Podcast: Tips to create better presentations

R: Can you share a bit about your background and what led you to creating a presentation design company?

D: Sure, so I have a marketing background. I’ve always been fascinated by creative campaigns, ads, and how companies use visuals and copywriting to sell their ideas and products. So I thought that’s what I wanted to do! 

And it was really a pure chance that I came into the presentation industry. I took some courses in marketing psychology and strategic communication, and it was during that time that I really started appreciating good presentations. I’m talking about ten years ago.

I can give you an example that I will never forget. I remember that we had to do a group presentation in the marketing psychology class, and we had to present different creative campaigns we had developed for a fictive project. These were creative, clever marketing campaigns, and I thought “everyone is gonna use bullet points and crappy stock photos. What can we do differently?”. So I googled a bunch of free mockup shots that we could use to bring our campaigns to life. Like t-shirts, coffee cups, hand bags, magazine spreads.. And then I used Photoshop to mock up our ideas into these product shots. And it turned out great. When my group presented the work, our classmates were just in awe, with faces like “how the hell did they do that?”. And they were probably slightly pissed off as well since our presentation was so much better than their white bullet point slides.

So I think that experience sparked something in me and I started sharing presentation tips online, and that basically led to me creating the agency some years after.

R: Tell us about the early days of your presentation design agency, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced back then?

D: So, the early days really started with me uploading presentation tips online. This is what you call content marketing today but back then I was just trying to share stuff and people started contacting me for work. So businesses from the US, Australia and other places started writing me, saying "hey we need help with our PowerPoint" and that was a huge revelation for me. Like, people actually pay for getting their PowerPoints redesigned!

Back then, I had a full time job so I had this safety net. I wasn’t ready to go 100% freelance. And I used to get up very early in the morning, do some freelance work before I headed to my other job. Then I would come back and jump back on it in the evening or late nights. That worked great for me during that time, and it was an amazing feeling that you could earn money from your bedroom, working with someone across the world, and they would pay you directly to your PayPal account. That was mind blowing for me at the time.

And the biggest challenge I think for anyone starting out freelancing is really getting clients. How do you get clients? How do clients find me? Just trying to figure out how can I negotiate better work, how can I close bigger deals, and all of those things. So all of that was a process and to be honest the first years were definitely a roller coaster. You would have good months, and you would have bad months. Thankfully I had this safety net of having a full-time job.

When I decided to move to Spain in 2015, I thought that would be a great time to give this freelance thing a go, and go all in on this. It took a year or two before I had a steady income, and since then word of mouth has been doing its work really. We haven’t done any paid marketing or sales outreach during all these years. You do good work with good people, and they share it with others. That’s it really.

R: How did your presentation agency evolve over the years? What key milestones did you achieve while building the agency?

D: So, I think what happened was that after the first or second year when I was doing all the work, I was working long hours a day, I connected with a guy called Martin from Italy, shout out to Martin, so he was my first online friend / collaborator you could say. We were doing the same thing, he was running his presentation design agency and I was running mine, and we decided to join forces to try to do something under another brand. Basically, to see if we can close better deals and just learn the art of collaboration. So we started doing that and one big thing I learned from him was the idea of outsourcing work to free up my own time.

We would get a lot of portfolios from presentations designers that would say "hey do you have some work we're looking for work" or whatever. And I would always look at it, then save it into my my freelancer folder, but I would never reach out. I would never outsource my work because my mindset at the time was "why would I give up half my income to someone if I can do it myself". I just need to work a couple of hours more or whatever. And one day we got a portfolio from a guy named Felipe in Brazil. Amazing portfolio. I loved his work. And then I threw it into my folder. And Martin said "why don't we give him the project we're working on right now?" I said "no man, I'm not going to give up 50% of my income."

But somehow, he convinced me to do it and in two days time Felipe came back with amazing work. So that was the first time I personally outsourced work and I just found that really valuable. It freed up my time, I could do other stuff while still getting paid, I developed my own branding, I could work with more clients, develop relationships. So that was the start of really working with others and both of these guys they worked with me for years to come so I'm really happy for that.

