Presentation Designers: In The Room Where it Happens.

Do you want a backstage pass to participate in some of the most important discussions business leaders make? Consider a career as a Presentation Designer.

Like many other high stakes presentation consultants, I have worked on powerpoint files that 99.99% of the employees at that organization should never see. [Securely empties trash]

Like many of my Presentation Designer peers, companies have flown me around the country and world to have a seat at the table alongside Fortune 500 CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CTOs, and their teams, as we decide which stories to keep, and which slides to leave on the cutting room floor, hours before they took the stage to present their grand company vision or big product keynote to an arena packed with eager conference attendees.

I don’t have an MBA, and I don’t want to diminish the value of that highly appealing degree (In fact I’d love to take two years off to nerd out on business and party with a cohort of inspiring leaders, come on!). Part of me wonders, though, if any book, class or curriculum could replace some of the experiences I’ve gained working as a high stakes Presentation Designer now for some 7-8 years.

The key word there is “Presentation." I’m a big believer in specialization. Trust me, I’ve been a generalist designer, so I feel I can safely speak to some of the advantages and disadvantages of expertise. I’ve done the “doer of all, master of none” thing, and I can tell you how that worked out for me. 

I think when you’re early in your career, you need to try and experience as much as possible to see what you dig, and what you detest. David Epstein’s book Range makes a fantastic case for the value “be[ing] a flirt with your possible selves,” as well as the power of “far transfer” thinking, I.e., one’s ability to take learnings from one field into another—seemingly entirely unrelated—field. Van Gogh was a far transfer thinker. So was Johannes Kepler. As long as you’re observant, you should start to recognize some patterns. David C. Baker talks about this in detail in his phenomenal book, The Business of Expertise, but when you’re in your “go wide” stage of your career, you will have to take the ups with the downs. Some jobs will straight up stoke your fire (remember those. It may come in handy). Others will drain you of your will to live. Some requests will induce a pit in your stomach when you realize the job you just sold is completely outside of your skillset. And of course, you will fulfill many, many requests to “Let’s make these social graphics really pop!” [Rests forehead on desk]

Early in my career, I finally got my foot in the door at a larger advertising agency, which was my then career goal. The gig was working as a junior level production artist, designing Flash banner ads all day every day for some very well known CPG brands. It was a great agency and I was surrounded by talented people. Something started bothering me, though. In my two years cranking out banner ads, I never once had a direct conversation with the client who was making decisions on my work. I understand why, I was a junior who had given my employer no reason to trust what words might come out of my mouth in front of a client. Now that I own my own small agency, I do understand why a larger, full-service agency needs the various levels of Project and Account Managers. However, my younger, more skeptical self, found the ensuing games of telephone quite comical. Okay, I still find them funny.

After sending my designs to my Associate Creative Director, he would pass them to the Project Manager, who would send to the Account Manager, who would present them to the Client. After the Client (who was very likely an entry level Campaign Manager who would of course need to send things up-chain) was able to review and meet with our Account Manager to provide feedback, the Account Manager would set up a meeting with the Project Manager. The Project Manager would then set up a meeting with me and my ACD,  tell us that, wait for it, “the client wants the button to be blue.”

Let’s not overlook the fact that this all needs to be routed to Legal after we’re done “finalizing” the designs.

Once again, I am not here to talk crap, because it was clearly working for some people. The agency was thriving. The clients were happy. And I had a job. But after a few years, I was yearning for something and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But now I know what I was craving: access. 

As Lin-Manuel Miranda so famously framed it, I wanted to be in the room where it happened. 

As a young creative, I wanted direct access to the clients so that I could ask questions and discuss— not only the visual designs, but moreso, the greater strategy driving some of these decisions. Maybe I needed to "stay in my lane,” but I started to get impatient with the bloated process. 

