Fast. Easy. Beautiful.
Viewing entries in
SlideMagic
My presentation app SlideMagic will make life easier for every amateur designer. Still a few common mistakes sneak in that are hard to prevent with software. Most of them are related to the balance of typography on a page. Making sure that boxes contain roughly the same amount of text, and that signs are nicely balanced. See the examples below.
We just deployed a new, more minimalist user interface for presentation app SlideMagic. Have a look!. Some of the things that have changed over the past weeks:
Let me know what you think.
With my presentation app SlideMagic I aim to change the communication culture in corporates. People spend too much time preparing slides. They produce documents that are unattractive to look at, and spend far too much time falling asleep in conference rooms.
The solution: splitting the communication tools: Excel and PowerPoint for logging the analysis, and a new tool 100% focused at communicating an idea and getting to a decision. A super simple visual language does not allow you to get lost in crafting complicated slides, or worse - give up all together and just use bullet points on every chart.
In a business presentation you need very few visual concepts:
When you hit "insert" in SlideMagic, you get presentation with this list of slide templates. In my opinion they can cover 99% of your business presentation needs. Think about what you want to do (listing, comparing, forecasting, showcasing, linking), pick a template and adjust row/column counts and you are done.
If you want, you clone this entire slide deck in your own SlideMagic account via this link. Let me know which concepts that I have left out you cannot live without. Maybe processes, timelines?
My presentation app SlideMagic is all about the grid. We have made some improvements to make the workflow (even) faster. Now, when you insert rows and or columns, it copies its design and structure from its neighbors. This will save you a lot of time in more complicated table layout with different background colors.
1) Our starting point
2) Open the grid editor
3) Add a row and a column
4) The result
Image via WikiPedia
We put in a number of improvements to the user interface of my presentation design app SlideMagic.
Templates, regular decks, duplicating, importing, etc. was all a bit confusing. We made a number of improvements to make the workflow more intuitive.
The account, support, and logout links that used to sit at the bottom left of the screen have been moved up. These buttons caused issues on smaller screens, especially tablets. As a result, SlideMagic is now running pretty well on iPad. I am not a big believer in designing slides on a small screen/tablet, because you need a decent canvas to focus and be creative. But, it can be handy to have the option to make smaller edits on a mobile device and that is now going pretty well with SlideMagic.
Let me know if you have any more feedback on SlideMagic here in the comments or by sending a message to jan at slidemagic dot com.
This Tweet caught my attention:
The future of computing isn't editing PPT status reports with a pen. It's replacing it with a live SaaS dashboard, ML analysis and messaging
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) October 26, 2016
Yes "status reports" are a distinct category of presentations. Some sort of weekly, monthly, quarterly updates, that follow more or less the same template. A lot of time is spent (wasted) on creating these. In the short run, you can do a lot with workflow automation. For example create the entire presentation in Excel, which has the same drawing and charting capabilities that PowerPoint has. And yes in the end, SAAS dashboards might replace them all together, if, and that is a big if, the dashboard is designed well.
The "other" type of presentation, the one in which you pitch an idea, a budget, an investment, is here to stay. Each story is different, each pitch is different. Still, people spend too much time on PowerPoint to create them (hopefully my presentation design app SlideMagic will change that), but the creative process will not be automated anytime soon.
Image from Wikipedia
Microsoft has been adding a number of features to PowerPoint recently. One of them is Designer. In the Design tab of the ribbon, a new button appears on the right "Design Ideas". Clicking it generates alternative layouts of your slides on the right side of your screen.
The layouts are pretty nice. Microsoft has "automated" the design of 2 types of slides:
Both are useful. Layman designers usually have no idea how to crop a nice photo collage, and translating that bullet list into a horizontal sequence looks nice, especially on wide 16:9 screen.
But here comes the but.
Microsoft is on the right path, these suggested layouts look a lot nicer than the SmartArt objects. And, getting layman designers to use some sort of grid is the biggest possible improvement you can create in slide design.
