Preserve image positioning when switching between 4x3 and 16x9

SlideMagic swaps instantly between traditional and widescreen aspect ratios. The slide content stays nicely in the slide frame, everything stays aligned and you can revert instantly.

Because SlideMagic does not distort aspect ratios of images (no stretching or squeezing), the positioning of an image changes slightly if you switch between a narrow and a wide screen layout. This can be annoying for images where positioning is a big deal (compare the lined up eye lines of a series of portrait images versus a long-distance shot of a mountain range). If you switch aspects 5 minutes before your meeting, your presentation is misaligned. (This is obviously still a lot better than PowerPoint where everything would stretch and move to unpredictable places when picking a different screen format)

Well, SlideMagic fixed this last hitch as well. I just released V2.3.17 (download SlideMagic here for both Windows and Mac) which now keeps 2 sets of image size and crop frames, one for each slide aspect ratio. You switch back and forth, so will the image positioning. Make sure to double check each image once in both aspect ratios, and the settings will be saved together with the presentation.

For future releases I am studying more advanced image analysis, where I could automatically recognise a face in an image for example, and lock in the position of the eyes (maybe the first true “AI” application in SlideMagic).

Even better image search

I made improvements to the image search interface in version 2.3.15. Removed clutter from the side bar, and you can now switch between Unsplash, Pixabay, and the Noun Project (icons) from the image search page. Search keywords are carried over to the other image provider. Existing users should see the update automatically on your machine or can download (like anyone else) here.

Unlimited access to Unsplash images

SlideMagic was approved by Unsplash for full access to the API, no more hourly rate limits for searching images. Thank you!

Version 2.3.9 of the SlideMagic desktop app also offers a more minimalist image search interface. The selected image gets put straight into your slide, in a proper grid so that it always lines up with the other elements on the page. In the app you can zoom in or out, and move the image (inside its container). The image credit also gets placed in the footnote of the slide (not required by Unsplash as it is a remixed image, but still nice to the photographer, the main obstacle for crediting images I think is not that people don’t want to, but it is a hassle to find the details and put them in your designs).

Hitting an empty search returns a set of random images (because I could :-)).

Integrated Pixabay image search

Pixabay offers a large database of free stock images. The site has become increasingly useful over the past years. In 2020, free images are now often better than paid stock photos, simply because the designer/photographer tries less hard to add effects and edits to the original photographs. (This is all written from the perspective of a corporate presentation designer, there are probably other people out there who value edited images).

Each free image site has its own profile. Unsplash has better aesthetics, more natural images. Pixabay has more functional images.

I have now added the ability to search Pixabay images in the desktop app. (Unsplash images, and the Noun Project icons were already present). All implementations are still beta features, as I finalise the approval for the API. (But I am confident I checked all the right boxes).

In-app image search is not just a “lazy” feature. It can greatly improve your presentation design workflow. Especially when it comes to copying, pasting, cropping and positioning images. In SlideMagic, this is just a few clicks. And, because of SldieMagic’s rigid slide grid, every image will always line up neatly with the other elements of your slide.

You can download the latest version of SlideMagic here (2.3.6). Integrated image search requires a pro subscription plan.

Finding the right portrait image

Today was another day of template building, I am reaching the point where the SlideMagic app starts to contain more slides than the SlideMagic template store that I host with Shopify.

I did some work on finding good portrait shots today. Although now there are many free photo sites around with abundant amount of images of people, it is still tricky to find the right photos to use in your presentation. Here are some of the filters I apply subconsciously as I go through hundreds and hundreds of images at high speed:

• Too much stock photo: you know what I mean

• Clothing mismatch: too fancy dress, very light outfit in a cold environment

• Trying too hard to pose

• Artistic shots of people who look unhappy, depressed, beautiful, but not for a business presentation

• Shots of people who look unnaturally happy

• A background that is too recognisable

• A screen with a message that is too recognisable, grabs too much attention

• Too pretty, cutesy

• Weird posing

• Trying too hard

• Background mismatch (a church, the Sahara) while checking your phone

• An outdated phone (this image was taken 15 years ago)

• Background too busy to add text, other visual elements

• The list goes on

Hopefully SlideMagic will save you the time I spent to find the right images.

P.S. For those who are interested in the cause of yesterday’s mystery bug that made items disappear in the small thumbnails on the left of the screen. Well, flipping an image (which I did on that particular slide) is a time consuming CPU operation, the computer starts it, but then goes on doing other things in parallel, one of which is scrolling the selected slide thumbnail in the visible part of the window (you see it sitting just at the bottom). The scroll stops the other slide rendering operations. And unlike pretty much anything in Javascript, there is no event to catch and manage this. A small 0.1s delay when needed solved the issue for now. That was 1 hour of yesterday’s day :-)

Photo by Baylee Gramling and Photo by Lindbergh Paimalan on Unsplash on Unsplash

Accurately cropping images

Cropping an image accurately can be tricky, especially when PowerPoint is trying really hard to suggest possible cuts alongside snap lines it thinks are useful. My solution, drag the image to a huge size (without distorting its aspect ratio), crop, and shrink it down again.

