"All presentations will look the same"

I get this feedback from early SlideMagic beta testers. SlideMagic supports one accent colour, one font, and encourages you to work in a strict slide layout grid. For certain presentations, this feedback is valid. I think we will not see any Apple product launch presentations designed in SlideMagic (yet).

For 99% of presentations though, it is actually precisely what I tried to achieve:

• When the software tool you use for presentations is incredibly simple, you spend most of your time worrying about the content rather than searching support web sites how to align the second line of a bullet point paragraph. I want 90% of SlideMagic users to master 100% of its features.
• If all presentations use more or less the same visual concepts to show trade offs, contrasts, sales over time, etc. then people will be able to read and understand them quicker

Today, I would argue that PowerPoint presentations look more similar to each other than the SlideMagic decks: lists of bullet points on a white background using the standard Microsoft Office (olive, blue, red, green) colour scheme.

Below are examples how the same SlideMagic chart would look when used in different companies. You see the impact of consistent use of colours. All SlideMagic charts will be updated instantly after a colour and logo change.

If you want to try SlideMagic for yourself, you can sign up here as a beta user.

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Art: Salomon de Bray, The Twins Clara and Aelbert de Bray, 1646

Send me your template requests

Presentation templates in SlideMagic have 3 big advantages:

1. They are very easy to customise: adding rows, columns, boxes can be done without destroying the slide layout. Colours and fonts are adjusted instantly, so templates look never out of place with the rest of your slides
2. You get them straight from a professional presentation designer
3. New templates and updates get pushed instantly to all SlideMagic users

I want to add more templates.

Let me know what templates, concepts, you need. Put requests in the comments are send them to me at [email protected]. You can even send me PowerPoint slides if you want. If you have not done so, I will strip the slides of company specific information before publishing them in the SlideMagic template library.

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Art: Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Sescau photographe, 1896

Be less busy with presentations

This memo that was sent to the team behind Slack before its preview release resonated with me. 

We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works fine).

I love the "be less busy" tag line of Slack. I love the stress relief that search provides in Slack (you can always find things if you have to). 

The more I think about it, SlideMagic might actually not an alternative to PowerPoint, it is a broader concept of change in how people in enterprises should communicate, and how they spend their time preparing for this communication. My tool enables this, but it is not the main thing of what it is all about.

SlideMagic enables you:

• To be less busy with meetings: you can have short, to the point meetings where ideas can be communicated clearly, and decisions can be taken quickly. Documents are simple and clear, and more or less standardised. It becomes a very efficient corporate language.
• To be less busy with preparing for meetings, Most of the time will go into forming your idea. Once you have your idea, it only should take an hour or so to jot it down in beautiful slides. And a powerful keyword search function across all your slides ensures that you will never have to do double work, rework slides.
• To lift the spirits of a company by eliminating poor design. Employees work better in a beautiful office. Seeing depressing dense bullet point presentations on every screen, on every printer, on every fax machine, on every projector, in every email inbox, does not add to employee morale.

Now I need to rework somehow in the SlideMagic marketing web site. You do not have to wait for this, you can sign up for SlideMagic right now to be less busy with presentations.

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Art: Portrait of an unknown woman, Ivan Kramskoi, 1883

Little productivity hacks in SlideMagic

Recently, I have focussed most of the development work for SlideMagic on improving the workflow. It is the small differences that can make a big difference. Here are two features that you might not have discovered yet:

You can select multiple boxes and edit their design (colours, font size, etc.) at the same time. Great for creating tables quickly or clean up inconsistent font sizes.

In the shape change menu you can tackle multiple shapes in one go. Click another shape and you can adjust its perimeter as well without leaving and re-entering the menu.

You can give SlideMagic a try yourself, the beta version is free to use. Sign up here.

