Cover the Earth? Really?

Sherwin Williams is a paint company with a long, long tradition (by American standards). The company dates back to 1866. It started with a Chameleon logo, which seems appropriate for a paint company. But in the 1890s, their head of marketing, George W. Ford, sketched up a new logo, right, called “Cover the Earth”. The logo started appearing on company materials occasionally in 1893, and in 1905, the logo officially replaced the chameleon logo.

The founder of the company, Henry Sherwin, had reservations about the “boldness” of the claim. And others in the company worried it needed explanation (I would say so). They point out, for example, that the paint is pouring over Cleveland, Ohio, not the North Pole, as Cleveland is the home of paint (who knew?).

So while this logo is certainly old, there really is no excuse for how terrible and outdated it is in its concept. In fact, the chameleon might be a fantastic “new” logo for the company to adopt.

Actually, I don’t really care what they do. I am simply amazed that the company finds this logo appropriate…or that they ever found it appropriate. Forget the environmental issues if you can, it is just tacky and suggests sloppiness.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not into trendy logo changes every few years. I really like companies that build great brands and stick with their logos. I have actually always admired Ford for keeping their logo over the years, despite I am sure the pressures of likely every VPs of Marketing that has worked them and wanted to leave their mark on the company or appease a misguided customer focus study.

But this Sherwin Williams logo is basically awful across the board. Are there other logos that you think are incredibly outdated or out of touch?

The elevator pitch

Most elevator pitches are terrible. They try to do too much with too little time. Startups should think of them as teasers, not my 60 minute pitch in 15 seconds.

I started thinking about the elevator pitch this week after I received a PPT makeover candidate. I did do a makeover on their slides, which I will blog about in the next week or so. They had generally good looking slides, but the material was so heavy with words, I just kept thinking, “What are you trying to say?”

Here is their elevator pitch. It captured the issues I was having with the overall preso. Note: their bolding, not mine.

Product XYZ is a new generation Productivity suite that is connected to all the services that you already rely on : IM (gtalk, msn, twitter,…), Mobile (Nokia, iPhone, soon Blackberry and Windows Mobile), Email, Desktop (Adobe AIR application), and allows you to Collaborate with your colleagues thanks to exclusive and intuitive social features.

Two things seem to be happening here. One, they don’t communicate the value of their product (ie, pain relief) to the customer. Second, they are tripping over buzzwords.

First Attempt: Let’s try to make this plain english, and really extract the unique value proposition:

Product XYZ is a suite of collaboration web apps that is different from competitors because:

1. It integrates directly with existing IM services, email and mobile phones.
2. It’s offered as software as a service versus installed software.
3. It connects with the major social networks.

I think this is easier to understand, but it is still “wrong”, as it is talking about how they built it, versus how it benefits the customer. I don’t know the product well enough to be accurate with this next attempt, but that has never stopped me.

Second Attempt: Let’s focus on pain versus how they solve it.

Collaboration applications have been left behind. Bloated install software, not integrated with the mainstay tools of business users like IM, email and mobile phones. And perhaps worst of all, today’s collaboration software is alarmingly unconnected to the social web. Product XYZ is different.

Third Attempt: What about poking a hole in the collaboration software market itself?

The primary competition for collaboration software like WebEx is substitutes: mainstream communication apps combined with social networks. Product XYZ is a different web collaboration service. It attacks this major market vulnerability by harnessing IM, email, and mobile phones and working with a users’ social network.

We still don’t know exactly what they do (which is true…I have never seen a demo), and you could argue I am still hypey with buzzwords like “social network” and “harnessing” and “market vulnerability”, but the audience are certainly hungrier to see the demo and see if Product XYZ pulls it off.

With Xobni, we typically combine both of these techniques. Here is a sample of what we might tell a potential investor:

MSFT’s Outlook is a massive mess of an application, and yet has over 400M users and an ecosystem over $10B. Xobni makes a plugin that makes Outlook suck much less. We add lightning fast search that knows the difference between a person and an email. And we automatically combine email addresses with rich profile data from the web like Facebook and Linkedin profiles. After just a couple of minutes using Xobni, like TiVo for your TV, it will be hard to use your inbox without it. Let me show you what I mean.

Often times, I edit this down even further. Again, I just need to earn the chance to tell them more, not to close the deal during the 15 seconds. This has been successful for me so far.

Anyway, I am curious to hear your thoughts on how to improve the startup elevator pitch, and certainly open to better examples.

