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SlideMagic
I am doing a number of service updates to the plumbing of SlideMagic to keep things secure. You might be logged out in the process. If things are not behaving normally, please log out and back into your account. Sorry about this.
A feature that was long overdue: today we added a color picker to the SlideMagic settings page. Better late than never. Click on the big bar to reveal the pop up. If you want, you can still enter RGB codes. With the eye dropper, you can now sample colors anywhere on your desktop. Make sure to have V3.1.7 installed to use this feature.
(Proud of my daughter Mia who insisted to put this in, and actually wrote the code to do so herself)
I added 2 additional AI generators to SlideMagic, the produce a slide with some text and an image based on your prompt. One generator pulls the image from Unsplash, the other creates it from scratch. There is no update to your SlideMagic app needed to see the extra image generators.
See an example below:
A few months ago, I added a DALL-E AI-image generator to SlideMagic. AI-generated images can be great for presentations:
You can get very precise in defining what you want to see, much more so than browsing endless stock images search results that are not exactly right
You can make images look visually consistent across a presentation
The DALL-E engine is not accurate enough though. Especially when it comes to humans/faces. Midjourney is doing a far better job at this but is not (yet) providing 3rd party API access to its engine, the only way to get images out is via a web-based interface.
I am starting to look into deploying the same open source models that are actually the basis of Midjourney, directly into SlideMagic. You can see the results below and they look very promising. More to come.
Image found with an automated prompt to a stock image site
Open-source AI-generated image
Very poor result from DALL-E
See the image below. I am blending AI-generated slides and images, and things are not completely right yet…
I am continuing the gradual upgrading of the SlideMagic AI capabilities. Today, I added an automated content page to the automated story line generator. For each section in your presentation outline, you now get a slides with all sections, plus the current one highlighted. (See the screenshot below).
More updates and refinements to come
I added the second AI-powered slide generator to SlideMagic. It creates a simple feature comparison of the items you enter. So this time it is a single slide rather than an entire presentation layout. See the screenshots below.
It was an interesting learning process to figure out how to “tame” OpenAI and get it to produce consistent outputs and data formats that I can use in layouts. I still need to improve the adjustment of font sizes based on the density of the output. More and better generators to come.
You need to update the app to version 3.1.1. to see the new features (or higher, this was written in June 2023), if it did not happen automatically, simply re-install SlideMagic from the home page.
I just soft launched SlideMagic 3.0 that now has a direct backend integration to OpenAI’s ChatGPT (in addition to the AI-based image generator I put in earlier).
My objective was to get the basic engine running. So things are very simple at the moment. When you try to insert a slide, you will see a new option: “AI-generated slides”. Clicking the icon will lead you to a new form where you can input a prompt. Hit “submit” and be patient, and the app will generate a simple presentation layout with separator pages based on your prompt. See the screenshots below.
I am planning to release many, many more of these generators. More sophisticated story lines, chart template generators etc. now that the basics are in place. Next steps for me is more “prompt engineering” (SlideMagic adds a lot of content to the prompt you submit in the background), and expanding my chart generation engine to take in more human-like responses from ChatGPT and turn them into SlideMagic boxes.
The generative AI feature is free for all to use at the moment (as long as it does not hit my OpenAI account too hard), SlideMagic Pro users can export these AI-generated charts to PowerPoint.
I am continuing to experiment with OpenAI to see how it can help us make presentation design easier. Generative AI feels a lot like the early days of the Internet in the end of the 1990s. People did not really see that “Internet” was not really a unified tool that could do wonders for business, but rather a description for hundreds of different applications and use cases that happen to rely on a web browser.
The same is true for generative AI now. I don’t think that I will come up with the ultimate AI-based presentation tool overnight that can read your thoughts and deliver the slides at the press of a button. Instead, I will try to release bite-size features that can make the life of a presentation designer easier.
And some of these might not even be very clever. Anyone can go to ChatGPT and get it to produce some presentation skeletons or summaries of text. But there are ways to make prompting of the engine better for presentations. You can save a lot of time by having a user interface straight into SlideMagic, and most importantly, it saves a lot of time when SlideMagic creates the slides for you (in .magic and/or .pptx). The latter has nothing to do with AI, but rather improving the slide generation engine that I already built.
Watch this space.
SlideMagic offers free Pro subscriptions to students (sign up here). For many countries there is automated, instant approval if you log in with your university/school credentials. For some countries, reviews are still manual. Make it easy to get approved by filling out the form correctly if you are in the latter box. Use your university email address, and provide a link to a profile (LinkedIn, school/university) so we can verify your status. We see many anonymous gmail addresses, and empty profile links in the applications, and we won’t switch these account on to the student plan.
