Color management in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Slowly I am working around some of the shortcomings that PowerPoint 2011 for Mac has in comparison to PowerPoint 2010 for Windows, and get to enjoy some of the advantages of the Mac platform. One of them is color management.

Built-in to a Mac is a powerful color management picker:

• With a magnifying glass, you can copy the color of any element on screen and add it as a color to your palette. For example, you can take the colors from your corporate logo to create a matching PowerPoint color scheme. In Windows, I had to rely on other applications (Photoshop, Paint) to do this.
• Your color palettes are stored across applications, so you set them in PowerPoint, they are available in Photoshop, Keynote, and any other applications you are using.

See this extensive post on robinwood.com on how to use the Mac color picking tool. Thank you Andrew Marritt for pointing me to this.

Jargon-free decks, even in medicine

I have now written a few pitch presentations in the healthcare sector. Medicine is complicated because professionals use incredibly difficult terminology (often derived from Latin) And the worst for a presentation designer: long words that are impossible to fit in boxes and shapes. A second factor adding to the complexity is the sheer breadth of knowledge required to understand things (doctors study for a long time before being allowed to practice).

The result of this: incomprehensible pitch decks that can only be understood by medical professionals or investors with some sort of medical degree.

In my designs, I try to get the best of both worlds: a presentation that is completely understandable to an outsider, and still credible to a medical professional.

• Start the presentation with a very short 101 on the disease area that can be skipped by professionals. Medicine is complicated, but when you zoom in to one micro therapy area it is actually surprisingly simple. Especially for medical devices (biotech is harder).
• Aim to write the presentation with zero professional terms. Usually I can get there with a few exceptions.

Medicine seems similar to the legal practice, where over the years, practitioners developed their own "secret language". It is time to open this up, especially when doctors need to face the outside world to get their startup ideas funded. 

Why don't we see more video pitches?

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that video pitches have a great future. Especially as an alternative to startup fund raising decks that now get emailed "cold" to potential investors. Why?

• The world is moving to a minimalist presentation design style that makes it harder to understand decks without verbal explanation.
  
• Somehow, I find audio tracks not very interesting to listen to. They take too long for a situation where you do not have direct interaction with the speaker. They just go on and on
• Startup pitch competitions have shown me that it is possible to get across a lot in just a few minutes of presentation time. You just need to prepare. Videos are high profile, people will invest a lot of time in getting it right. The result will be a higher quality pitch than someone "winging it" in front of a live audience
• A very important part of an investor pitch is the team. A video of the presenter gives already some clue about the CEO of the business.
• You can make sure people will listen to your entire story. When you set expectations (watch this 5 minute video) and investors see the counter counting down I think it is highly likely that they will go through to the end. Much more likely than a slide deck: click, click, click, "bleep" from the Blackberry and they get distracted.

Other big applications could be job interviews, or university applications.

You should check out a new online presentation sharing service: present.me, it creates a slide window and a video window to deliver your presentation.

Book review - The visual dictionary of typography

The Visual Dictionary of Typography (affiliate link) is a nice little book that explains 250 concepts in typography, each using a visual example. Dictionary is the wrong title, this is not a reference book, but rather something to browse through and explore. I stumbled on many terms that I have never heard of before. On the other hand, the book also contains some entries that are a bit forced: music for example.

Here are the entries for the letter V to give you an example of the contents:

• Vector
• Vernacular
• Vertical alignment
• Virgule

All in all a nice little book, I would get it in print rather than as an eBook.

[VIDEO] Here is live audience interaction for you

In New York the last week of July

I am planning another trip to New York in the last week of July. I will be speaking at an investor relations conference about presenting to Wall Street. More details to follow.

The presentation snowball

Sometimes it is a enough for a good slide deck to make a small difference in order to win the big prize. Take fund raising for example.

• A good slide deck gives you a slightly higher probability of getting through the email screen
• Better slides lift your confidence just a tiny bit when presenting
• When your presentation is better, you get more meetings, you get to practice more, your story gets better, you get more meetings

Even a small difference can have a big impact.

[VIDEO] NYU presentation on VC pitching

After the introduction presentation by venture capitalist Mark Suster, the people over at SalesCrunch are now starting to post the videos of my own NYU presentations online. Yesterday number 1 (out of 7) went up, and it provides a much needed audio track to my slightly cryptical slides.

Speaking at the Technion in Haifa next week

Just a heads up that I will be speaking at the Technion university in Haifa next week June 1. My presentation will be part of BizTec's Annual Pitch Competition. I will be talking about how to design effective fundraising pitch presentations to venture capitalists and other investors. The details of the event can be found here.