R: How do you go about assembling your team of creatives? What qualities do you look for in your team members?

D: Oh this is a really challenging one. I think anyone who works in the creative industry or any industry knows the huge challenge of hiring and finding the right people for your team. Because there are great designers that are awful communicators. There are designers that can’t take feedback, they take it personally. And speaking specifically about the presentation design industry, there are great designers that can make any slide look absolutely stunning, but they have zero sense of messaging when it comes to slides. 

So, finding a presentation designer that understands the balance between design and function has been one of my biggest challenges. So back to your question: what qualities do I look for? I would say that I look for three things:

(1) Creative designer, likes to explore ideas and play around, someone who does not fall back to generic layouts, for example my lead designer who has worked with me for many years she would always come back with 5-10 explorations of slide designs, that’s just the way her creative process works, she needs to explore ideas to find the best solution, and you can often see how the creative process develops and the slides become better as she tries different ideas.

(2) Great communicator, someone who knows how to write short concise emails, easy to talk to and discuss things with, open to feedback, does not take feedback personally. 

(3) Attention to detail, I can't stress this one enough. I have had designers that are really good designers, they checked the previous two qualities, but they lacked attention to detail and it didnt work out. Things like, making the elements in the PPT file user friendly, easy to work with, aligning things properly, not adding a 15mb visual to the file without compressing it first, to keep the file size down, things like that. I’m a bit of a fanatic for these things because I think it adds a lot of value to the end client, so if the designer does not do this I have to spend lots of my time doing it.

Because I think a lot of designers or at least a lot of graphic designers who come into the presentation industry, they might not think about this because we're actually sending source files to the client. Usually in the design industry you don't send a Photoshop file you just send a poster or the end result. But PowerPoint is a bit different, you send the source file so you need to make sure that's cleaned up and properly handled.

R: Do you have a core team of presentation designers that work with you, or it depends on the projects?

D: Yeah, so I have a core team of five presentation designers that work with me. They're based around Europe. And then I have a huge extended network that I bring in depending on our needs. So for example we have an animation agency in Portugal that we work with that does great explainer videos, animated products, and stuff like that. We have a copywriter in the UK that we bring in if we see that the client's copywriting is not really hitting the mark. We also have relationships with a bunch of graphic designers, 3D designers and very specific niche designers that we can tap if necessary.

My general experience is that I've worked with people from all over the world, and generally I prefer the same time zone. It's just easier for me to manage when I know that they're up at the same time as me. So I've had collaborators and great designers in the US, we had like six hours difference, and it became very hard to manage. So that's why my core team is in Europe.

R: What are some mistakes you made, while building your PowerPoint design agency, that held you back? And how would you do things differently today?

D: That would be understanding the value of outsourcing and collaborating with others earlier. When you’re starting out it is normal to want to keep the whole cake for yourself, because you’re not making any big money. But my experience is that the more you free up your time, to work on things you enjoy, to build your personal brand, put more work out there, all of this will compound and essentially bring you more work.

If I would start freelancing today, I would focus more on developing my craft and doing lots of personal work and simply share it on social. Get your name and work out there. The rest will come later.

R: Can you share any presentation success stories or memorable client projects that you've worked on?

D: Sure. We did some work for Uber Eats a while ago, which was very cool. To see their branding guidelines and assets, their teams and how they collaborate.

We also had a huge success when we worked with a Danish team named Lenus who needed help with their pitch deck. They were gonna raise 30M euros to fund their growth into the US. We helped them to redesign their deck, and visualize their data better. Some month later they announced that they had raised 50M euros. That was very cool!

But then we have a lot of good stories with other smaller clients as well, that are equally important and fun. We've worked with Newcastle University for two years in a row where we help their marketing teams with raising funds. They've won both bids for five million pounds each, so that's been great!

What else? I personally love to work with young brands who don't really have a developed brand. Because this gives you more freedom to create for them. Some years ago we worked with a brand called Loop Earplugs. Back then it was just the two co-founders and now I think they are 100+ employees. We actually spoke with them the other day and we're doing a project now where we're helping them with their PowerPoint templates. It's just cool to see your old clients grow and turn into success stories.