Photo by Morgan Harris on Unsplash

Flying through

With a bit of Photoshop editing you can create an effect of a PowerPoint shape flying through some loop. I uploaded a new slide to the template store that uses this effect. Over the arrow, I positioned a second layer of the image, but just with a piece of rope with its background isolated. The arrow expanding outside the frame of the image (yes, I look those), adds to the motion feel in the slide.

View fullsize

Click the image to find the slide on the template store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

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Cover image by Blake Wheeler on Unsplash

Cartoons in presentations

Want to use a cartoon in your presentation? Here are some things to consider:

• Humor in a presentation can work, but be careful what sort of jokes you pick. A cartoon that was very funny late last night when you prepared the slides, could not fit the meeting context the next morning after that earlier remark that did not go down well. If you hardwired the wrong cartoon in your slide deck, make sure to click-skip really quickly.
• Do you have the copyright for the cartoon you just found on Google Image search?
• Does the cartoon actually add something to the presentation, or is it a business cartoon cliche?
• Can the audience actually read what is written on the cartoon from the back row?
• And finally, do you give the audience enough time to read it? As soon as you put a cartoon on the screen, everyone will start squinting to read what Dilbert has to say, and no one is listening anymore what you say at the same time. It might be best to pause your presentation until the first giggles start emerging from the audience. And remember the audience reads the cartoon for the first time, and needs more time than you to understand it. If you have to, you might have to read out the cartoon to the audience.

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Cover image by Samantha Lorette on Unsplash

How to cut out shapes out of images in PowerPoint

PowerPoint can do Photoshop-like tricks. One of them: cutting shapes out of images. Here is how to do it:

1. Drag your image on the slide

2. Draw a shape on top of it (the freehand shape allows you to create a very precise shape)

3. First select the image, then select the shape (shift click)

4. Now select the Shape Format menu

5. Click Merge Shapes

6. Click Subtract

That's it. Below is a slide from the template store that uses this technique (you can download the ready-made slide if you want)

The final template slide

The making of

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

Size creep

Super high resolution images of small slide elements can inflate the size of your PowerPoint or Keynote file without you noticing. A common culprit is an innocent looking page with 30 customer logos. Compress your images often to keep file sizes in check.

Another common file size mistake is to include high resolution images in the slide master to make it easer for people to understand template slides that are meant for photos. As a result, even a simple text slide will create a huge file as the slide master gets saved as an integral part of the document. This can add up in a company with 10,000 employees.

Image compression in PowerPoint can sometimes produce unpredictable results, especially when you tick "apply to all" and you have a presentation with a lot of photographs. I often see cropped images going haywire, the only rescue is to compress images one by one. Always save a copy of your file before attempting to compress the file.

Handy link: how to reduce file sizes in Office

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Image via WikiPedia

Dramatic reduction in stock image use

Stock image sites were a great discovery when I started getting into the presentation design business in the early 2000s. In fact, they might have pushed me over the edge in becoming a designer. All of a sudden, I discovered that combining McKinsey-style professional slides with carefully chosen stock images you could make some powerful sales and investor decks.

All of this happened at the same time when very fundamental books by the likes of Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte were published, TED talks were taking of, presentations were changing!

Looking back, and looking forward, I see that my presentation style has changed. The biggest change: far, far fewer (premium) stock images. How come? Post-rationalizing:

• I got much better and assessing the setting in which the presentation would be delivered. And very rarely do I design presentations for a massive keynote or TED Talk. Most of the time, these are decks that will be presented in a small conference room, to a small audience. And more importantly, the first "punch" that these decks need to deliver is in the email inbox, when an investor or potential customer decides to keep on clicking (or not). More and more, I am starting to design these presentations for the impatient attachment clicker, and less for the live audience. This means: fewer images, and yes denser content. It is cumbersome to maintain 2 versions of a document (one for sending, one for presenting), so in practice the live audience is suffering a little bit at the expensive of the email attachment reader.
• Investor and sales audiences have evolved. Pitches have a high degree of similarity, they all follow a similar pattern, companies are addressing similar types of problems, pitching similar types of technologies (investors are increasingly specializing), so I see less need to "wow" the audience with dramatic new concepts (self-driving cars) but rather focus more on the nuts and bolts of an innovation. Investors are clued up, and look for the substance, quickly clicking through the pretty pictures. 
• The premium stock image sites are collapsing under their own success. Image banks are diluted with designs that are somewhere between an actual clean photo and a finished design concept. Quality is technically good, but artistically "cheesy" and staged. Opening these sites as a designer makes you instantly feel that you are "in the wrong part of the Internet" And I am sure that even the layman designers gets totally confused when browsing these image sites.
• Free alternatives to paid stock image sites are popping up everywhere. If you need an image of the tip of an iceberg, you can find pretty decent ones on Google Image search (use the labeled for re-use option), WikiPedia or one of the many free stock image sites (that try to lure you into buying premium images that are often not better). 
• And finally, I think it is a matter confidence and experience, where I somehow found a personal design style that involves fewer images.