But I think it will take some time before language interpretation will be so sophisticated that PowerPoint understands the meaning of a slide and can pull a suggested layout from its library. That's one step above asking Siri to book a movie for you.
Images get a nice suggested cropping
Multiple images trigger multiple grid suggestions
No suggestion to clean up this grid
No suggestions for these charts
Language interpretation concludes this is not a process
This is a process, text taken from a Microsoft post
(* Commercial start *)
This is why designed my presentation app SlideMagic with a forced grid structure, which is a fundamentally different interface approach from PowerPoint and Keynote, which are based on free placement and resizing of objects.
(* End of the commercial break *)
PowerPoint Designer is not 100% there yet, but from its look and feel and general creative direction you see that Microsoft is on the right path.
We deployed a new version of my presentation app SlideMagic that eliminated the TEMPLATES menus. It makes things even simpler. Templates are now more integrated in the workflow
In little bursts of work I will be updating my presentation app SlideMagic over the coming weeks. I noticed that many users stick to the 9 box grid that is the default blank layout of a new slide. Yesterday we released a new insert routine. You now get presented with a number of slide layouts to choose from when inserting a new slide, without having to import and/or clone template slides.
Try it out and let me know what you think.
I saw this Tweet by Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen):
Great presentations are NOT achieved simply by using the latest cool app, no matter what marketers say. pic.twitter.com/A4blPpCvov
— Garr Reynolds (@presentationzen) June 27, 2016
I agree fully, and as the CEO of an aspiring presentation app (SlideMagic), I am not contradicting myself. SlideMagic is of course cool, but not because it adds spectacular features. It makes you design slides in a very strict grid so that your slides look good regardless of your design experience. Try it yourself.
A question I often get after a very simple make over of a slide. Answer:
"You make it sound so simple, but it is not.". It actually is. If you struggle doing it in PowerPoint, use SlideMagic, my presentation app.
I have been incredibly busy with client work over the past months, but over the summer, I plan to turn my attention back to SlideMagic, my presentation design app. Two ideas have started to form in my head:
Obviously I could also focus on making existing features better: a more accurate PowerPoint conversion, better rendering on iPads for example.
For beta users out there, what do you want to see? You can let me know via jan at slidemagic dot com.
The main reason to design a new presentation app that is an alternative to PowerPoint (SlideMagic) is the flaw in the windows/mouse-based user interface design that has been with us since the end of the 1980s. Users can drag, move, place, distort, objects as they see fit. Inexperienced designers will get it wrong and put things in the wrong places.
Over my holiday, I have been listening to this Andreessen Horowitz podcast that discusses whether tablets are finally ready to eliminate the laptop:
Some other interesting points that came up:
Image from WikiPedia
I gave a short podcast interview for Oscar Santolalla's blog "Time to shine". I give my perspectives on business presentation design, and explain the philosophy behind my presentation app SlideMagic. You can listen to the podcast here.
Image from WikiPedia
Many of a company's operational processes have become a lot more efficient over the past decades, partly with the help of automation and computers.
Above the factory floor, middle management of corporations gets more efficient as well. Computers take over routine tasks, and slide/dice data so it becomes easier to make decisions.
Human communication among decision makers is pretty inefficient. People are bad at formulating and selling their ideas. Presentations have helped though: they have replaced long-winded memos and forced people to get to the point faster. Visuals are easier to digest, and more importantly, it is faster to skip through useless pages of a presentation (PGDN, PGDN) than looking for "the meat" in a text document.
This realisation might help you with the design of your everyday presentations. It should look decent. It should get to the point. It should show interesting, unusual, unexpected facts and insights. You want to get to a decision, you are not aiming to publish a complete, scientific document.
Here is where my presentation app SlideMagic comes in, adding even more shortcuts to make corporate decision making more efficient, and less cumbersome, boring and time consuming.