R: Yes, it must be very satisfying to see teams you worked with, going from being a single founder to 100+ employee company and knowing that you've been a part of that story

D: And in all transparency, the opposite is true as well. Unfortunately, sometimes you do projects where you charge big amounts and they don't get the funding and they need to close down. That happens as well. So let's be honest, it's not all about success and you already know this probably, is it 95% of startups that fail and shut down? So people / founders / entrepreneurs that are doing this startup thing, all the respect to them because they put their lives into it and their families are supporting them and we're just really trying to help to push for their success. But sometimes it doesn't happen.

R: In this second part, I want to ask for some tips and tricks to creating better presentation slides. Why do most PowerPoints suck? And, what are the typical mistakes you see clients do with their presentations?

D: I think there's many reasons for that. One reason being that people don't understand the tremendous value a good presentation can give. I truly believe that a good presentation can change everything. I've experienced it myself. So when I graduated from university I gave a really good presentation in a job interview. The other stuff like the interviews or tests, I didn't do as well as the other applicants. But my presentation was so good that they couldn't forget it. And they hired me for that reason I believe.

You can have the best idea / the best product / the best service, but if you present it poorly, it's a bad product. Period. Because that's what people receive. If you can't present your ideas properly, it will just be a good idea in your head because the people receiving it will not get it. Makes sense?

For example, sales people spend countless hours on market research, lead generation, cold calls, booking meetings, and all of that. And on the most important step of the sales process, when they are presenting to the client, they show below average slides. They show bullet points. Slides that excite absolutely no one. That blows my mind.

And to be fair, I don’t blame the sales people or persons doing the actual presentations. Because I know that a lot of times their hands are tied with bad templates, bad branding, or simply they don’t get the time needed to develop good presentations. If the company you work for doesn't give you the time or tools to create a good deck, with a good story, then there’s not much you can do really.

So, I think that’s the number one reason. Another quite obvious but still very common mistake is when clients try to use one deck for multiple purposes. One of the first things we ask our clients is “what’s the purpose of this deck? How will it be used”, and we might give a couple of options like “is it for live pitching or sending out as a pdf?” and most clients answer “all of the above.” Which I totally get. That’s how it works. You pitch investors both live and virtually. You have sales call over Zoom, or you meet face to face. Or you email them a PDF of your product or service. Right? That’s normal. The problem is that one deck can’t tick all of these boxes. It will simply not be very impactful.

The bare minimum you can do is to have one deck that is the inspirational deck, the high level story, the attention grabber. And then you have another deck that is the more in depth story. It has the details that will close the deal. That’s a better approach in my opinion.

R: Why do good presentation slides even matter? What benefits does a good presentation bring?

D: I’ve written a lot about this topic, and the value of a good presentation. It can be the reason you close that million dollar deal or sales partnership. It can be the reason you get that dream job. It can really open any doors. 

I read this quote a while ago, that said something in the lines of “The better an idea is packaged, the faster it moves.” And that really struck me. Think about it: the better your idea is packaged in terms of your slides, your story and how you deliver your talk, the faster it will inspire the audience, and the quicker they will share the idea with others. It will have a domino effect.

To the contrary, if you package your idea with dull slides, no story, just facts and features, it will not be received with excitement from the audience, and therefore not shared as quickly with others.

R: How do you approach the process of designing a presentation that effectively communicates complex information in a simple way?

D: Oh, that’s a good one. How do you make complex simple. So, when we work with clients that have complex content, usually very technical or industry specific, we basically ask tons of questions to try to get to the essence of the message. Like, we would ask things like:

• Can you explain this to me as if I’m a five year old? And we go back and forth on this until we understand what the idea is.
  
  

• Once we understand it, then we ask, how much does the audience know about this topic? For example, imagine a machine learning startup pitching a group of investors with very basic knowledge about ML. If that’s the case, we need to chop out lots of details and keep it very high-level to grab their interest. The details would go into a separate doc for a more detailed meeting.
  