I would have loved to save the Agency and Client hours of our lives back by just being present in those meetings, where I might be asked to just open up the design program, sharing my screen, and land on that perfect tint of blue for the CTA’s button (or tell them why it wasn’t blue in the first place). Instant buy-in saves hours of meeting time, and most importantly, eliminates so many of those communication mishaps and nuance that can so easily be lost in translation, meeting after meeting after meeting.

The great game of telephone has no place in presentation design, and that is why I love this damn medium. 

I noticed this immediately when, as a freelance designer, I started receiving more and more PowerPoint slide redesign requests. Being remote, my client and I would do rapid iteration on a slide, I’d send my version, she would sling that slide back with a few notes, and we found this amazingly lean workflow to help get some really important work done in a matter of hours, not weeks. And now, with more screensharing options, my teammates and I have fully embraced this idea of direct-to-creative “live design” to help save rounds and rounds of emails, collaborating directly with our amazing clients and getting buy-in before we end the call. 

Sure, you need to be able to work under the gun and under pressure. If you can’t work at event pace, or are intimidated by working with a group of passionate storytellers looking over your shoulder, Presentation Design might not be for you. But if you crave that direct feedback, and if you want your voice to be heard in the creation process, if you want a seat at the table, then look no further than your machine’s version of PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides. Get yourself familiar with those programs, bring your amazing ideas and design training along with you, and get ready for a meaningful creative career.

Significant Stories

Have you ever been to SignificantObjects.com? This isn’t an ad to help drive their clicks. You’ll notice right away their site is not sleek. It’s not guerilla marketing, and they are not trying to sell you anything (well, not since 2009).

They’re actually more like a case study. In their own words they’re: “A literary and anthropological experiment.” What’s the opposite of buzz words?

The concept is quite simple. They collect found objects; knickknacks from yard sales or home craft items, all of them second-hand, none of them costing more than $3, and most of them plainly hideous and clearly useless. Then, they ask a writer to give it a back story before posting it on eBay, and those suckers sell.

In the language of business, we’re talking MASSIVE returns. 300%, 400%, even 10,000%. Think of the margins! Don’t worry, it’s all for charity.

One particularly hideous armless plastic doll bought for $0.25 sold for $25, even though in the words of the writer who gave it its custom-written backstory, it had lips like “rotting guavas mashed by the fist of an angry Mexican servant”

In the hands of the right storyteller, the ugly can become sublime and the worthless can project immense value once it has been imbued with the magic of story and meaning.

There is a constant bombardment of factums and data points for those of us in the marketing, sales, and product management space. We parse through case studies trying to find meaning in numbers, we scour the marketplace for every edge in clicks, engagements, conversions, and immersions, sometimes forgetting that behind every click, engagement, conversion, and immersion is a living, breathing person who is hungering for a story and a meaningful connection.

“Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.”

-Roger C. Schank, cognitive scientist

If you, like me, are prone to the occasional philosophical mood, you might take a moment some day to consider those things that feel true to you, and why that may be. Stephen Colbert brilliantly took this idea to its logical conclusion when he explored the devastating consequences of “truthiness” in our national discourse. But this is not a new bug in our code, some kind of unforeseen consequence of the digital age; this is a feature of humanity. We are, by our very nature, inclined to look up at the stars and see gods and beasts; to find stories and divine meaning from tea leaves and tarot cards. Similarly, when we collect our favorite data points about our service or our business, and put them together on a few slides, most of us think we think we are painting a picture, as clearly as we see it mapped out in our own mind’s eye.

Often, when a data point really resonates with us, it’s either because it exemplifies something we already thought was true (validation provides some of the very best fuzzy-wuzzies), or it connects two things we already had thoughts about in some interesting and novel way. It just rings true! We might share that data point, thinking we are sharing that feeling, just like you’d create a mix tape for that crush in middle school, with each song so carefully laid out one after the other in a symphony of feeling! And perhaps, at first, that’s exactly what we are doing—at least within our own industry. We’ll test out this message and receive positive feedback from like-minded individuals and professionals who share our passions, perspectives, and goals. However, once you pivot that message out, you may find that the constellation of information and data you so carefully built just isn’t resonating. That message which rang so undeniably true to you might get altogether lost, leaving you bobbing your head to a beat only you can hear while you’re reading off lyrics that barely make any sense at all. Disconnected from story, data is worthless. You might as well throw it straight into the bin.

