The philosophy behind SlideMagic is to save making everyday presentations:
A bank of useful templates (still small, but growing rapidly now)
A clever search algorithm
A proprietary UI to make obvious changes to slides at lightning speed (with the option to convert to PowerPoint)
A simple framework to make all slides look uniform and consistent with corporate branding
But there is one other important component: simplifying (call it “boxifying”?) layouts.
Shapes and layouts that are great for drawing on paper or a whiteboard, are harder to get right and look good on a computer, think circles, arrows, curved lines. Professional designers know how to space text out evenly, add white space, line up the 7 levels perfectly on a circle at even distances. For the rest of us, this is a lot harder, or maybe even impossible. Not everyone has that eye for design, you know your slide looks bad, but you somehow cannot pin down why.
Another problem with these “sketch shapes” is that they are not ver efficient to hold text. Try adding long words in a circle shape and you run into problems. (The Japanese figured out a way to create square water melons so more of them would fit in a fridge).
And maybe you have that eye for design, then you still need to invest all that time to get your shapes and layouts right. Time that is worth it if you are designing your annual sales team kick off keynote address, time that is definitely not worth it when bashing out the quarterly numbers for a quick review meeting with the team.
As an example, see this alternative layout to the classical Venn diagram that I recently added to the SlideMagic 2.0 slide database. Less pretty, but it still looks decent and is easier to work with.