  

• Once we’ve narrowed it down to the bare essentials, then we start to explore visual directions and how we can visualize the idea in a simple and clear way. And here we can use icons, images, animation, and all these things to clarify the complex. It all depends on the specific situation. But simplicity is often key here.

R: How has the work-from-home culture and virtual presentations changed the way we use slides?

D: I think the core principles of slide design is the same, in the sense that you should keep your slides clean, easy to follow, clear structure, and so on. But what's happened now is that slides have gone from being something that’s projected behind you on a tv or projector screen, to now being the thing that is in focus on peoples screens when you present virtually. Usually when you present live, you the person is in focus right? Because you move around, you’re closer to the audience, you work with your body language. But when you present virtually you’re usually sitting or standing up, and most of us are just shown in tiny circles or squares. And the slide is what’s taking up 90% of the screen. This means that you really need to step up your slides game. If not people will tune out.

We also need to keep the flow of slides quicker now that we present virtually. What does this mean? It means that we cant stay too long on one slide. Cut up your content. Split it up across several slides. Keep one idea per slide, and keep the flow going. This way we can grab and regrab the attention of our audience from time to time, instead of risking losing their attention if we stay too long on one slide.

R: What are your top 3 tips to creating WOW presentation slides?

D: Good question. Let's take what comes to mind first:

1. Get your story and content right. Put time into your content and message. What's the key thing you want the audience to leave with? Focus your presentation on that and put the details in a leave behind document. Make it exciting with interesting data or surprising stats. Make a big statement, leave a mark. Use ChatGPT for inspiration and help with your copy if needed.

   
   

2. Use simple and clear slide layouts. Structure your slides in simple to follow layouts like three column headline + description, big visuals, icons with descriptions, etc.

   
   

3. Break the rules and push the limit a bit. If you have a company template that's limiting you, or if your brand is a bit bland, see how far you can push it without getting fired.

R: What’s more important, the design or the message / story?

D: The story without any doubt. And this is where most presentation designers fail today. They are in the business of beautifying slides. They are in the business of adding lipstick to ugly slides to hide the non-existing story. 

A nice deck without a good story, good message, good copy, is soulless. It has no substance. It might make an impact because of its visuals, but that will be long forgotten once the speaker leaves the room. The reason stories are so impactful is that they work perfectly well without slides as well. If you have a good story to tell, you don’t even need slides most of the time right? People still get engaged and lean in to listen to you. Just because of the story.

Story over design 100% of the time.

R: Any tips on using typography, color, and imagery effectively in presentations?

D: When it comes to typography, pay attention to text hierarchy, use different text sizes and weights to control the viewers attention. Don't make all the text the same size because then you don't know what's key info or not. On colors, use them sparingly to highlight key information. Often times we just need black/white and a highlight color. Keep a high contrast between text color and background. And stock photos should reflect both your brand but also your audience. If the audience cant identify with the images, it will be harder to get your message across. E.g. ugly stock photos are no no.

R: Do you sometimes use Canva and tap into their photo library, or what are your go-to image banks for presentations?

D: I used Canva for many years when I was subscribed to their photos account, that was great as they had some really good shots there. And we have some clients that have Canva accounts so they have their branding there and obviously in those cases we also use it. Besides Canva, I use the typical ones like Unsplash, which is the most famous one. Then you have Pexels. Reshot is another one. There are a ton of those, if you just Google "free stock photos" you'll probably find a ton. And sometimes you need very specific photos, so then we go to Shutterstock and we purchase those.

R: Is there an ideal structure to follow, while designing a presentation, to keep the audience engaged?

D: I don't think there's an ideal structure that fits all presentations but the general rule is to grab their attention early, to show that you understand the audience. So I think this makes sense if I give some examples:

For example, investor pitch decks have an established structure of Problem, Solution, Why now, Target market, and so forth. And it is a good idea to follow that, although you can customize it to make it more impactful. E.g. you don't need to follow all sections in order, lift up your strengths early in the deck to grab peoples attention. If you have a strong team, show it early. Do you have good traction? Show it at the start. And so forth. Restructure it to make it impactful.