Art Authority for Mac

I reviewed Art Authority, this great art catalogue for iPad earlier, and I just bought the same application for the Mac.



The bad news, the user interface is a lot worse than the iPad. You browse art in finder windows, sometimes via HTML pages.

The good news, working with the images is a lot easier. Since a good keyword search mechanism is still missing, a very large monitor makes it easier to browse icons of paintings. You can have multiple thumbnail windows open, and leave them open for a long time.

Ten dollars well spent. Twenty dollars well spent if you buy the iPad app as well.

Tilting Google maps

Someone asked me how I managed to create this image of my office location in a recent presentation.



The secret is in an earlier post about tilting Google maps. Pay attention to the angle that the satellite camera took when taking images closer to the ground. Rotate the image in such a way that shadows look natural.

Presentation design and web design

In many of my presentation design projects, the content of the presentation is already 80% available on the client's web site: a startup with an exciting new technology, the strategy of a big Fortune 500 company. But it clearly does not a good job at explaining the messages in an interesting visual way. (Otherwise you could just put a modified version of the web graphics as the background to your presentation).

Over the past years, we have learned a lot about effective design of presentation visuals. Maybe web design is next, and can learn from this process? Fewer buzzwords, fewer environmental policies, less prominent contact details. If bullet points and clutter do not work in a presentation, why would they work in a web site? Instead: the web page as a clutter-free presentation canvas that tells your story.

The implication will be that, similar to presentations, we get a level playing field in web design. A good web site template that can handle big images and sliders is all you need from the technical site. That is the easy part. The difficult bit is to get the story right.

Photo compositions that hurt the eye

Photo editing software can do a lot, and it is getting increasingly used in advertising. This ad however shows its limitation. When you try to be photo-realistic and it is not 100% right, it just hurts the eyes. The concept behind the ad is good, the execution not.



Via Ads of the World.

Mark Suster on pitching to VCs

The great people of SalesCrunch are beginning to put the videos from my New York presentations online. First up is Mark Suster, a well-known venture capitalist from LA who introduces my presentation on pitching VCs





Mark is one of the best VC bloggers around, and I was honored when he offered to introduce my presentation in New York in person. We found out the night before that we happened to be in the same city (it is a statistically low probability that 2 people from Tel Aviv and Los Angeles are at the same time in New York).

More videos to come. Thank you Ann Lupo for the video recording and editing.

Voice pacing

Here is an interesting article about voice pacing on the BBC web site. Researches analyzed voice patterns of 1,400 attempts to get people to do a phone service. Here they are:

• Speak moderately fast
• Pause
• Don't change the pitch of your voice too much

You could re-write these findings as follows:

• Be energetic and enthusiastic
• Don't rattle off a pre-programmed script
• Act normal

In short, have a human conversation.

Editable maps in PowerPoint

I do not agree with the design approach of the majority of free template databases on the web. Many of these sites are built to attract Google traffic and host cluttered templates that seem nothing more than a more colorful extension of Microsoft's standard bullet point opening screen.

Presentationmagazine.com fits somewhere in the middle. Managed by Jonty Pearce, It hosts some standard PowerPoint templates that I would not use in a design, but also has a number of useful articles.

The really useful content of this web site however is its library of free editable PowerPoint maps. You can download them and color states, countries and continents with your own colors. An excellent resource.

PowerPoint feature wish list for Microsoft

My wish list of features to be included in PowerPoint. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

• Custom font embed (available in PPT 2010)
• Ability to set custom theme fonts (available in PPT 2010)
• Selection pane (available in PPT 2010)
• Define custom grid spacing (available in PPT 2010)
• Ability to lock the static grid

PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

• Better integration with photo browsers (available in PPT 2011)
• Included weights in font selection menu (available in PPT 2011)

Magic Mouse versus Logitec MX mouse versus Magic Trackpad

I have experimenting with various input devices over the past month.

• The Logitech MX mouse: a leftover from my old PC. Large to fill the palm of your hand completely, this device has worked for me very well over the past years. If there is one drawback it is the materials it is made off. This fake-velvet plastic actually wears off after long use, making the piece of hardware that you touch all day, every day of the year look and feel dirty.
• The Apple Magic Mouse. I actually had to get used to this device for a few days. Unlike the Logitech mouse, it is small. You move it with your thumb and index finger. The surface is made of glass enabling you to manipulate the cursor and zoom just like you can do on a track pad. I love the clean material (glass), no more sticky plastic on your fingers. Sometimes though, the scrolling can be a bit unpredictable in PowerPoint, oops I just went 2 pages up.
• The Apple Magic Trackpad is a standalone version of the trackpad that is usually found in laptops. It has a nice large surface, and nice click. For a casual computer user, this would be the one I recommend. For the professional designer (me included), I still prefer a mouse to manipulate and drag shapes across the screen.

