New free fonts from Google

Google is going through a design metamorphosis and launching a lot of new products and features. Designers should take note of a new series of 180 free fonts. Many of the free fonts available are the kind you would use to spice the invitation for your children's birthday party, and they usually are not presented on a web site that allows you to search and compare them.



Not so with Google. Most of the fonts are for serious use and are viable replacements for Arial, Calibri and Times New Roman. Also, there are some good extra black ones for headlines and titles. The search interface is great, enabling you to select styles and test out words, sentences, and paragraphs.

You can check the new Google fonts out here.

Why designers cannot for work free...

I love 99% of the work I do, except for the 1% that is fee discussions. Below is the logic why it is so hard for designers to do work for free. I know that this blog is read by many independent professionals, you are more than welcome to link to it if you need to.

• You pay for a design service, rather than hours of labor. Designers bring with them years of experience, they create a story for you to tell that was not there before. The design of the actual slides does not take the time, it is the iterative design process that you as a client are taken through. You purchased your story, a different mind set than buying slides, or buying hours.
• Like in any other (larger) business, not all top line revenue is profit. Designers buy computers, software, books, printers, office infrastructure, Internet connections, phone lines, cars, go on holiday, need a pension, rent an office, and pay taxes just to name a few of the expense items.
• Design-as-a-service on a variable cost basis deserves a premium. Most customers cannot afford to hire a full time, highly experienced and talented designer (the cost is too high, and they do not have enough work to keep her busy throughout the year). In exchange for offering design services on an as needed basis, designers expect to be compensated for the inefficiency of not being able to get paid 100% of the time. Negotiating projects takes time that cannot be charged. But the result of this model: a win-win for both parties. 
• If you cannot agree on fees, that probably means that there is a mismatch of expectations on both sides. In today's interconnected world (cliche alert) this is not a problem. Among the thousands of designers out there, there is probably one that fits the client's profile. Among the thousands of clients out there, there are other one's that fit the designer's profile. Both sides just need to move on.
• Asking a designer to get paid once you managed to raise money six month from now (and not get paid if the client failed) is the same as asking a stranger in the street to hand over hard cash as an investment in your business. The designer might agree, but it is an investment decision. Does she believe in the concept of your business, and is she compensated for the risk she is taking like any other investor would? Clients need to realize that asking a 1-person design firm to put in cash in their business is different from asking a large supplier to do the same. In the designer's case, it is her own money, in case of the big supplier, it is "other people's money"

Most of the time when I have to descend into this type of discussion, the project in the end does not happen, somehow it did not click between me and the client. Luckily this does not happen that often. 

In case you have not seen it, you should check out this great flow diagram: Should I work for free?. 

A last piece of advice to designers, do not compromise on the quality of the work when a client puts pressure on the budget. Either take the financial hit but do your art as good as you can, or do not do the project. The client will not understand it when you say that this is not the sort of quality you usually deliver. You are as good as the work you delivered in your last project.

Impressions of the Gary Vaynerchuk talk in Tel Aviv

Gary Vaynerchuk spoke live at an event organized by the Tel Aviv office of advertising agency McCann Erickson last night, and it was the first time that I got to see him on stage in person.

Gary became an Internet celebrity after he started using wine reviews in video format to transform his family liquor business from a mom and pop store to a major force in the US market. Since then, he he broadened his activities. He is a well-known author of books, runs a marketing consulting firm, and is a sought after speaker.



The one thing that got him were he is, is for sure his passion and energy that shines through in his presentation style. One of his opening statements was that every single brand that has been successful over the past 150 years has been one that managed to tell its story well.

Gary delivers a great performance in a unique style while breaking many of the rules of presentation delivery. And maybe that is what makes it interesting. He can pace back and forth, looking at the floor while speaking. His story line is an improvised sequence of stories. But these stories are memorable and delivered well.

Gary is good at building up tension in a talk. He is hinting at a crucial question he will ask you, or that he is about to reveal a major insight (what do I think that the Old Spice guy campaign was a failure), but he waits and waits with giving the answer.

It was a shame that after this powerful, high-energy talk that on multiple occasions challenged the practices of most people in the audience (traditional advertising agency staff), the audience was mostly silence and had limited questions (I felt compelled to ask one, which I usually do not do). Maybe it is a bit hard for a Israeli/Hebrew audience to follow the flood of high speed English.