Yahoo! has been doing badly, but looking at their corporate slides, you would think they were doing much worse. I worked at Yahoo! for over 2 years. Every time there was a quarterly all-hands, I cringed. Not because the stock was dropping, but because the corporate slides are so amazingly crappy looking. You really have to go out of your way to make these things as bad looking as they are. A lot of what the company does looks pretty darn good, but when it comes to making PPTs, they have some dude that seems to have a corner on the market of making ugly ass slides.

Let’s take a look:

WTF? These are so friggin' bad.

Here are my major issues:

1. Logos: One logo is enough. Why two? Why is the Y! so big?
2. Headline: Sucks, it says nothing
3. Colors: Purple and yellow! Gag, these colors look awful together. I know those are the old colors, but for charts and for today (not 1996), they look terrible together.
4. Colors: There are two purples. Why? One for the Y! logo and one for the chart. Makes no sense
5. Boldness and Lines! There are outlines to the chart boxes. Why? Every font is bold. Why? Why is there yet another line between the title and chart?
6. Chart legend: Looks ridiculous
7. 3d! I hate 3D charts. This is a perfect example of how they make data harder to absorb.
8. What is my take-away? They know this slide is going to be reprinted. Help tell the story they want to tell.

In 8 minutes, I remade this slide. This is not a great slide now, but it sucks so much less.

It isn't perfect. But in 8 minutes, it is much better.

In my revised slide, I increase the data fidelity. For example, I have added faint lines behind the bars to show the information from 12 months earlier. This added more data to the chart, but eliminated one of the bars. I have eliminated the legend. I have added a “why?” so I can tell a bit of my story. I tried to use a tone that is matter of fact, but unsatisfied (#3). I have made all the colors consistent. I have eliminated the garish yellow in favor of 75% shade of the purple. I have made the headline informative. I could have said, “Revenue is down. We are going to change that.” for more attitude, which seems like Carol Bartz’s style. Maybe added an f-bomb. The notes are smaller and in plain english. I have added a lot more white space.

For more ideas on how to make presentations that don’t look like crap, see my post: 20 Tips to Make Your Presos Suck Less.

What do you think?

PPT with a standard theme applied

If you are cringing right now, that is understandable. But these types of slides are VERY common. And it violates a whole slew of my tips, including 1, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 14 and 17. Mostly, I really hate how big the text is and that awful blue background with color text title.

Keep reading to see how the slide changes.

Ok, so what if we just made it super generic with a Keynote template in white?

Why London Sucks, in default settings

It is easier to understand why London sucks…but I have no long term memory of the reasons. There is no story (Tip #13). And there is a lot going on here that is wrong. The only tip we stopped breaking from the PPT template above was Tip #17, don’t use colored backgrounds. Let’s do just another 5 minutes of work on this with a little help from Google image search. Remember, we are working to reduce the text both in quantity and size from the original default.

So now we are just violating one of the rules, #7, don’t use slide titles. I violated the rule in this case, as I wanted to eliminate bullets completely from the slide (rule #11) and I needed a bit of the narrative, as I am not presenting this to you in person. But overall, there is a strong voice on this slide, in this case Cousin Avi’s. It is visually compelling and easy to remember/recall. The text gives you the main info…Cousin Avi hates London.

With this slide, I tried something different, really focusing on telling a story. I used Plastiq’s Comic Life (free with a Mac) to make this slide in about 10 minutes. I use this comic book approach with customer case studies in presentations successfully.

Full photo with caption call-out.

With this last version, bled the photo to the edges, and used the comic book inspired text call-out for my bullet points. This is hugely impacting…if you have a strong photo or screenshot.

Original (left) is more text intensive...and far less effective.

Let’s take a look at the concentration of text in each slide. You will see that the original is less impactful and less interesting. Smaller text. Less text. More effective.

PS: I really recommend you watch Snatch. It is an excellent movie.

PSS: I don’t really hate London. I just wanted to see what a slide based on Ari’s character in Snatch might look like in bad PPT form. Now I know.

“Make your own color palette and stick with it for the entire presentation. Generally, you should only use 1-2 colors (plus black and grays).”

In this post, I am going to give you some ideas on how to pick good colors and how to reduce the eye sore that are most presentations. I might also note here, that PPT actually gives you only a mildly miserable experience here. I will explain in a bit.

First lets take a look at the standard palettes in both PPT and Keynote:

PowerPoint and Keynote standard palettes

PowerPoint’s palette (left) has a nice feature in the “Theme Colors” that basically give you 10 base colors and then from there you get five shades of those colors (basically 15/30/45/60/85 percent). If you didn’t want to spend any more time on picking an appropriate palette, you could just use the black/greys and the blues or greens. You might use the base color on orange or red as a highlight color in selected places.