Same goes with sales decks. You can’t present your product or services before you show the prospect that you understand their situation, and create some urgency for what you’re offering. So before you even talk about yourself, your business and your products, you need to talk about the prospects current pain points, get their attention, show that something has changed in the market to create some urgency, if you don’t follow the trend you will lose out, and then your services come in. All of that is a science really.

And I think that rule can be applied to all presentations. Engage your audience with surprising data, interesting information, things they can relate to, creative images or visuals, quotes, and so forth. And keep them engaged by repeating this throughout your deck.

For example, I gave my first keynote some month ago and the basic structure in my deck was: (1) start with an interesting story, make them laugh early, (2) once I got their attention, I spoke about things they could identify with. For example my talk was about hybrid presentations, so I brought up challenges that I knew they were facing, (3) so now I have both their attention and they feel like the talk is relevant to them, so then I went into actionable tips and tricks that they could use. And throughout my talk I used engaging visuals, strong quotes, interesting stories to keep their attention. You need to mix it up.

If I would go up on stage and just give them 10 tips on how to create better presentations, without all of the other stuff, that would be very hard to keep their attention after talking for ten min, right?

R: Do you also give tips on how to deliver great presentations to your clients?

D: Not really. I am a rookie presenter with one keynote talk only in my baggage, so I'm not really in a position to give those tips. But I have good partners that are presentation coaches, so I can either recommend people to them, or we occasionally run workshops together, where my partner does a day of workshop on delivering good talks, body language, how to use your voice, and so forth. And I come in and talk about how you can combine that with good presentation design and pitch deck design.

R: What do you think of AI and everything that’s happening now in the design and presentation industry, like Microsoft Copilot, Midjourney, Canva's Magic Presentations, etc.

D: I think it’s super exciting how fast AI is developing. Like scary exciting. I saw the president of PPT demo Microsoft Copilot at a conference recently, and it was nuts how quickly PowerPoint could whip up a presentation based on a couple of prompts. That’s gonna be cool to follow for sure. Maybe in some years I will be terrified, let's see, but right now it's in the excitement phase. And you can imagine all the stuff that's gonna change like, I can imagine co-pilot or other software as well where you just pull up the little AI chatbot and you say: "please review my deck and fix all the typos, highlight them so I know what to fix", or you can say "hey Mr AI, review my deck and restructure the slides so they're more impactful and they tell a coherent story, and highlight if there are any gaps that I need to fill."

I also know of some teams that are training their own AI, so they're basically uploading their work to an AI machine and teaching it on their style and design style. You can imagine where that would go when they get client projects they can quickly brainstorm ideas with an AI and get an idea of how it will look. So I think all of this is super exciting and they're new tools popping up every day. You mentioned Canva Magic Presentations, to be honest I haven't really jumped into the magic presentations thing but knowing how quickly Canva develops products I'm pretty sure it's amazing.

R: Which of these AI tools do you personally use in your presentation agency?

D: Right now I am using ChatGPT for copy and Midjourney for visuals. That's it really. When it comes to how do I apply it to our work, I wouldn't say we use it on a daily basis but it's really good for brainstorming. So for example, if a client comes to us and they have a, let's say it's a tech product or whatever in the real estate industry, but the cover slide title is not really that hard-hitting. So we might feed that into ChatGPT and say "give us 10 concise titles that explain this service" and you get really good results.

Now having said that, this is quite tricky because you need to get clearance from the client as well because who knows what we feed into this machine where it ends up right? And 90% of the work we do is fully confidential so that's a conversation that needs to be had as well. Where does this information end up? So you have to be careful there.

And regarding Midjourney I'm really in the early stages so I'm definitely a rookie there. I'm trying to learn the prompt structures and it's getting better for the month. Like the other day I tried to type in "generate an image of a female sports athlete in Nike apparel running on the streets" and it just came out brilliant. You had to do some tweaks but it looked like a photoshoot really.