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New PowerPoint 2016 for Mac can beat Keynote

The preview of the new Microsoft Office 2016 is out (finally) and I have installed it on my production machine letting it do all my presentation design work for clients. (You can download the Office 2016 preview here)

• It looks beautiful. PowerPoint 2016 for Mac looks exactly the same as PowerPoint 2013 for Windows. A calm flat user interface. Working in a beautiful software environment always encourages you to create beautiful presentations.
• The whole interface feels faster, snappier, and smoother, somehow. This is especially true for Excel. The current version of Excel for Mac has a highly annoying latency when entering data in cells. 
• Subtle changes to the default colours and fonts. Gone are the boring olive greens of the old PowerPoint colour scheme. Calibri light looks great on Retina displays. Gone are the default gradients and drop shadows. Gone are the tick marks in data charts.
• The commenting infrastructure is nice for collaboration with other people
• Full integration with OneDrive cloud storage (if Microsoft has guts they should add Dropbox as well, and maybe even Google Drive).
• Now PowerPoint gives suggested snap lines to place objects, automatically distributing and aligning things on your screen. 
• The grid behaves more normal with a centimeter ruler. If you accidentally move a grid line (yes, this still happens) it is easy to move it back to the right position. 
• Now text and shape backgrounds have the exact same colour rendering, an annoying bug in PowerPoint 2011, where despite selecting the same RGB value, colours on text and shapes would render differently.

There are a few important things that are missing:

• The ability to customise the toolbar at the top (here is where I put my align and distribute buttons for example) (this was possible in PowerPoint 2011)
• It is still not possible to embed fonts with a presentation saved in PowerPoint for Mac (it works on the Windows version)

I think PowerPoint 2016 is so good that it has gained the edge over Apple Keynote. Recent user interface changes in Keynote have made the workflow a bit slower. You need to navigate around too many menus to do basic things such as colour changes. Keynote looks nice and clean, but this organised UI comes at the expense of usability.

But before PowerPoint can take the trophy, some bugs that are still in the preview need to be ironed out. I am confident that Microsoft will be able to do this over the next few months until the official release. Here wo go:

• Font rendering: The software UI looks clean and crisp, but the presentation fonts look a bit fuzzy. In Excel, there is an inconsistency of fonts across the spreadsheet. It looks fine towards the top and bottom of the screen, but not in the middle. 

• The colour picking is not completely fool proof, especially when you want to use it define new theme colours for your presentation
• There are frequent crashes, save your work
• Font variations to not come through as in PowerPoint 2011. For the Apple Helvetica font, the bold condensed variant does not pop up for example

But hey, you are developing a PowerPoint killer?

Correct (and therefore my review is biased), I think that PowerPoint and Keynote have too many features, and leave too much design freedom to a layman designer. The result: boring bullet point presentations. My presentation app SlideMagic is trying to address these issues. But that is a separate discussion.

UPDATE: This post was corrected, shape booleans are still present in PowerPoint 2016

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Art: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, Facade (sunset), harmonie in gold and blue 1892-1894 Musée Marmottan Monet Paris, France. Sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter

SlideMagic is in public beta, anyone can sign up

Two years after having the first idea about creating a PowerPoint alternative from scratch, I now have taken the invite wall down on presentation software SlideMagic. Anyone can now sign up for the beta version.

Here is how to get hooked:

1. Go to the "templates" tab and clone one of the template presentations to start
2. Customise your own accent colour and logo
3. Go all the way to the end (beyond playing around) and create one real presentation for your next meeting. It can be a short presentation. It can be low-risk presentation.

Step 3 is the important one. You will see how incredibly easy it is to create a presentation, especially when you think you should go back to PowerPoint for your next presentation.

Let me know your thoughts and share SlideMagic with like minded people who you think might enjoy it as well.

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Art: Claude Monet, La rue Montorgueil à Paris. Fête du 30 juin 1878. Subscribe to this blog. Follow me on Twitter. Sign up for SlideMagic

Why SlideMagic is different

I created a quick presentation (hey, in SlideMagic) that highlights some of the features I have put inside that you will not get in other presentation design apps. Some of them you will never find there (even if people try to copy them) because of the fundamentally different way SlideMagic works. Less designer freedom and more uniformity allows you to do great things!