Keynote’s palette (right) doesn’t have the pre-done color palettes as simply as PPT, but it has a more powerful color palette overall. In this case, if you are new to colors, the easiest way to go is to just use the “palettes” tab, and then select the “Web Safe Colors” from the pull down. These have color combos that are a bit richer than PPT, and the base colors span the rainbow. As most web developers know, green and blues are the strongest and most diverse palettes available in the web-safe spectrum. Yellows and purples are more limited. You can easily create a custom palette from here by clicking on the gear icon.

If you are in a hurry, either of these solutions will do fine. If you are a bit more of a perfectionist, you will want to create a custom palette. When I worked at Yahoo! they had a custom palette in their 400 page brand guidelines with hundreds of combinations that were fantastic, and consistent with the brand. I hand built that using the CMYK numbers in Keynote, which was one of the reasons my presos looked better than everyone elses. I always used the corporate approved color palettes instead of the standard purple or red that were available within PPT.

Toucan

If you want to get a bit of the sophistication that I got from Yahoo!’s brand management team (and consulting firm), then you can use a special tool on the web called Aviary. Aviary is basically a collection of web apps built in Flash that are set to compete with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. They have one application called Toucan. With Toucan you can create really impressive palettes that are mathmatically accurate. I created this blue palette in under 30 seconds (right).

Rather than fully review Toucan here, just watch their demo video and you will get what I mean when I say mathmatically correct palettes. You can even start with your startup or company logo or even a digital photo to get the first color in your palette. I even picked the paint colors in my house with Toucan. It is fantastic!

Conclusion

Most of you reading this post are not talented designers. So there are easy crutches for your. Let’s review:

• Don’t let PPT pick for your. In almost everycase, avoid charts or diagrams with 3+ colors. Use one color in various shades.
• Use the same color with the simple palette throughout your presentation, unless the data demands you choose another color. For example in previous slide examples, I have shown how I used colors to refer to web vs. desktop technologies, and I kept those colors consistently throughout the presentation.
• Blues and greens are the most simple. Choose red, purple or orange for the occasional highlight…but it should only be used for selectively. Hot colors like that are like TYPING IN ALL CAPS.
• Take advantage of the palettes that are already in PPT or Keynote
• Borrow! I will often find a magazine or corporate piece that I really like. I use the colors to build a custom palette.
• Consistency. Not only should you generally stick with the same palette throughout a preso, you should just go a head and keep the same palette all year. No reason to reinvent when you have a good thing going.

I hope this helps a little.

Note to self

I asked in Twitter and Facebook what fathers wish they had or were glad that they had brought to the hospital when they went in for the delivery. Here are the responses I got:

• Larry (former colleague from Y!) “Better snacks, a good book, relaxing music, and some “happy” photos for her to look at. We were in labor much longer than expected” [my note: got a big photo poster of our dog, Zoe :]
  
• Terra (from our PR firm and recent new mom with her third child) “Take massage oil and take your swim trunks so you can get in shower/bath with her in labor if she wants to.”
  
• From Twitter “Some snacks and drinks”
  
• From Twitter “Lip balm or chapstick. Its such a tiring process and you barely remember to drink water so chapped lips are common.”
  
• Joff (former colleague from Y!) “Bring Advil, People Magazine, tunebox, pillow, warm socks for mom’s feet.” [my note: done. Bought Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere 2]
  
• Padma Warrior (CTO at Cisco) “Just be there by her side the whole time.”
• Ryan (former Y! and new father this month) “Sweat pants for me. I worn jeans for 3 days straight.” [my note: done]
  
• From Twitter “Bring your wife’s favorite music.” [my note: done]
  
• Sol (founder of 12seconds.tv) “Buy a Mophie Juice Pack for your iPhone.” [my note: done]
• From Twitter “Cameras and batteries and memory chips.” [my note: done, done & done]
• Rich (former Y! colleague) “A book and booklight so I could read and let the other two sleep” [my note: done]
• Gary (former Y! colleague) “Have a fantastic bottle of wine available for that first night in the hospital after the baby’s born. Make it memorable.”
• JK founder of Xoopit “Some form of bottled caffeine if you are a coffee drinker.” [my note: Red Bull, check]
• Matt (former i-drive colleague) “Powerbars and a list of people to send e-mail updates.” [my note: Facebook and Twitter for updates! ]
• Joel (former i-drive colleague) “Take a snack or sandwich. You won’t want to leave for anything. And a cocktail (for her!) to celebrate when it’s over.”
• Markus (former Y! colleague) “Earplugs” [my note: right!]
• Nick (friend since 1st grade) “Lots of food and water. When it comes to hospital meals, assume nothing! Map out the best local takeout so you can enjoy a proper meal after all that.”
• Frederique “Camera, video camera, iphone & chargers for all of those (!), and CHAMPAGNE!!!” [my note: done, done, done, done & not done]
• Stephanie (high school friend) “Good food for mom a few hours after delivery and maybe a cool necklace with the baby’s name.”
• Elizabeth (sister) “A gift for Amy. I recommend a pashmina for amy and a pillow/blanket for you.” [my note: ladies seem to suggest gifts for my wife a lot]

