Chart concept — low hanging fruit (that’s gone)

“Low-hanging fruit” is a term that is over-used in corporate meeting rooms. Recently I used a nice giraffe image to create a tongue in cheek slide explaining that all the easy opportunities have been picked away. (Yes I now giraffes eat leaves and…

Depth in images

It is very hard to capture the sensation of a wide panoramic view in a photograph. Making a picture of that stunning view will look boring when you view it later. Not when you capture an object nearby as well.

The summary page that does not stick

Many presentations start with a summary page, and most of them are stuck in the middle. They give a bit more information than “I am going to tell you why this is the best investment in cloud computing that you can make” and a bit less information than what is…

De-cluttering spaghetti charts

Sometimes, complexity is a visualization issue. When you design your slides, save the audience some work and do the disentangling for them. Example: there are 2 approaches to drawing a technology architecture:

1. Start with the boxes, then draw the links

Filtering background noise in self-defense

I grew up next to a rail track and always wondered why friends who came over to play looked startled when a massive freight train would shake the house. Currently I live close to an airport and my guest are running to window to see whether that plane…

Demo slide sequence versus demo video

I get this question a lot when designing presentations for technology startups: “Hey, can you embed our demo video into the presentation?” I almost always try to avoid this:

• Embedding videos always triggers Murphy’s law: on-stage…