After a month, I end up working with the Magic Mouse most of the time. I still need to find a solution for that unpredictable scrolling somehow.

Helvetica - the movie

I finally managed to get my hands on the movie Helvetica (affiliate link). It is a wonderful documentary about this famous type face, and how it has managed to infiltrate our daily lives on almost anything we see written in the street. Beautiful movie shots, nice music, and interviews with some well-known typographers.



Somewhere hidden inside the movie is an interview with typographer Erik Spiekermann where he gives his opinion about the typeface helvetica. He speaks very quickly but in a few seconds he makes a great number of points that I have started to notice as well: Helvetica works great with lots of white space around it and Helvetica needs careful attention with weights. (In fact I think one of the reasons that Arial looks so poor is that people usually only use the regular and bold variants. Helvetica comes in an endless range of weights.)

Security and presentations

The presentations I design for conferences are in the public domain (these are the ones you will find as examples on my web site). Almost all other ones are confidential. Fund raising pitches for startups (although I think most startups could actually be better off sharing these stories with the world), sales presentations (same here), and last but not least, quarterly results presentations to the stock market (incredibly sensitive a week before the announcement, completely public 5 minutes after).

I have started to beef up the security of my IT infrastructure, especially for these earnings announcement. The biggest risk is not so much becoming the victim of a crime, it is human error. Forgetting your laptop somewhere, typing in the wrong email address and sending a highly confidential document to the wrong person.

Here are some basic steps you can do to beef up your security.

1. Password-protect your laptop and have the screen lock up after you left your device standing unattended for 15 minutes.
2. Send confidential files only by hitting "reply" to an earlier message by the trusted person to prevent making typos in the name (and have your email program trying to be helpful and pulling up the email address of a random person)
3. Put PowerPoint files in an encrypted WinZip file before emailing them. Standard PowerPoint passwords can easily be broken, you can Google the technique to do this easily. An encrypted WinZip file covers you if you send the file to the wrong person by accident. (There is also a WinZip version for Mac, it costs $30)
4. For added security, apply a full encryption of the harddisk, or put highly confidential files in an encrypted folder on your disk. The free open source utility TrueCrypt is great for this. 

When the analogy gets too complicated

Yesterday I spent hours trying to find the perfect analogy for a company that sell a complex storage technology. After a while I realized that while an analogy would be really good to describe one aspect of the story, it would be impossible to find one that covers all issues involved. The analogies become more complex than the technology itself.

Plan B: back to the drawing board and start explaining the technology itself with simple visuals, without analogies.

Borrowing frameworks

Consulting firms, market research companies, universities produce an endless amount of complex and sophisticated-looking frameworks. Often, I see people borrowing one, re-drawing it, or overwriting the labels with their own text. It is better than you don't.

• Frameworks are highly specific to a certain context, so they are unlikely to work when you borrow them for your own presentation
• Frameworks are great to solve problems, to discuss issues with a small audience who has worked with it before, but are incredibly poor at communicating to a large audience

Instead, sketch your own simple, specific, and relevant diagram on a piece of paper and replicate that in PowerPoint.

Bullet points and abs

I always preach that the look and feel of an investor presentation should match the brand identity of the company.

Abercombie & Fitch sticks to this principle. See the investor presentation here.  The Footnote website comments:

We counted no fewer than 13 slides that featured shirtless dudes baring their pecs. That’s nearly 20% of the slides in the 67-slide deck. The PowerPoint was part of the company’s Investors Day earlier this week. The presentation seems to have gone well, judging by this brief WSJ article that notes that Abercrombie stock climbed over 8% on Tuesday, in part, it seems, based on the bullish projections made during the presentation. So there was some substance in between the eye-candy slides.

On a more serious note, this investor presentation has some good and bad practices. The good:

• Muted formatting
• The use of maps to highlight global expansion
• The real images of the customer excitement in the stories

Things that could have been done better:

• Too many bullet points, the numbers would have looked even more impressive if they were put into data charts
• I like the big bold "$1.0bn" type text across the maps, just don't put financial data in red.

Thank you Robert Lakin. Image by Abercombie & Fitch.

Clean up your mess

Daniel Higginbotham has set a little web site with a useful recap of some important design principles. He called it www.visualmess.com. Worth skimming through. Now that I get to think of it, I am actually in the cleaning business...