Build your image library

It is surprising to see that most of my clients have very few images of their staff, their products, their client installations. The result: very poor product image shots, and a set of inconsistent headshots of the management team in the presentation.

Make it a habit to build your image library constantly using your smartphone. Snap a picture of the management team meeting (when everyone is in the same room together), the product demonstration, the big shipment of product that goes out of the door, maybe the strategic partner visiting.

In that way, you always have a rich library of images to chose from.

Robo photo shoots

I was always wondering why it is that whenever I look for images of the exact same person, in the same outfit in different positions, I always end up with a search screen full of Asian models. Via Petapixel.

Building image grids in PowerPoint

Making a grid of images in PowerPoint is tricky. Images never have a consistent aspect ratio, and when you place a lot of them on a page, the guide suggestions always snap in the wrong place somehow. Here is a survival guide.

• Copy all your images inside the page and select them all
• Right click and go in "format picture"
• Tick the "size" icon, and click "size" 
• Hit "reset" to kill any aspect ratio distortion
• Hit "lock aspect ratio"
• Now select each image one by one, hit "crop", hit "aspect ratio" and pick one
• After this, select all the images again, and give them the same width with a numerical value
• Position the images on your grid
• Take each image in turn, select "crop" and move/zoom the image mask for the right composition

The above was a major consideration when designing the image grid system in my presentation app SlideMagic.

Soft edges around images...

...never look good. At least, I have never seen ones that do. Soft edges are right up there with standard PowerPoint colors, low res images, clip art, and distorted aspect ratios: all tell tale signs that it is going to be "that kind of" presentation.

Where visuals are crucial

If I sit down with a client, in almost all cases, the pitch of a company comes out fine verbally. People know how to tell their story. The order might not be perfect, there are some repetitions, here and there one of my questions needs to be clarified, but all in all, in 30 minutes we got a pretty good understanding of what is happening.

My work is to translate that story into visuals. And given the above, there are different types of slides.

Some slides are absolutely crucial to understanding the pitch. These are the ones that people are opening their laptops for, and pull up page 37:

• Screen shots and images of applications/products, in many cases it is actually unclear what the product does. This is specifically the case in internet applications, or medical devices where a picture of the actual product explains a lot.
• Data visualization that emphasizes how big something really is compared to something else, how fast things are growing or declining. Visuals do a much better job here than spoken word
• Complicated relationships, competitive positionings, IT architectures. These cases require a map on which both brains can sync to disentangle these complex structures.

Other slides are mere backup for the spoken word. They help to make the story more powerful, but are not essential: large photographs of metaphors (endless road, squeezed orange, confused customer) or simple text charts that support the flow of the story.

The purpose of the last group of charts is 1) to give your company a professional look & feel, and 2) make it possible for people to read/digest the story without you being present.

2-step image search

When searching for an image, there are 2 steps:

1. What sort of image works best?
2. What actual image is the best (and can I use without copyright issues)?

Recently, I needed a panorama overview of a retail store. Most stores do not have 20 meter high ceilings (a waste of space, a waste of energy), and stock image sites only provide images of actual stores under an editorial license (news papers can use them, marketing presentations not).

A broad Google search brought me to the Galeries Lafayette in Paris (step 1), after which it was easy to find a nice, high-res, creative commons image (step 2).

"Flattening" a video

Most of the corporate promotion videos I see are enhanced presentations: text movements with animations, still images with slow zoom added, piano background music and maybe some custom made illustrations. They look good, but have 2 problems when it comes to pitches to busy people:

• They make files very heavy (email attachment bounce and/or consuming 500MB of mobile download data)
• They take too much time: like a bullet point chart, you will have read that one sentence 10x by the time the pianist is finished with the 8 bar melody and ready to move on to the next shot.

That is the reason why I often "flatten" these videos, take the 5 best screen shots and paste them as images in a regular presentation deck. Looks great, quick to read, easy to download.

Anticipating this issue, when you brief a video production company ask them for 2 versions of the video, one with all the graphical elements, and one with less text, so you can use it as source material for still images over which you can place your own text in a presentation. Also handy when your messages change over time.

There are many other situations where you might actually need to keep the video in its full size: demonstrations of products, interviews of people, etc. If it is just about adding drama to a still visual, why not go with a well designed still visual though.