Image from WikiPedia
As a CEO you are paranoid with competitors who are doing things that are very similar to what you are trying to do. But that is usually not the competitive differentiation you need to emphasise in a sales presentation, especially if you are a tiny startup.
The real challenge will often be to get the client to break away from her current practice. Either a big established product, or maybe she is not investing at all in the sort of solutions you are trying to offer.
In my case as the CEO of presentation app SlideMagic, I could pitch it against other new and small presentation solutions that are out there in the market. But that is not the choice people need to make. I even would not consider PowerPoint to be my competitor for a feature-by-feature comparison. I am competing against the inefficient approach to presentation creation and delivery in corporations. And that is a real challenge :-)
Art: The Chess Players, by Thomas Eakins
Often when I produce a slide with simple rectangular boxes and just once accent colour plus a black and white image (hey that looks like a SlideMagic slide), I get the comment that "things look really simple, unsophisticated".
No icons, no shadings, Helvetica, no drop shadows, no rounded corners, no gradients, no nothing.
Here is the trick: it is the composition of the slide that makes things sophisticated. And that is the hard part to get right. Look at the work of the famous Swiss graphics designers of the 1960s. Most of them designed posters with the very same tools that you have in your hands when opening PowerPoint.
Look some of the simpler posters, look at your slide, look back at the poster, look at your slide. Spot the difference, and fix it!. It is layout, not fancy graphics.
And, my presentation app SlideMagic makes it a bit easier than PowerPoint or Keynote.
Some new users of my presentation app SlideMagic complain that you cannot import any existing PowerPoint presentations, you have to start from scratch to design your pitch. "This will take me too much time!"
There are 2 reasons why SlideMagic does not import PowerPoint presentations (export is OK though):
If you really need to import that one complex PowerPoint slide, you can always use a screen shot and import it as an image.
Image by Alexandre Duret-Lutz on Flickr
On Quora, I see questions like which presentation software did [company X] use at [event Y]. For the audience there is no difference. The same simple, good slide can be made in PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, and Adobe InDesign. The exception is probably Prezi and its complex zooming capabilities.
The process that got you there makes a big difference though. How easy is it set up a basic presentation template (colours, fonts, positions of titles, page numbers, aspect ratio), how is it to create a basic slide layout other than a list of bullets, how easy is it to align items properly on a grid, how easy is to create basic data charts, how easy is it to keep everything consistent page after page, how easy is it to do basic image manipulation (cropping and repositioning).
Either the audience cannot tell in which program the presentation was made and you were either a design pro or have made a huge effort to master the software. Or, the audience can spot your software instantly (most likely PowerPoint), which means that you did not get much further than the standard slide template.
(A secret: you can get away with taking design short cuts in my presentation app SlideMagic and no one will notice).
Edgar Degas, Rehearsal on stage, 1874
A lot of the progress of humanity boils down to improving and simplifying communication. There were huge wins when we figured out how to speak and coordinate hunting strategies, learned how to read/write/print books, speak long distance instead of taking the ocean liner, video, etc. etc.
More subtle improvements happened as well. Clear, simple language impacts the premium/position that bosses, priests, doctors, lawyers, politicians, can command. Long-winded corporate memos and formal letters made way for informal emails and now messaging to get to the point, quickly.
What we lose in style, we gain in efficiency and clarity. Gone are the beautifully hand-written letters without grammatical errors. Now we have the universal "business English" with a tiny vocabulary, full of mistakes, and pronunciation can be whatever you see fit. The English might not be perfect, or sophisticated, its meaning is crystal clear.
The same happens to corporate language. Management consultants took a first stab at making memoranda logical and structured. The exhibits in these documents slowly become more important than the written words themselves. And now presentation software/slides has become the main language in which we do business.
We need a crisp, simple, visual language to get a business concept across. Everyone can understand it, everyone can use it. That's what I am trying to do in the presentation app SlideMagic.
Art: Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Tower of Bable, 1563