R: Do you see a future for presentation designers?  What will be tomorrow's must have skills in that field?

D: That's the question everyone is asking in their industry right? How about copywriters, how about lawyers? I think there's definitely a future for designers, I don't think it will replace all of us. With that said, and maybe I will eat my own words in the future, but I think a lot of average designers or slightly above average designers will slowly get replaced by AI. But the high-end designers, or presentation designers specifically, who understand presentations, who understand storytelling, messaging, copywriting all of that, and how to combine these into a good presentation, they will will become more in demand. I think that’s just a natural development.

R: What other tools are your go-to for creating presentation slides?

D: The obvious one is PowerPoint, we try to keep as much as possible in PowerPoint mainly for the end client so they can be able to edit it. But thankfully there are really good design tools nowadays like Figma, that's something we use every day to develop vector graphics, that we later can import into PowerPoint or other presentation softwares. Google slides is another one we use a lot, because many clients still use that mostly because of the collaboration features. What else, Adobe Creative Suit we use less, Photoshop is still our go to for photo editing but Illustrator has basically been replaced by Figma.

R: What is your professional opinion of Canva for creating presentations?

D: In full honesty, I think I've used Canva a handful of times when it comes to presentations. I've used a lot for graphics like social media graphics. We've done a lot of work for clients who have huge international teams and they needed a set of templates where Canva works perfect. We create the design in Canva, and even after two three four years I still see them using those templates and just manipulating the text and it looks great. So in that sense it's really good. When it comes to presentations, we had one team who wanted to migrate all their PowerPoints into Canva, and the compatibility with PowerPoint back then was in the early stages. Today I think it is much better.

I think Canva in general is a super easy, and user-friendly software that works for a lot of companies. It has some really great features, like the template bank is amazing, they have a huge set of templates, and as you said a lot of design elements you can use and reuse and download as vectors or whatever. All these online presentation softwares, they know that at the end of the day most people use PowerPoint, so they are all trying to bridge the gap between their platforms and PPT so you can upload and download between the softwares seamlessly. That’s the main challenge I think. 

R: Are there any emerging technologies or trends in the presentation design field that you're excited about or actively exploring?

D: Well, right now it’s hard to think about anything else than AI right? What’s interesting is that since presentations have so many functions, you can always find a new use case for all these developments we’re seeing in AI. We already mentioned ChatGPT which I think is super exciting to see how quickly it develops. We mentioned Midjourney and Dall-E which are all tools for creating images. That's also very cool to see how that's developing and I think the use case in presentation is huge there, instead of going to a stock bank and typing in search words you can generate an image based on exactly what you need right away. Is it there yet for the average man to use? Probably not. Because you need to really customize the prompts and understand the technology. But based on how quickly it got to where it is now, I think in the coming six months is going to be super exciting.

You have tools like Microsoft co-pilot and other tools that integrate AI directly into the software which is great for speeding up the workflow. Not so much replacing the workflow as you said, because it's not there yet. It's just about getting away from the blank slide. Generate some inspiration and generate some ideas. All this is going to be super exciting. I see presentation tools pop up every day, like the latest one I saw is called Tome - the storytelling platform. So that's basically an AI platform where you type in a prompt and generate content. I don't know the huge difference between co-pilot but it's been pretty hyped up on Twitter so I'm definitely gonna check it out.

R: How do you stay updated with the latest tools and advancements in presentation design technology?

D: I really just stay connected to the people in the industry and design industry in general, follow updates on Linkedin and Twitter. That's it. If something is good enough it will eventually land in your scroll feed. And I try to schedule in some time per week to explore these tools, and get familiar with them. I think that's what you need to do if it interests you.

R: Where can our viewers go to learn more about you and the agency?

D: You can hit me up on Linkedin, just search for my name there. That’s where I'm most active. And you can also go to our website slides.agency to see what we do.

R: I really appreciate your work and I appreciate that you took the time to have this conversation with me, so thank you very much for being with us. I wish you you all the best with your presentation agency and continue to create beautiful slides for the world.

D: Thank you for having me!