How to evaluate a designer

The web is full of freelance presentation designers and full of sample portfolios. How to get a true feel for the style/skills of a designer: go beyond pages 1, 2, or 3, and look at a page somewhere in the middle of the deck. What does the designer do when no one is looking?

Slides versus speaker notes

During a long plane flight to San Francsico I could see a number of people editing their presentations while stuck in the air for more than 10 hours.



Many of them were editing the exact sequence of what they were going to say to the audience. Changing a sentence, switching the…

Demo vs introduction

A live app demo is not the same as an introduction of what your app does. Getting the technology to work, logging in as a dummy user, creating some dummy files, showing some dummy output, changing some settings, quickly going back to the management console, before switching to the user…

Humour in presentations

Jokes can be great ice breakers in presentations. Jokes can also be incredibly awkward when introduced in the wrong meeting, at the wrong time, with an audience who is not ready for them.



Here is my advice: do not hardwire risky jokes into your slides, but rather, keep the option to…

Apple Keynote is broken

I really try to like the latest version (6, October 2013) of Apple Keynote, but a year later, I still cannot. The user interface in the latest release has been cleaned up (gone is the cramped inspector window), and initially I thought I would overcome the initial confusion where…

Overdoing the icons

It is tempting to use an icon for everything in your presentation: enterprise customer, picture of a guy in suit; small business, picture of a chef; consumer segment, picture of a smiling woman. Alternative: a factory icon, a house icon, a face icon. Other alternative: browse the clip art…

The company shareholders

If you are are a company shareholder, it is reassuring to see the shareholdings on the first or second page of the company presentation.



For everyone else, the shareholdings can go somewhere in the back.

VC body language

Last week, I sat in the same seat many of my clients sit in: the one facing a VC. I had a couple of meetings in the valley to test initial appetite for my “PowerPoint killer” web app.



The body language in these meetings was very interesting. In all these meetings you could clearly see when…

Going off script

When you get a question during your presentation, should you abandon your story flow and answer it? It depends.

• For very large audiences, no. One person’s question does not merit throwing out your carefully crafted story line and potentially confuse the rest of the…