Presentation Design

Rows or columns?

When designing a table there is always the question: which dimension to put in rows, and which in columns. Personally, I do what looks best, without applying any specific rules.

• If one dimension has labels that are very long, I prefer to put them in rows

Text on 16:9

Many people think that the wide screen 16:9 format looks modern for presentations, a slide fills the entire LCD screen, rather than being framed by 2 black bars or worse: stretched/distorted while you cannot find the screen remote in the conference room.



There is a problem though. Widescreen was…

3 things with 3 things each

Management consulting stories are always divided in 3 or 5 components (optimally starting with the same letter), and each of these is then divided into 3 sub components as well.



Connect, communicate, control. And to achieve connect we need to aggregate, accumulate, and…

You didn’t know you need this

If you pitch your product as a direct alternative to something else, the purchasing manager might say that it is a nice solution, but we already spent our budget on something that is acceptable. Often, it is better to convince the buyer that this is a new market, a new…

And also, and also, and also

There are so many wonderful things to say about your idea. all the problems it solves, all the things it can do, all the thought you have put in to make it perfect.



In the middle of the “and also, and also, and also, and also” the audience gets bored and wonders what it…

Self destructing presentations

Many presentations degenerate over time. What started fresh, clean, and straight to the point gets diluted over time.



More people start editing the presentation. They do not understand all the slides 100%, so they add bubbles and bullet points with text just to make sure…

I can only explain it in 45 minutes…

I often get this issue in client discussions. So we start out, and in that first meeting, it often turns out that the client can explain it in 5 to 10 minutes. The difference? Me impolitely interrupting monologues where I got the point already, and asking questions…

Background overload

Professors, researchers, and teachers like to start their lectures with an extensive discussion of the background and/or context of an issue. Talking about the background is useful if it adds to the story, if it does not it is boring content that fills up those important first minutes of your…