Here is an interesting twist on the traditional annual calendar:
Image credit: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/one-page-calendar/
Yes, it is a lot more efficient when it comes to the amount of space it takes (or the required font size to fit a whole year on a page). But I think the point of the big, dense, calendar is to schedule and plan things across the year. Also, you need to do a few mental steps to get your head around looking at a specific month.
I added a template with this calendar to the SlideMagic template library, search for “calendar” in the SlideMagic app and it will show up.
You can read the full discussion of this alternative calendar format here.
The installation of the latest SlideMagic version with AI-powered image generation created an issue for some users where the access to online image search was blocked. It is easy to fix: log out, and back in again in the SlideMagic app and all should work. I deployed version 2.7.3 as well that eliminates this issue all together.
Most people use AI image generators to create something funny (a cat riding an elephant) or something artsy (a formula 1 car in the style of Van Gogh). This is not the primary motivation why I included OpenAI image generation in SlideMagic.
Image generators can be useful already in presentations, especially for image concepts that are relatively straightforward, but hard to find on stock image sites. The example that came along yesterday with an image of a ‘sleeping bull’ for a economics-related presentation. Perfect for OpenAI, see the result below.
PowerPoint, Google Slides are presentation tools that most of the time are actually not used as presentation tools. Rather people use them as a visual collaboration tool. The organization chart that needs to go into the deck forces the issue: it is time to agree on where the boxes sit and which lines (dotted or straight) go between them. The tiny footnote is essential to agree the strategy for the North America entry strategy etc.
The visual character of these programs makes them more useful to do this than word processors. Online collaboration adds another option to manage multiple pens in one document. Comments give a system to manage todo lists.
SlideMagic on the other hand is a presentation tool.
Image credit: Jay Cross on Flickr
There was a small glitch in SlideMagic’s PDF converter which has been fixed in version 2.7.2, updates should install automatically, if not, download a fresh version from www.slidemagic.com and you are good to go.
Soon, SlideMagic Pro users will be able to create images using AI (DALL.E) right from within SlideMagic. The prototype is working (see screenshot), I just need to tidy up things a bit before a release to the public.
If you need to plot the progress of your team in the FIFA World Cup, SlideMagic is there to help you. There are a number of football charts in the library, including a tree where you can add teams in the knock out race to the final (see below).
Simply search for football in the SlideMagic app and the charts will show up (see below).
SlideMagic Pro users can convert these slides to PowerPoint or PDF. Free student plan available
PowerPoint slide templates originate from the 1980s. “Slides” would mainly be data charts: graphs and tables to show information. At the top of these pages would be a descriptive title (Economic output in the EU), and the subtitle would give the unit of measurement ($ billion).
Slide templates evolved. Business school professors and management consultants invented frameworks, more conceptual slide layouts, and people started using presentation software to layout their entire story on the big screen, often in bullet points. Descriptive titles became messages.
In most cases the title stayed. Every slide always has a title at the top. But this layout does not always work. People started adding a big arrow, with another big message next to it to make sure that the audience gets the point (it is spelled out 2x on the slide).
Titles take up valuable screen real estate, especially on widescreen 16x9 layouts. They make the chart body space even longer, more stretched. A loooong sentence in small font across a 16x9 slide can be hard to read.
I have become more flexible when it comes to titles. Data charts still have them. But other slide layouts might have none, instead, just an image, or a big text box somewhere else on the page. Or a message that is actually a few paragraphs long, on the side of the slide.
In SlideMagic, you can instantly change the layout of slides, and switch the fixed title on or off. It is time to let go of the obligatory title. See the the examples below. (If you are reading this as an email blog update, you might have to click through to the original post to see).
No title at all
Big box of text
SlideMagic’s side title view
Traditional title and subtitle
The message in a SlideMagic explanation box
I have added this slide to the SlideMagic slide library, so you can use it in your own presentation. Simply search for “dead end” in the app and it will show up. Pro users can convert this slide to PowerPoint or PDF.
Make sure you maintain a consistent graphical language throughout your slides. Here is a thumbnail view of a section of a deck I used in recent meetings.
Here are the guidelines I used:
Dark background, white text, purple accent
Page-filling, black and white images
No capitals
Selectively bolding a word in a sentence
No slide titles in a fixed position
Every slide blends right in without, complicated graphics, and SlideMagic makes it really easy to apply this style.
The slide panel is a way to add the story of the slide in a few paragraphs, so people can understand things if you are not there to present. It is important to keep the text in this box as text, resist the temptation to create bullet points, or short messages which will compete with the slide design.
On a separator, the box might look odd at first sight. But it is a consistent look. In side panel mode, the separator is the 'illustration' of the text on the right. Include explanation text on separator slides to introduce the next section of your presentation, exactly as you would in a live situation.
See the example below:
If you switch to another view mode, the side panel will disappear, but the app keeps the text, so you can switch them back on at a later stage.