Budget enough time for design

Theory and rules are not enough to create good looking slides. It is a bit like interior design. Architects can use nice materials, pick matching colors, and still, somehow the overall design does not look good. And you cannot exactly pinpoint why this is.

I often have these moments where I am starting over, trying again, do something different, put a design away to give it a few extra days, because it just does not feel right, despite that I used good fonts, matching colors, the right proportions. So why is it not good? I would not be able to tell you.

This is not a problem if you allow enough time for the design process.

I will be hosting a webinar this Wednesday

This Wednesday, 29 June, at 15:00 EST I will be hosting a webinar about presentation design. Maybe useful for those who were not able to join my NYU presentations. The event is hosted by SalesCrunch, details on how to register are here.

Using your laptop monitor as a 2nd monitor

Computer screens have gotten bigger and bigger, and I suspect that most users will use the extra screen real estate to keep multiple windows open on their desktop. One for email, one for Twitter, one for PowerPoint, one for Skype. Designers do not have this luxury to spread everything out in front of them, they need a big calm design environment with minimal distraction. My PowerPoint or Keynote screen is always set to the maximum.

I used to work with a laptop in clam shell mode in my office: the laptop is closed, and a big external monitor is used as a display. For copying and pasting, inserting Excel charts in PowerPoint, I was constantly moving windows around. Until yesterday, as I looked at the closed laptop screen.

So now I created a dual monitor screen set up. My slide design application is up full screen on the large monitor, and my laptop screen is used as a collection bin for all kind of bits. It has been a liberation. My 17" laptop actually is big enough for the little side apps that I am running in that screen. Great.

If you are on a Mac, here is how to do it:

Device proliferation: email PDFs instead of PPTXs

It is better to email a PDF of your presentation than the original PPTX PowerPoint file.

1. Fonts get rendered correctly, even if the receiving party does not have them installed on their computer. This is especially true now that more and more people are starting to use Macs and are running PowerPoint for Mac, an application that does not allow font embedding. 
2. Many people open PPTX files on their Blackberry. A PDF is your safest bet that everything renders correctly.
3. Many people use Gmail as their email system (hiding a gmail address behind what looks like a regular domain). In Gmail, you have the option to view a file rather than downloading and opening it. When you select view, the document gets opened in Google Docs, which is not very good at rendering PowerPoint files (not only fonts go wrong, but entire shapes can go missing)
4. A PDF opens nicer and cleaner than a PPTX that lands in you the slide edit mode.
5. PDF file sizes are usually a lot smaller than PPTX file sizes.

The consequence of all this is that you should think twice about using animations in your slides. I switch more and more to just copying a slide and building content page by page, so it will show correctly in PDF format.

Motion graphics: Stuxnet virus explained

Here is an impressive piece of video animation work by Patrick Clair. Watch the use of narrow all caps fonts.

Using hand drawn graphics in slides

Hand drawn graphics can work great together with images in slides. As an example, see these ads below. (I am not sure whether these ads do a good job in selling markers, they are great though in warning you to take care of your health).



It is possible to draw shapes using a mouse or a drawing pad in PowerPoint, but I always find it hard to replicate that marker effect. Instead, I scan in real hand writing using a scanner, and then kill the white background with the Photoshop color range filter.

1970s label font

The Impact label font by Tension Type can work great in a presentation design. It is open source, you can download it here at Dafont. It also comes in a white reverse version.

Sentences are useful sometimes

Back at McKinsey in the 1990s we would write a long-hand sentence, or a "lead" at the top of every slide (similar in length to today's 140-character Tweets. This sentence would give you the message of the chart and you could get the whole story by reading all the leads in a document, without looking at the exhibits below.

I am re-discovering the sentence recently.

1. In some presentation designs, I switch to a slide template with a 2 line title, creating space for longer sentences at the top of a slide.
2. Certain thoughts or concepts are just too complex to shorten to 2 bullets of 3 words each, so I am just writing them out.

White frames or not?

Most slides with images work best when you scale up the photograph until it bleeds of the page.



Making the image a bit smaller leaves a distracting white border around your slides that does not look good when projected on a big screen.



However, recently I started using a layout that is very often used in print advertising. An image which is more horizontally cut and more white space above and below the image. It is maybe not the best for large on-screen key note presentations, but it looks great for corporate decks that are discussed in a smaller setting.