People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another.”

–Studs Terkel

I think many of us know this on some level. It feels true to almost all of us. Part of why must surely be because storytelling is so baked in to what it means to be human. And yet, we ignore this truism constantly. We run up against this wall time and again. We argue with that uncle every Thanksgiving, when we’d be better served telling him an anecdote of lived experience. We send angry e-mails to customer service starting with our expectations rather than our experience. We ask the people we love “Have you tried this?” when we should just say, “I’m still listening.”

And we do the same thing in business. We assault the eyes with numbers. We bullet point our way through meetings as though the next slide might have just the right percentage-based promise or datapoint that will wow the customer and end the meeting with that handshake deal. That’s not how lifeworks, and in our experience, it’s not really how business works, either.

“Facts don’t persuade, feelings do. And stories are the best way to get at those feelings.”

–Tom Asacker

Now, are we saying fill your slides with fluff? Of course not. Are we saying style supersedes content? Get outta here! However...what we are saying is that style, beauty, and emotional appeals are all too often playing second fiddle (if they’re given a fiddle at all!) in how companies present themselves. Messaging doesn’t trump content, but surely it should at least have equal weight!

So, if you find yourself stuck in the weeds, unable to reach your audience because you can’t quite get your message to resonate, chances are good that if you were to pivot your message away from data and towards inspiration, stories, and maybe a few eye-popping visuals (courtesy your friends at GhostRanch) it will surely pay dividends. We guarantee it.

“In order to win a man to your cause, you must first reach his heart, the great high road to his reason.”

–Abraham Lincoln

Anatomy of a Dead Slide

Hi, I’m Allie, I’m a Creative Director with GhostRanch Communications, a Presentation Design Company.

Hello, friend

What’s a Presentation Design Company? We’re visual storytellers. Sales enablement enablers. We’re, like, really good at PowerPoint (and Slides, and Keynote). Basically, if it has anything to do with visually elevating a pitch, asset, or message: we’re all about it!

As you might imagine, over the years we’ve seen a lot of bad slides.

Probably one of the mistakes we see most often is the long, rambling, bullet-point-rich, seemingly never-going-to-end, cram all the data you can, do you see where we are going with this, information-dense slide.

When it comes to slides, brevity truly is the soul of wit. To wit: Mark’s Twain excellent quote, above. You may have heard it before, but have you ever stopped to consider how to apply it to your slides, presentations, & sales pitches?

We’re real big Carmen Simon fanboys and fangirls round these parts. We even had 10% branded custom-made gear for a speech she made one time (the same year she decided to flip her messaging to 1%...whoops!)

The point she makes is that—if you’re lucky—your audience will remember about 10% of what you say. Whether that 10% is plucked at random from the dozens of data points you fling at them, or whether it’s actually your desired takeaway will depend on your own efforts to deliberately emphasize and weave said message throughout your presentation. The goal is to cut through the clutter and get to that key takeaway early and often. You can get there by narrowing in on 3 crucial messaging tasks:

Let’s do a thought exercise. Let’s start by taking a look at a slide that tries to make the entire case for this whole article in one fell swoop (good luck!):

Take a good, long look at it. Really. Take as long as you like. Personally, I can only look for so long before my eyes start to burn in their sockets and my delete button finger starts to twitch.

It’s got a long, conversational title that stretches across multiple lines, a completely unnecessary subtitle that is just repeating what the headline is already saying. There’s that beefy set of bullets there on the left. Pretty daunting. Lots of words, lots to take in… sure feels like it’ll take a good deal of effort to read through ‘em, especially when you’re trying to listen to a speaker explain them at the same time.