• Keyword search across all your slides, no more opening and closing files
• Image-based search: "get me all the slides that contain this image"
• Explanation slide-out drawer to turn an abstract visual presentation that needs verbal explanation into a document that you can email.
• A strictly enforced grid that makes sure everything is always lined up and distributed properly. And the most tricky part: that includes the columns and bars of data charts as well.
• Instant conversion from a light to a dark background and back (switch between a conference room and a keynote hall setting)
• And, a template bank that is constantly updated by a McKinsey/Idea Transplant designer!

Give SlideMagic a try yourself, you can request an invite here.

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Art: Albert Gleizes, 1912, Les Baigneuses, oil on canvas, 105 x 171 cm, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Published in Du "Cubisme"
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The final clean up

Some things to check once you think you have finished your presentation:

• Are the fonts consistent throughout the presentation? Are have default Arials/Calibris managed to sneak in? 
• Are font sizes in comparable boxes the same?
• Are the headlines all in the same place on every slide?
• Are objects in each slide aligned, and properly distributed?
• Are the proper colours used on every slide, including data charts, or do you still see standard PowerPoint colours anywhere?
• Are all images in the proper aspect ratio, without distortion?
• Did you include an attribution to creative common images?
• In case you will be displaying the presentation on another computer, have you checked Windows/Mac rendering issues? Sometimes fonts are rendered in slightly different sizes, causing words to drop to the second line.
• Is data properly rounded up?

Now you see why SlideMagic has 1 font, 1 accent colour, and a strict grid that makes it impossible to misalign objects or put titles in the wrong places.

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Art: Berthe Morisot, Hanging the Laundry out to Dry, 1875
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The catch up slide

Here is a concept that you can use in many investor and/or sales pitches for technology:

While [a] and [b] have moved on, [c] is still pretty much stuck in the 1950s despite a lot of technological development. Our company is going to fix that.

I have added a slide to the SlideMagic startup pitch template library that reflects this idea, Two "arrows" moving to the right, and a third one which is catching up. Look at the simplicity of the graphics which exactly fits the philosophy of SlideMagic. It looks pretty, it gets the message across, is easy to design. A new business language that does not need arrows, drop shadows, and gradients. It is almost a Lego-like abstractification (is that a word?) of a complex visual.

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Art: Le derby d'Epsom, painting by Théodore Géricault, 1821
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Your requests for SlideMagic templates

I am keen to make the templates in presentation software SlideMagic as useful as possible. Let me know if you have specific requests for templates and/or story flows that I should include. Two conditions for this free presentation design help:

• You do not get angry with me when I could not find the time to work on your request and prioritised another template 
• The result of your request will be publicly available for everyone to use, so strip it of any specific/confidential information

Send your requests to jan at slidemagic dot com, start with TEMPLATE PLEASE in the subject line.

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Art: Henri Matisse, The Open Window, 1905
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Working with templates in SlideMagic

Many beta testers ask me how to use templates in presentation software SlideMagic. The series of screen shots below explain how you can access and use them. You can:

• Clone an entire template presentation into a new presentation
• Import selected template slides into your presentation

SlideMagic stores all presentations in one big database which created the opportunity for a really cool feature: the ability to search through ALL your slides like a Google web search. And not only with keywords, you can also ask SlideMagic to return all slides that use a specific image.

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Art: William Powell Frith, The Sleeping Model, 1893

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The future of the PC

Technology analyst Ben Evans was pondering the next possible revolution in computing platforms: the PC, the smartphone. This triggered me to give my thoughts about the future of the desktop or laptop computer (I will call them PC). I posted a quick comment, but will elaborate here a bit more.

It is important to separate device from the usage setting. There will always be a need for a creative, focussed work environment to capture your ideas. I do not think that we will ever witness the moment where we can do serious design work on the go on a small device. Creative means, focus, concentration, and an organised clutter free spacious environment.

