now $2.675bn in 2009").

Text is not the right way to convey this information. A simple one-page table with rounded figures can replace the entire document. And hey, you might even be able to put it on one slide in your presentation.

Maps: an increasingly important visualization tool

Look at this beautiful visualization of images taken in London. Blue: images taken by locals, red: ones by tourists (more cities here).

I am using maps more and more in my presentations. A map with color-coded segments is a much more powerful way to visualize data than a bar chart with a ranking of variables. I am still struggling to find good tools. There are very few good editable PowerPoint maps available, and Google maps screen shots are a bit cumbersome for large volumes of data points. Suggestions?

Google assumes you are smart enough to understand their technology

The recent post on the Google blog about an update to the search algorithm is an excellent example of how to explain technology:

No apologies or "I will not bother you with the detail", or "this is kind of complex and only an engineer (read someone more intelligent than you) will understand". No instead, explain things clearly, but without oversimplifying.
A simple graphic supports the verbal/written explanation

In case you missed, an earlier post on how Google uses cartoon characters to explain why its Chrome browser beats the competition.

A dense presentation that's actually good

Mary Meeker is a well-known Internet analyst. Every few months she updates her presentation about the state of the online world. Usually, dense slides are boring and fail to communicate a message. Not when every slide is packed with interesting data like in Mary's decks. This presentation will not fit a Steve-Jobs-style keynote address, but it contains a wealth of insights well worth digesting.

Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research

View more presentations from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time.

Microsoft Office web apps are going live

Microsoft is quietly rolling out its office applications in the cloud. They announced that the web-version of major Office applications are live, at least in a number of countries/languages. In Israel I could get it to work. Try for yourself here.

I have been following these in-the-cloud initiatives closely, and must conclude that Microsoft stands a good chance to be the winner. I chose Microsoft over Google docs for a recent project that involved collaboration in multiple countries.

It looks like the world is dividing into 2:

Consumers and freelancers using Google Docs, iPhones, prezi, SlideShare, Windows 7 or Apple OS, gmail, freely sharing stuff over social networks and insecure internet connections
Corporate workers using Blackberry, Microsoft Office 2003, Windows XP as a result of strict security guidelines and cost cutting in IT budgets (i.e., delaying upgrades of software). These people are struggling to find stuff in their bulging Outlook 2003 inbox.

The learning curve of switching user interfaces of Office applications is huge (read: costing a lot of money in downtime and helpdesk support), and for a big corporate to switch means that everyone is required to change habits: the 25-year old tech savvy analyst, the 60 year old secretary of the CEO, the CEO herself, to name a few. It's just hard to move them out of the Microsoft world.

Ultimately, the big corporates will move Office applications/data into the cloud, there are significant benefits to collaboration and simply finding stuff. They will go with Office Live though, and not with Google Docs...

There is another potential direction where this could go: the corporate equivalent of a facebook-style social network. Microsoft might well be the player who can pull this off. Not a place to share jokes and family pictures, but a tool for collaboration and information sharing in the enterprise.

BP logo contests

The BP logo was a very powerful one: an environmentally green flower/sun beaming with lots of positive energy. (Apparently it is based on the symbol of Helios, the personification of the sun in Greek mythology).

The fact that it was so good is proven by the enormous number of logo redesign contests that are being conducted now after the oil spill disaster. See this Google search. Here is one that offers a $200 bounty (still accepting entries), and here is a Flickr page with the entries from a contest organized by Greenpeace. The illustration below is taken from Draplin Design.

It is good to see that graphics design can spark so much emotion. Just a shame that is not a more positive one.

Semi-transparent text fills in PowerPoint

When you pick a color for a shape, PowerPoint gives you the option to set its transparency. However, when you select a color for your font, this dialog box does not appear. How to recreate this effect in PowerPoint? Here is the work around (PowerPoint 2007).

Select the text
Right click
Format text effects
Text fill
And now you can change the transparency!

The real story

We offer quality because we control the entire supply chain.

A bullet point on a presentation that I came across last week. This statement could have come out of any presentation. People hear it, but do not internalize it.

The real story is that competitors are small players working out of tiny factories in emerging markets stitching together poor quality products that just, but just, meet regulatory requirements. If that is the story, tell it.

VC pitch: talk about the elephant in the room

One of the new slides I included in my presentation lessons for entrepreneurs deck: talk about the elephant in the room. Some issues are just so obvious that you have to address them (Mark Suster gives a few examples here).

OK, you can decide to ignore them. The potential investor will say "thank you very much" and mentally shelf your pitch already while shaking your hand on the way to the door (peaking over your shoulder to that enormous animal standing in the corner).

Image via David Blackwell