We have a few data visualizations over there… that’s nice. Kind of compelling, but do you really have the space to understand what they mean, or how they are connected to each other? That’s a lot of work for an audience to connect those dots.

And you already know that is my favorite quote there on the bottom… but in the context of this slide, is it really helping to enhance my message, or is it distracting?

Let’s give this dead slide a moment of silence.

Ok… so what did that slide mean to you? How much of it do you remember? How much do you think you’ll remember 48 hours from now?

Now, let’s bring this bad boy back to life. Spoiler alert, it’s going to take MAJOR surgery to cut through all that clutter and get to the key takeaway & what I really want you (dear friend, kind audience) to walk away from this article with.

First, we’ll do a CONTENT GUT CHECK.

Since that slide was HEAVY on content, there is a lot we can trim away to help simplify what’s shown on the slide.

A great question to ask yourself: is the content on your slide overly conversational? Will you be saying most or some of the text on your slide out loud? We often use slides as a crutch for our talk track, rather than a visual that helps to enhance the story we’re telling. The true hard work isn’t just in consolidating your information, but then in practicing the delivery of your message so it feels like a story rather than a consolidation of facts.

Your audience will either be reading your slide or listening to you. They can’t do both at the same time. So, the question here is: will your slide be more effective if they are reading your content, or if they’re listening to what you’re saying?

Let’s start at the top. Be concise with your headlines & the big statements on your slides. It might feel scary to trim down that much content, but it will help keep your audience engaged with what you’re saying. 

Here, you’ll also see that I’ve highlighted the information on the slide that feels really important. That bit about having one key takeaway per slide is supported by the data and information over on the right, and the rest would make way more sense in the talk track rather than on the slide itself.

Well… that looks better. The slide is lighter, but there is still a lot to digest. We definitely didn’t need that quote in there… although it’s a fantastic quote, it was a bit redundant and can be easily spoken to.

Let’s keep taking big, bold strides forward in self-honesty (And being honest with ourselves is by far the hardest and most important part in this exercise). Even our nice bullet point by itself was pretty meaty. The story it’s telling is already on the right, and that sub header was really just for kicks.

That feels a lot closer!

Now, let’s dive into how we can express what this information actually means in a way that’s memorable.

For this next step, we need to GET TO THE POINT. This is where we’ll take a closer look at the content remaining on the slide, and really drill down into what it actually MEANS so its intentions are clear.
 

Let’s examine the two charts in our slide. They’re taking up a lot of space… but is it clear what the takeaway message is here?

Data is extremely important. There is no question about that. However, if it’s not clear what that data MEANS, then it’s useless to your audience.

We’re showing that an audience only retains 10% of your message, and that information can easily be forgotten after 48 hours… but is that our earth-shattering message? If we want to make sure people are remembering the right information, you need to focus on one thing at a time. Do two complementary charts accomplish that job?

I think we can go further. …And besides, my delete key finger is still twitching.

We can distill the data from those two charts into one key idea: Your audience needs focus to remember your idea. Let’s simplify our message even further here and focus on what is MOST important.

Now that we’ve drilled through all that content and decided what we’re actually trying to say, it’s time we ESTABLISH HIERARCHY and make sure our message is reading loud and clear on the slide for ultra-memorability.

The two graphs were great, but consider this their requiem song. They aren’t quite as profound in this instance as the bumper sticker visual.  We’ve really summed up the insights for those in the statement on the left, so the audience isn’t trying to connect the dots while we’re speaking.

We now have way more room on the slide to play with! Lots and lots of breathing room. But as it stands, it’s pretty off balance.

Even when you have distilled the content you really need on the slide, that doesn’t mean your audience will engage with it. Take a second and look at the slide. Be mindful of where your eyes go first.

The goal is to guide your audience through the slide in a way that makes sense. Currently, the “statement” in the middle in pink is the focal point of the slide… it’s big, chunky, sort of standing alone. You don’t immediately see the connection between the headline, statement and the bumper sticker graphic.