This layout is often used in CD covers, see Similar to this album cover of a 1990s hit by Everything but the girl:

Sync narrative and visuals in web presentations

Online presentation sharing services such as SlideShare allow you to upload an audio track alongside your slides. You need to make sure that the narrative is exactly in sync with the visuals.

I have seen (heard) examples where the audio presenter starts talking about data or concepts that are not present on the visual in front of you. As a result, the brain starts to wander off, looking for missing pieces of information on the slide.

When talking to a live audience in person, you can draw the attention from the visual back to you. An exact sync is less important, and it is easy to fit in a slide story. During a short web presentation with audio, your audience is using the narrative as an explanation of the slides. Make sure they are lined up.

Sometimes, when you are short in time, that might actually mean inserting a slide with some quick (very short) bullets (did I just write that?) or a short sentence to support your side story. Something like: "Case example: 22% cost savings"

Making Gmail more Zen

We sit almost our entire day behind a screen, and most applications we run are an ugly collection of screen clutter. Clutter and distractions are creativity killers. Gmail is incredibly useful, but also incredibly ugly. Here is a partial solution, Ansel Santosa has designed minimalist Gmail a Chrome extension that let's you switch off unwanted features.

Font mix up that hurts the eye

Finally I spotted a newspaper ad of the store that I often drive by in the morning. A mix up of typography that hurts the eye. Here in Israel, many people might not notice since they are used to seeing a different character set all together.



Update: this company actually operates stores all around the world, with the same logo...

And then he started arguing with me!

You do not win over VCs by trying to prove your point by entering a debating contest (even if you are right). The two of you have to sit on a Board together. The VC needs to pick Board seats, the entrepreneur needs to pick battles.

Any designers out there who can help me out?

Over the past year, things have gotten increasingly busy for me. Two weeks ago for example, I landed new clients in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Milan, and Calgary. Of course, not every week is like this, but still.

I would like to experiment whether it is possible to scale my business without investing in people on the payroll and fixed office infrastructure, working with people on a project-by-project basis. As I look around me and see other designers present themselves, I realize that each and every one has their own specific strengths. I would be great to use that talent and bundle it into a great client proposition.

To start, I would like to get a better idea who is out there. If you are interested, do not post in the comments, but you can contact met at jan [at] ideatransplant [dot] com, put "iamadesigner" in the headline so my gmail filter catches you and specify what your specific strengths are, maybe link to some examples of your work, and (only if you want) give me a sense of the sort of commercial terms you usually work on.

Maybe this is you (obviously not all of these need to apply):

• Someone who can clean up slides once the overall design has set
• Someone who is great at finding images to visualize a concept
• Someone who is a master at Adobe Illustrator
• Someone who is a master in Photoshop
• Someone who can transform a PowerPont presentation into beautiful motion graphics
• Someone who is an expert in data visualization
• Someone who is great at taping video interviews/presentations

I have no idea whether this freelance network model will work/happen, but if I do not reach out, it will for sure not happen. In the worst case, I will get a list of people I can refer work to that I cannot do myself, either because of a time constraint, or a mismatch in skills required.

Observations after Apple's keynote

Through a series of live bloggers and buffering live streams I managed to catch most of Apple's keynote yesterday (you can now watch the Apple keynote video here). The presentation covered a lot and dot all is relevant for presentation design. Here are some points that struck me.

• A move to more minimalist productivity applications. First Internet browsers started cutting screen clutter, now it is the turn of other applications. The new Lion operating system will have a standard full screen mode into it.
• A move away from the file system that was created in the 1980s, where you had to remember file names, locations, worry about saving frequently, and make sure not to overwrite versions. The iCloud syncing service will make files available on all connected devices. Lion seems to support a sophisticated version management system so you do no to saving your files with extension 1, 2, 3, etc. (does it only work in iWork or also in Microsoft Office?), and applications now remember how you left things when you closed them down.
• A move back to keyboard and touchpad short cuts. Back in the 1990s I would know almost all keyboard short cuts available. With the advent of the mouse, I forgot all of them, just using arrow keys and mouse clicks. That is changing again. More and more menu navigation is going through short cuts.

It was interesting to see how the whole presentation still worked well despite a reduced role of Steve Jobs. Good slide design, careful script writing, and practice-practice-practice turns everyone into a great presenter.

