Architecture diagrams

I am starting to experiment with different chart types in SlideMagic. One experiment: IT architectures that consist of users, servers, databases, clouds and lots of lines.

The built-in icon search, combined with the new line drawing feature does a pretty good job actually. And while SlideMagic is not a dedicated tool to design network architectures, it might actually force you to make better architecture diagrams in presentations. Let me explain.

Detailed network diagrams have the same problem as detailed spreadsheets when it comes to presentations. They are project work tools to run analysis and plan work, they are not tools for communication. When I need to make a data chart, I always disconnect from the spreadsheet and resist the temptation to copy-paste. Instead, I pick the 10 numbers that matter, round them up to the relevant precision, and plop them in a very simple bar/column chart that tells the story.

The same is true for IT architectures. If you want to present an architecture overview on a slide, that slide needs to be understood almost immediately when putting it up (like all slides in your deck). If tangled connections, boxes, servers make that hard, then the only thing your slide communicates is that your architecture is complex, not much more.

Again, disconnect from the working papers. Think about your message: ‘my architecture has 3 layers’, ‘my system connects the systems of 15 suppliers’, ‘my system is entirely on premise’, whatever that message is, make a simple chart that supports it.

Remember, presentation slides are usually not project briefings for network installers.

Hexagons

The new line drawing feature in SlideMagic was put in to support the connection of boxes in organisation charts and flow diagrams, but you can use it more creatively as well. The attached examples of the use of hexagon shapes shows how you can bypass SlideMagic’s strict limitations on shape types (basically boxes). But do you need to?

Photo by Jonas Svidras on Unsplash

What do you mean, "presentation"?

This is a comment by my 15 year old daughter. She sees SlideMagic or PowerPoint as software that you can use to create your school project or make a photo compilation to share with your friends.

She is right. “Presentations” are mostly documents that capture an idea. Only a small percentage of these slides actually get presented on a screen in front of a live audience. “Presentation Zen”, TED Talks, Steve Jobs, and others have taught us how to make good live presentations, and SlideMagic can support this.

Now it is time to take on the quality of the other 95% of slides that get produced in businesses (and schools).

Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash

Image cropping with a focal point

SlideMagic can switch back and forth between multiple layouts, and needs to handle rapid changes in the grid of a slide. As a result, aspect ratios of images get changed all the time, tripping up your carefully selected image composition. At the moment, the app is storing different crop and zoom levels for different aspect ratios, but that solution is not ideal. (You see how Squarespace gets it wrong with the banner image of this blog post).

I want to get to the point where a SlideMagic user can click a focal point of an image, after which the app will do the hard work of re-adjusting the crop automatically. Doing research, I see a lot of “AI” applications that can figure out what the focal point of an image should be, there seems to be nothing that deals with focal point-based cropping itself. The solutions I see, are ones where you can store multiple crops of the same image, after which the most appropriate one gets selected.

I started scribbling a manual algorithm to come up with reasonable compositions. Here are the first (manual but automateable) results applied to some cows on a beach in Africa, the first image is the original.

It works pretty well, on the the extremely horizontal one gets cropped too low, I would have shown a bit more sky on that one. Let’s see if we can get this to work, both in terms of the algorithm, and the user interface.

Photo by Vince Gx on Unsplash

The perfect arrow...

I am replacing the connectors in SlideMagic with 2 features. The relatively thin lines that connect boxes in a diagram went live yesterday. Currently I am working on the 2nd feature: fat arrows to show cause-effect relationships or other forces.

As I already discussed back in 2017, it is tricky to get arrows to look right in presentation software. The aspect ratio of the containing box, the angles of the arrow, some come out great, others won’t.

And even if you got one right on your slide by moving the various sliders in the shape, how do you make sure that the 3 below it look exactly the same? Oh, and then you need to insert a fifth one and squeeze everything a bit…

I think I am on to a possible solution. I scribbled an algorithm on a piece of paper, now let’s see how to bring it to life in SlideMagic, and then convert them to PowerPoint. The latter might have to be via an image rather than a dynamic shape. Below is a screenshot of my development machine. Work in progress.

Update

I have entered my usual summer blogger schedule (fewer posts) and am now working really hard to get SlideMagic 2.0 right. The feature list for SlideMagic 2.0 is now almost completely implemented. In software, there are always more things to add, but the product as it stands at the moment is starting to get very useful. Over the last 2 weeks I put in very big changes that might not look big from a user’s perspective, but required huge changes under the hood:

• The new '“side title” layout (my preferred)

• Slide search previews in your own preferred colour, layout, font style

• Horizontal and vertical waterfall charts

• Dynamically generated slides with a relevant image (i.e., unlimited slide in the template bank)

• Better rendering of slides and images on higher resolution screens

• Useful image compression in the background

The only big one that remains outstanding is a better way to make diagrams with lines and arrows, the connector solution is not perfect.

In the background I am now tweaking lots of user interface details: how borders fit around thumbs, mouse behaviour when hovering over things, an “endless scroll” is now working for image search, messages that warn you when things go wrong, or when your app is busy searching, making sure that thumbnails distribute nicely over the screen when zooming, minimising the times when the app needs to re-render a slide or image to make the workflow calmer, etc. etc.

I start to look at app design the way I look at slide design. Things need to be absolutely right, and even tiny deviations, irregularities, small mistakes, can really upset me, while most people won’t even notice them. This is what I think ultimately leads to good design, one by one, these details do not matter, I you add them all though, something works without you having an ability to point your finger at exactly why.

If you tried SlideMagic 3 months ago, you almost won’t recognise it (sort of), today (at the moment of writing, version 2.4.12 is the latest one). Work in progress

"Operating system updates" for presentations

Every year Apple releases operating system upgrades for computers, tablets, and phones. Your apps and documents have the same content, but look slightly different. I am trying to push this concept to the world of presentations.

It has already happened (sort of). The slide-out panel to right changes the look and feel of your presentation without changing the content. Over time, I have made subtle changes to font sizes and layout proportions, which means that every SlideMagic presentation in the world will have a slightly different look. Switching to a dark slide background turn the colours of your presentation upside down (in a good way), far beyond just making the background black.

I will try to push this further, by adding more layout options , your slides will look entirely different, including the ones you made 6 months ago, but you can always switch back to another layout format.

Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash

Appearance

Wearing a mask in times of the virus (probably) protects you somewhat from catching the virus, (probably) protects others from you. Individually, the change in odds are probably not that big, but as a society as a whole (the perspective of the government), a small change in infection rate can have an incredibly positive impact (exponential mathematics).

But there is something else, a mask has a social function

• A mask signals that it is not rude when you don’t shake my hand

• A mask signals that you are probably a careful person in general and therefore OK to be with (from 1.5 meters distance)

• A mask makes others think (feel guilty) whether to do the same

The mask signals who you are.

This ‘appearance’ also applies to your presentation. You can have the perfect story line, slides with little text, clear and crisp headlines. But the look and feel of your slides says a lot about the culture of you and your company, irrespective of their content.

With SlideMagic, the look and feel is sorted.

Photo by Fran Boloni on Unsplash

Pretty template, ugly slide

Most corporate presentation templates are designed starting from an empty slide. The designer feels the urge to spice things up a bit with logos and other graphical elements. Now when you actually use that template (designed for a blank page) with everyday presentation content, things start to clash.

The same things must have happened to the designers at BMW, who forgot the license plate that would be plastered over the front of their new car design….

The next time you brief a designer for a new PowerPoint template, give her a full slide deck including content, let her create a design you like, then strip out all the elements and see what you are left with.

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