Our bumper sticker graphic feels like a great visual to help emphasize our point… though, by itself, it doesn’t represent the whole idea. We’ll need to find that perfect balance between these three pieces of content to really make our idea shine.

Here, we’ll give that title a nice boost. It’s direct and grabs attention. It leads the way for the rest of the idea to fall into place.  

As it stands, our ‘big idea’ bumper sticker is pretty teeny tiny, and it’s redundant with the statement. It would be much more powerful if they were working together as a system.

If we bring the bumper sticker forward and pull the rest of the message into it… HEY! That’s a pretty damn good slide. Now, you immediately see BE CONCISE, and BIG IDEA. The rest of the copy is now secondary and gives context around WHY you need to be concise with your big idea: to allow your audience to focus for maximum memorability.

The slide is now balanced, bold, and communicates clearly. 

Take a look at where we started… and where we landed. Two VERY different slides, with similar intentions, but different results.

Be concise. Let your big idea lead the way so people remember what you want them to remember. Whittle away at unnecessary content: sometimes your best design tool is the delete key. Know your information deeply, so you can use your slides to enhance your story, not distract from it. And don’t be afraid to throw away that crutch: if you find yourself reading from your slides, chances are good that you’re missing out on golden opportunities to amaze, connect, and impress.

A Non-Designer’s Takeaways From the Visual Design of Information Conference

Hello. My name is Andre. I’m a recovering salesman (I wasn’t born this way. I stumbled into it. Got addicted to the lifestyle. Yada, yada, yada), and I’m new to being on the agency side of things, here at GhostRanch Communications. I’d like to start by saying I’m sorry. For everything. 

With that out of the way, as part of my re-introduction to the world of marketing (I did go to school for marketing at a very nice school; a degree I promptly threw into a dark closet, never to see the light of day again), and in the interest of getting up to speed with best practices in the world of presentation design and visual storytelling, I recently sat in on a 2-day conference titled PowerPoint Presentation Design Deep Dive (good ol’ PPPDDD) which was, as chef Graham Elliot would say “packed full of goodies.”

In the spirit of their storytelling feats of visual acrobatics, I wanted to do an Andy Raskin-esque take on the story that flowed from their collective brains:

Name a Big, Relevant Change in the World 

I don’t know about you, but one thing I have been hearing time and again from clients & in our own internal discussions about pitch decks is some variation of “how hard do we push the COVID thing” or “Do we want to tie this in with COVID?” It’s a really fair question when you’re producing a presentation deck or any sales or marketing asset. When you tie in a company or a product’s recent success to the changes in society & business brought about by COVID (some of permanent, some of it decidedly temporary), are you limiting the opportunity in the eyes of the audience? Are you potentially touching on a nerve either personal or political that’s better off avoided? Are you bumming folks out?

One of the things about conferences, by and large, is that they’re a snapshot of the last year’s business trends. Not discussing COVID at the PPPDDD would have been absurd in that context. Presentation design is a business which (like many others) is in a state of accelerated evolution. Although it wasn’t an explicit subject matter to be discussed, the panelists all did a great job explaining the ways in which their businesses were, at first, severely challenged by COVID and the March/April disappearance of their customers, as well as detailing how they were ultimately brought back into the fold. The secret, for most, was to key in on new ways to bring value (or reframe their value) to their clients. For some, that value came in the form of creating even more visually engaging content for a world where stage presence was a relic of a former time. For others, consulting on best practices for webinars and online engagement to clients who were suddenly all-too-eager to listen rather than speak, seemed a natural pivot.

My favorite take came from Mark Heaps in talking about how some of the C-suite alphas he worked with regularly were suddenly drained of the confidence the got while standing on a stage before a rapt audience: “I went from slide janitor to presentation therapist.”