No, smartphones and tables (current screen sizes) are not going to be the dominant platform for design work (that is why I am launching SlideMagic for bigger screens first).

Having said that, the PC as we know it could totally change. Design work requires some form of big visual interface, and some form of human-machine interaction. What is in between can be completely different from the form factor that we know today.

Technology might advance to such a level that all PC-type processing power, storage requirements, and power supply can easily fit in a smart phone-sized device. And I think that is the future. Everyone carries one piece of hardware with them that contains these functions, but also serves as a wrapper for our security credentials.

Screens could evolve drastically (remember that touch screens were the big driver behind the smartphone revolution). We could see very large tablet style devices for design work. But maybe e-ink technology will enable the creating of super thin, super light, paper-like foldable screens The same is true for keyboards and mouse controllers. Maybe that same screen can spread out in front of you and creates a combined input device and visual screen for your work?

Screen innovation should go along software user interface innovation. Many of today's productivity tools are still based on old working practices. Mouse-based drawing, type writer-style keyboards. 

SlideMagic is already working to innovate the user interface. Now the screens need to follow suit.

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Art: Georges de la Tour, The Cheat, 1630

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SlideMagic is not Software

I tend to look at it as a new business communication design language. When you give people simple building blocks they end up doing great things with it. Look at Lego. Look at Twitter. Constraints actually drive creativity.

Engineers used to just design for machine/system constraints. Designers used to just engineer for human/social constraints.

— John Maeda (@johnmaeda) September 30, 2013

I can see the confirmation that it works in the behaviour beta users. Advanced designers who are looking for the most advanced features miss certain functionality (but hey, check out that automatic light to dark background conversion). Some people are confused by the user interface which is radically different (read much more simple) than PowerPoint. But the user who makes a first effort to go through the dip and actually makes a presentation for real is hooked.

I could have written a book, created a training program, but I thought I would never get the reach that a web based tool could give. Hence the presentation design app SlideMagic.

So the ambition is not to remove PowerPoint from corporate desktops, it is bigger than that. The ambition is to change the way people talk to each other in business.

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Art: Rene Magritte, La trahison des images, 1928–29, Image credit: Nad Renrel on Flickr.

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Speaker versus explanation notes on SlideMagic

SlideMagic now has 2 types of notes for each slide:

• Explanation notes can be added to the right of the slide (optionally) and are meant for explaining the content of the visual is nice fluid full sentences. In case the presenter cannot be there to explain things in person. They are nicely formatted.
• Speaker notes are messy, huge bullets that serve as a reminder for the speaker during a live presentation. The bullets are visible to the speaker on the presenter window (not to the audience).

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Art: George Jakobides, Two children playing peekaboo, 1895

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Lawyers, politicians, doctors, priests, and corporate executives...

...They all have their own traditional language. Complicated contracts, evasive and woolly statements, illegible prescriptions, religious books only written in Latin, and bullet point-filled PowerPoint presentations full of jargon and buzzwords. These languages were formed by tradition, and some may argue are here to protect a profession (who needs a lawyer when you can seal agreements with a simple paragraph?). 

And yes, I put business presentations in the same category. Change is already happening. Formal letters are replaced by short, informal emails. The woolly Microsoft Word long hand memo was replaced by PowerPoint bullets. And for very important presentations (1% of the total?), businesses start investing in visual, custom designed, presentations (the work I do under the Idea Transplant name)

But change can go further.  The other 99% of business presentations can be different as well. These documents do not have to be graphically stunning, loaded with the latest animation and zooming effects, or full of exciting video clips. They need to look good, and they need to have a clear, crisp, direct, visual language.

It requires a change in the corporate language that corporate executives are using. And making that change is hard. Requiring a new complicated piece of software for it would kill the change before it even starts. The idea behind my presentation design app SlideMagic is to stop comparing business language to that used by lawyers, politicians, doctors, and priests...

Art: Benjamin Ferrers, The Court of Chancery during the reign of George I, circa 1725

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