Happy to hear any more thoughts in the comments. I am assembling the final list and should post it soon.

I am a big fan of cussing. It is the unwritten 21st tip in my 20 Tips to Making Your PPT Presos Suck Less.  I learned at my first concert (Bon Jovi, Slippery When Wet Tour, Irvine Medows, April 22, 1989) that the crowd loves a little cussing. “How are you, Irivine?” got a much better response as, “How the fuck are you, Irvine?” And, “You guys rock!” was much better received as “You guys fucking rock!”

I have often wondered how “transitive” the power of cussing is. So, for example, would the passengers of a flight go nuts if the pilot got on the Com and said, “Ladies and Gentleman, this is your captain, Frank Lazio. We know you have a choice when you fly, so fucking thanks for choosing United.” Probably not. Though I guess it is a bit circumstantial, as they might appreciate or at least understand, “Ladies and Gentleman, this is your captain. You will not fucking believe this…our left engine just dropped off.” I might not cheer, but I would at least understand.

Keep reading…it gets better.

So while I love to drop the occasional “bullshit” in a live preso, I really sanitize my written communique. Why? Because the transitive powers of cussing don’t seem to work with written word. It just doesn’t translate. Not too far off written cussing, is the old dude trying to talk like the young kids. Ouch. In general, when you pass the age of 30 and certainly when you hit 40, leave the “killers” and “rads” for the kids.

So, as I read Carol Bartz’s more recent memo I can’t help thinking they would be much better if she just toned them down a bit. She may be a very spry 60, I’ve never met her, but it just comes across as a bit too effected to read her “kick ass”es and her “killers”. You certainly get the sense that she is trying really hard…that’s nice, I guess.

Here are some samples from her recent memo:

“I’ve been gathering information on what it’s going to take to get Yahoo! to a great place as an organization — and one that brings you killer products.”

“Poeple here have impressed the hell out of me.”

“I’m singularly focused on providing you with awesome products. Period.”

“Look for this company’s brand to kick ass again.”

In person, all these may actually come across really well (maybe not). But in the memo format, for sure, they are fucking painful (whoops, it just slipped out). Furthermore, they are a bit misplaced. Take the whole, “Look for the company’s brand to kick ass again.” To be certain, the company’s brand was once very strong. It certainly never kicked ass, though. In fact, I don’t think there was ever any aggressiveness in the Yahoo! brand.  Sure the font and “!” (bang, as they call it in Yahoo!) make it seem a bit irrepressible, but not ass kicking. Certainly not cross over to the other side of the street type of ass kicking. More, oh that Murray just never quits, rascalliness.

The Yahoo! brand at its height was the opposite. It was friendly, approachable with that little bit of loveable scamp quality (like Gilligan). Certainly not Jesse “the body” Ventura. More Jesse “the Govenor” Ventura.

Anyway, I am pulling for Yahoo! I still have a bit of purple in the blood. But I can’t help wanting to write an email to the CEO and tell her dial it all back a bit…it will actually make her seem more ernest and enthusiastic. Trust me.

As I was downloading the most recent version of Apple’s browser Safari 4 (beta), I had a funny/sad thought about the browser: I can’t think of any other piece of software, which is used to assist in switching to a competitor. Imagine the humiliation our poor browsers endure by not just witnessing, but assisting the us to replace it. It is like asking your girlfriend to help you get ready for a hot date…with the girl next door.

I can just imagine the horror of browser as I start typing in www.apple.com/safari, like I did this morning with Firefox 3. I can hear the browser saying, “Hey! What’s going on here? There’s no need for this…I can do better, I swear. She’s not even pretty!” Or maybe it is like that scene from Wizard of Oz where the wicked witch melts away as we all watch on.

Keep reading…

Hmmm. Where did that last 1% go?