Show There’ll be Winners and Losers

To the above point, one of the things that impressed me is just how keyed in on the needs of presentation professionals all these presentation designers are. Pivoting after COVID meant so much more than Make this webinar POP (though it also involved a fair amount of that). The creatives that not only survived but thrived during 2020 seem to have come away with some insights:

• Clients are listening better. Have something important to say;

• Practice flexibility: pivot into skills that your clients value, whether that means consultation, educating their sales team, enabling their presenters by building their confidence, or even something as simple as giving them a sandbox with tools, icons, and layouts at the end of their deck to allow them to iterate on their own;

• Limit bells and whistles for the betterment of the final result—a smooth, lag-free presentation—is worth killing your darlings;

• Call sales decks “living documents.” It matches the real lived experience of your clients and also provides you with added cover when your latest version isn’t perfect, just the most recent iteration;

Having the flexibility to pivot into new skills and crossover into new services proved absolutely crucial for all the presenters and their businesses in 2020 and keeping this open-mindedness moving forward will continue to serve those committed to providing presentation design for real-world business needs.

Tease the Promised Land

You’re not going to like hearing this, but the future is probably Google Slides. And I’m just going to come out and say it: I like it. I can hear the boos, I know. I’ve heard a few of our designers say that using Google Slides is like designing with oven mitts on. Bethany Auck devoted a whole section to “Slides Playing Nicely in the Sandbox Together” about best practices for those of us (all of us) who have to port content back and forth from PPT to Slides and how to keep it from breaking or reformatting in fun new ways.

Some food for thought: Bethany saw Google Slides work go from about 1/5 of all her business to about 2/5. Demand doubled in 1 year of COVID-induced isolation, and the smart money would be on Google Slides (and companies placing added value in remote collaboration, writ large) being one of COVID’s lingering aftereffects, rather than something that will simply go away in 2021 and beyond.

Introduce Features as Magic Gifts

I could go on and on here. In fact, I’d say about 90% of the content in this conference was about presenting magic gifts. Amy Balliett’s section on the preeminence of visual learning for the human brain was mind-opening. Nolan Haims’ two sections on best practices for charts was as clear & concise as his bar graphs. Richard Goring, Hannah Harper, & BrightCarbon astounded, as usual, with their apparently infinite supply of custom illustrations, graphics, and animations (seriously, those guys illustrate more than the nation of South Korea) and I don’t think there was a single presenter who did live design work on the screen and didn’t make use of the BrightSlide PowerPoint add-on at some point or another. And Mike Parkinson’s Hollywood FX for a Virtual Audience was a fun breakdown of little-known, lesser-used, & custom hacks for ways to make your presentation look like the opening credits to a Bond movie.

Also, can I just say it’s been amazing for me to find out that apparently every creative studio in America uses Pinterest to collaborate creatively? I mean, if DUARTE is doing it, and GhostRanch is doing it, then I guess that means everyone is doing it? I thought Pinterest was where my wife found things on Wayfair for 200% more than Amazon sold it, but I see now it’s so much more than that!

Present Evidence You Can Make The Story Come True

One of the really fun things about making the transition to the presentation design industry has been seeing how professionals in this industry value & treat the currency they deal in. Namely, how does a presentation designer present? Turns out they’re a lot better at it than barbers are at cutting their own hair. During the PPPDDD, the presenters’ use of slides was never precious, always added to the content, and were often complementary, rather than merely mirroring the content being spoken to aloud.

I can’t help but compare my own experiences with presentations—a VP of some stripe before a dark & drowsy room immediately after lunch (why is it always after lunch?), clicking through slides which they would proceed to read through in gross detail—with the speed and wit with which these presentation professionals would fly through their gorgeous, custom-made slides, seemingly without a thought to all the painstaking work that went on behind the scenes to make them, the beautiful symmetry of their design, and the multiple iterations and versions that culminated in each one.

Because, at the end of the day…PowerPoint (and Slides, and Keynote) is just a tool, even to those who make that tool their livelihood. And what better way to do this tool justice than to walk the walk and fly through them if it helps your presentation soar.