Add some polish to that presentation
CEOs call me all the time. Like, the other day, Tony Faure, ex-CEO of ninemsn.com.au and founder of Yahoo! Australia & NZ, called me. Actually, that’s not strictly true — I called him first for some advice, and during that call he also asked me for some help.
Tony was due to speak at Australia’s CPA Congress 2009, on the topic of What Makes A Great CEO?. Tony’s an engaging and accomplished keynote speaker and doesn’t need any coaching from me on his delivery. Instead, he was hoping I could make his PowerPoint slides look as good as he sounds.
At first, I wasn’t sure I could help. “CPA” is short for “Chartered Practicing Accountant” and frankly, I can count on two fingers the number of accountants I’d choose to have an interesting conversation with (Goche, Elias, thanks for being interesting.) CPAs aren’t an audience I easily connect with.
But I connected with Tony’s topic. While I’m not a world-class designer, sometimes a designer who understands your topic is more important than a designer who can, say, draw a horse. And I’ve been designing and presenting in PowerPoint and Keynote for a very long time.
But enough about me, let’s see what you think about me.
The original slide deck
Here’s Tony’s original PowerPoint slide deck:
The reworked slide deck
Now, here’s my reworking of his material:
Changed the point of balance
Tony’s original slides are all balanced in the horizontal and vertical centre of the slides. Moving headlines and text to the corners of the slides unbalances the layout and adds a sense of tension. The eye anticipates a coming change which will re-balance the proportion of the page. That expectation holds the viewer’s interest a little longer than usual. This is a trick I learned from Garr Reynolds, of Presentation Zen.
The headlines subheads are all centered text, which makes each slide look even more balanced, so changing them to left-justified helps add tension. It also adds readability, since Western readers find it easier to start each line from a common left margin.
Added colour, weight
The original slides are black and white. While the stark simplicity of black and white can work well, it works best if you use good typography and grey-scale images. Grey-scale images weren’t available and good typography is always difficult in PowerPoint, even more so if moving between Mac and PC versions. Instead, I used a heavier sans-serif font and introduced a secondary colour.
There aren’t many colours strong enough to hold up against black and white. Orange is up to the job, and it’s a positive colour psychologically, associated with new ideas, creativity and energy. Could I have used a wider colour palette? Probably, but then I’d be wading into a swamp of PowerPoint-vs-projector-related colour matching headaches, and Presentation Zen has taught me never to use more colours when less colours will suffice.
To add some depth to the ’stage’ of the presentation I used Apple’s Keynote presentation software to add a reflection to the base of the headlines on slides that included only text. The effect starts at slide 10 (you won’t see it on the Slideshare version unless you display the presentation at full-screen size).
Photo editing
Many of Tony’s photos were low resolution and no high-resolution versions were available. I replaced some of his images with similar images I sourced from iStockPhoto.com and Flickr’s CreativeCommons search where I could. Where Tony needed a photo of a CEO and only a low-resolution version was available, I used the Mac software Picturesque to rotate the image in the Z axis and add a reflection (I could also have added the reflection in Keynote, but not the rotation.) Rotating the image compresses the pixels in the ‘far’ end of the image, and that and the perspective effect disguises the fact that there aren’t as many pixels there as the brain would like to see.
Cool software it may be but even Picturesque can't make a photo of me more attractive.
Rotating the images also meant they required less horizontal area, which allowed me to widen the column used for the CEO quotes, which adds readability — it makes the quote seem shorter and the eye has to skip less often from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.
Rupert Murdoch versus Steve Ballmer video
Tony wanted to make a point about how media people are meant to be a little bit crazy and tech people aren’t, when really, if you observe Rupert Murdoch and Steve Ballmer in action, the reverse is usually true.
The first challenge was to show a video of Steve Ballmer of Microsoft doing one of his famous dances across a stage. But pulling this off on the congress stage would be very challenging. First, showing a YouTube video in a room almost guaranteed not to have good internet access would be a disaster. Saving a video to disk and then playing it from the presentation PC might be possible but would require testing and setup that Tony would not want to do. And finally, while it was a good point to make, asking the audience to sit through a minute of Steve Ballmer dancing followed by Rupert Murdoch saying nothing very interesting would be labouring the point way too far. What we really needed was to bring the two CEOs together onto the same slide. But how?
To pull this off, I used ScreenFlow to record a YouTube video of Murdoch and another separate video of Ballmer. (By doing this I displayed a cavalier attitude to the very copyright issues Murdoch is railing against and YouTube makes a big business from bending. Contact me and I’ll take them straight down, promise.) Once I’d recorded them, in a ScreenFlow composing window I was able to resize both videos so they’d both fit on one screen. Then I performed the same reflection-and-rotation trick I’d performed on the still images earlier, thereby partly disguising how low-res the source material was. I cued the videos to start at different times so the audience would get the context of the Ballmer video first, and then be able to catch the beginning of the Murdoch clip. I love ScreenFlow and Picturesque!
Slideshare doesn’t support embedded videos from PowerPoint presentations so here is the video from slide four:
How’d I do?
Should you always hire an ex-product director to redesign your PowerPoint slides? Probably not. But I like to think my understanding of Tony’s topic and the points he was making helped me do a better job. Do you agree? Have you spotted a hundred things wrong with my design? Do you want to defend Rupert’s reputation as a change agent, test pilot and gambling man? Are you an angry typecast accountant? Please let me know in the comments section below…
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