I wondered how many software engineers have thought about a little easter egg to foil those oh-so specific downloads, a last ditch gasp of self-preservation. You can imagine a little bug that just misplaces those last few Kbs of the competitor installer leaving you with a frustrating 99% complete download each time.

Or maybe the engineers could have downloads from competitors mysteriously choke down to the download speed of a 300 baud modem (If you’re under the age of 30, you might have to look this reference up to understand its perversity).

I have been thinking about it a lot this year as I have been checking out first IE 8, then Firefox 3, then Google Chrome and this week Apple’s Safari 4. After a pretty boring last few years, it is great to see new blood and fresh energy in the browser space. And with all this fresh activity, more fresh browser humiliation.

The OS Cheers for the Home Team

And while we sadistically force a browser to watch and assist us to find its successor, both major OSes have their own way of preserving their home team browser: the “default browser” setting. Apple has moved this a few times. Everyone in the office I asked said, “Under the Internet settings in System Preferences.” And that would make sense. But in 10.5, they moved it to the Preferences pane of Safari! That’s right, to set the OS setting, you have to go into the Apple’s browser.

Default web browse? Nope, just IE

Windows is both better and worse. You can go to “Options” in the Tools menu of IE to change the default. Or you can go to Control Panels » Internet Options » Programs where you can “Set Programs” and select an alternate browser. But, of course, they had to give themselves a bit of an unfair advantage. So they also have one level up, and very prominently at the top an area called “Default web browser” where you can ONLY set IE as the default. Adding insult to injury, there is a box you can select to “Tell me if Internet Explorer is not the default browser.”

I guess the Justice Department didn’t inflict enough pain to cause a permanent scare, after all.

IE, I Like It When You Watch

Of course, I don’t always feel badly. As you can see above, one browser doesn’t seem to earn my sympathy. Each time I replace IE, I get this twisted pleasure surfing over to a competitor download page. “Mmmm, IE, I like it when you watch.” And I swear there are multiple times that I have made Firefox the default, only to have the setting mysteriously changed back to IE.

In fact, when I worked at Yahoo!, the Toolbar team got alphas of IE 7 and found that when we installed our Toolbar, IE barfed up the error reported “Someone is attempting to hijack your browser. Would you like to allow this?” Hijack? I guess that is one perspective. We were told it wasn’t intended for public consumption. Even if not, it shows a disturbing perspective, like that Internet Properties box above.

PS: Safari 4 doesn’t allow me to add a link in WordPress, so I am using FF 3 for this entry. Oh, the irony.

I am going to do a free slide make-over for 2-3 startups. Here is how it works. Just send me an email with 1-2 slides from your pitch. They should be the important slides…slides that will act as either the foundation for the rest of the presentation. I am not talking about making you a template, I will remake the actual slides that could transform your pitch. Here are some examples: (a) your product roadmap slide, (b) you “strategy” slide or your (c) your business model slide.

Here are the things you must consider before sending me anything:

1. I am going to blog the make-over (I will scrub/anonymize before doing so), but you have to be ready to let me show what I did on the blog to improve your slides.
2. I am going to use Keynote 09 on a Mac. PPT is just too time consuming.
3. No promises if I will pick yours, or how long it will take me, though I will notify you within a few days if you have been selected and give you a guesstimate when I will work on it.
4. I will not sign an NDA…I don’t want crazy confidential info…I’m blogging it after all.

How I will make my decision on who to help:

• Inspiration: I like your startup, idea or product (I am a product guy, after all…I need a muse). I don’t care what phase of the company or industry you are in.
• Need: You need the help (you suck at slides but otherwise are a very talented team)
• Potential: You have a bit of traction (product). Things are tough…I am looking for teams that just need that little extra help in telling their story. If you haven’t done anything yet to build your product or service, you need help there before your pitch gets a make-over

Here is what you should send:

• A few pages of your preso. Feel free to clean out some of the info, but I need to know enough to help you out, obviously. I am going to only pick 1-2 slides to make over.
• A description of your product, company, and its stage (team), etc
• Some basic info on the audience of the preso (and your product, actually)

As a bonus, here is what I will do for the startups I select:

• VCs: I will make a few, targeted introductions to a few appropriate top tier VCs in bay area and/or back East
• Advisers: I will make an introduction or two to people in my network that might be able to help you (advisors or key team members)
• PR: Perhaps I can help you get a “hit” with a significant blog/blogger or news outlet, assuming you have an interesting story.

If you are interested. You can send me your pitch to jeff at bonforte dot com. If you are reading this after Feb 2009, you can assume I am done with this offer.