The 3 minute pitch

Last week I was presenting at a startup pitch competition at the Technion University in Haifa, Israel. After my talk, the contestants had 3 minute each to pitch their business idea. Some observations inspired by the evening, and not necessarily related to any of the contestants.

• Do not speak too fast. It is better to make sure the audience gets all you say, than cram in a 10 minute pitch in 3 minutes. OK, do not go the other extreme and speak so slowly that it becomes boring to listen to.
• Say what you are doing early on. Starting with a nice story and revealing your venture at 2:10 gives the audience 50 seconds to assess your business. While I always advocate to sell the problem, not the solution, sometimes you might have to cut the problem section short if you have just 3 minutes. "Gasoline prices are high", that is it, time to move on to what you want to do about it.
• Decide what is really important in a first pitch. Some details such as extensive elaborations on revenue models or team backgrounds can probably wait for your second 30 minute pitch.
• Do not bring up concerns that take a lot of time to explain, you want to keep the excitement and momentum going. Examples: complicated comparisons against the competition, or a defense why you picked a small market segment to start. Three minutes is not enough to present the results of a strategy consulting project.

The objective of 3 minute pitch is not to land the investment, it is to get an invitation to a 30 minute meeting.

Monet, poppies, and color rhythm

Nature and artists are still better at producing certain colors than computers. Look at the famous painting Poppies at Argenteuil by Monet. If you were the pick the blue green color and copy the RGB values into your PowerPoint presentation, the result would be dull. The rhythm of the brush strokes adds something.



In spring, there are many flower fields like these in Israel. The green blue color is created by the contrast between the top and the bottom of the leaves: grey green and yellow green. The wind moving the leaves creates the color effect. In an earlier post I discussed a painting by Jan van Eyck with a similar effect of alternating and interacting colors.

This painting is also a great example of how to create movement in a static image. The horizon and the diagonal line between the two ladies set the composition. Look how the red flowers are blurry dots of paint without much detail, and how they get incredibly big close to the front. Flowers in the wind never sit still, but rather we watch them go round, leaving a much bigger impression than the space they actually occupy.

This painting has multiple levels of experience, an almost impossible feature to recreate in a PowerPoint slide, but a reminder about what visuals ultimately are: pieces of emotional input. First you see a landscape, then you see things moving in the wind, hear the wind whistling, feel that spring sensation when you venture out of your cold house into the sun and sense your skin warming up from the outside. The bright red, blue green contrast, plus the movements of the children running down the hill might just remind you that life is all about those simple pleasures and moments of beauty.

Minimalist design environments: Byword

Even more than visual design, writing text can easily be interrupted by clutter and screen distractions. Yesterday’s launch of iA Writer for Mac prompted me to have a look around for minimalist word processing tools. This review in The Next Web led me to Byword, which I am using right now to write this blog post.

It is a liberating experience, especially now that I do not have worry about the HTML formatting of my text that up until now destroyed all sense of lay out in my blog posts.

I am waiting for the day that a similar tool will appear for slide design as well, but I guess it will be a bigger challenge since visual design requires a much broader set of tools than simply writing text.

Finding space for labels of small pie slices

In pie diagrams, the small pieces always come in last, and end up close to the top of the pie chart. Adding readable labels becomes difficult as the horizontal space for them is small.

I find it better to rotate the pie chart in such a way that the smaller pieces get in a horizontal position, so you have space to write out the labels of them. The illustration shows an example.

Speaking tonight at the Technion [details]

Just a reminder that I will be speaking at the Technion tonight about designing investor pitches. I will be opening the Pitching Competition at 18:30 in the Industrial Engineering building in room 424 (4th floor).

A new way to use LEGO in your slides

Recently, I needed to find a good visualization of modularity in a presentation. Lego is a nice concept, but maybe a bit cliché. Not if you use this really cool LEGO design tool: LEGO Digital Designer. It is a full 3D design environment in which you can create any LEGO object you want, and even submit it to LEGO to buy a box with the pieces plus a build instruction. It comes with a large online library where people can upload and download designs.

Here is an example of the Empire State Building. You switch on an animation of how the building is built up as the bricks fly in from all directions. Great stuff.





If you are in to LEGO, here are some earlier posts about it. Christoph Niemann uses LEGO to model New York city. This ad visualizes the power of imagination that kids have, but grown ups seem to have lost.