Quick makeover: our high-tech industry matters

I saw the following slide coming by in my Twitter feed (original post):

Here are some things I fixed:

• Message in the title

• 19.7% -> 20%

• Simplification of the labels

(For those of you interested in the political context: Israel is fragmented in many population groups, the Israeli high-tech sector which is mostly secular, pro-democracy, situated around Tel Aviv, and not really represented in the current government is making the case that it generates a big chunk of the Israeli economy and is bank rolling many other sectors.)

More server updates.... Might need to log out / log in

I am making updates to the server plumbing of SlideMagic, to ensure uninterrupted service, please log out and back in to the app. Apologies for the inconvenience, but this keeps everything safe and secure.

Version 3.1.8.

I deployed a new version of the SlideMagic app today with security updates. The server was patched too. Please let me know if you experience any issues.

Training AI on presentations?

ChatGPT is good at writing fluent text because there is lots of quality text around on the Internet to train it on. Most text online is at least grammatically correct, and a subset of online content is of some decent quality at a story level (books, reports, professional news websites, etc.) . Midjourney can make up great images because there are lots of images around to train it on, they do not even have to be that good in terms of composition, the pixels in an image add up to an accurate representation of something.

Now with presentations though…. There are fewer of them around online, and most of these are actually not that good. Even if you were to feed let’s say McKinsey’s entire archive of decks into an AI model, would it be able to produce a McKinsey-style deck based on a prompt? Maybe. But the result would be a consulting-style, dense document, not an engaging pitch deck.

AI's strength: categorizing

In 2023 the power of ChatGPT is not in automating extremely complicated tasks, but taking out the daily hassle of smaller things. For presentations, one of my favorites are translating long-hand text into tables of short points. “Please summarize the pros and cons of both options discussed in the following text”. What you get back ia a bird’s eye view of all the elements of the story. Often, the first thing an old-fashioned presentation designer does on a piece of paper.

Adobe Firefly review (AI in Photoshop)

Firefly is Adobe’s stab at generative AI. I had a quick look at it an and am pretty impressed.

Most current AI image generators make either very cute artificial / fantasy / cartoon style photos, or allow you to create crazy / unreal compositions. For example: creating compositions you would not normally see (an elephant riding a bike), or mixing styles (the US president soloing on a guitar in the style of Van Gogh).

Adobe Firefly is more useful. You can extend backgrounds on existing images, or position objects in pictures. Below are some of my efforts to add a purple cow to an Alpine background.

Here is a basic background. You can now add an object in it. This is the first result after prompting “purple cow”

The placing of the cow is very good, the purple cow itself is totally unrealistic, probably because “purple cow” in itself is not a concept that is very common. You can select alternative versions of the cow that are more realistic (and less purple):

It’s pretty good (although not perfect). Here is the layer that the app generated on top of the background image (I disabled the background layer)

The best feature of the app might actually be the extension of backgrounds. See the example below, the area to the right was added automatically.

Firefly is part of a beta version of Photoshop (it will soon appear in other Adobe apps as well), and as a result requires a bit of Photoshop skill to use it (which will be a drawback from many). You can also access its features via the web interface. Results are pretty good (you can see that Adobe is very good at separating the foreground and background of the image), but the style is still slightly cartoonish.

Why is the quality of Firefly better than other image generators such as DALL-E or Midjourney? Adobe trained its model purely on high quality stock images rather than relatively random internet content.

You can see where this all is going. The quality of images will increase as people get better in feeding quality data in models. Not only stock images, but maybe you can actually analyse entire movies that give you the context of a visual, plus the same image with objects positioned differently. And that I think is the second area for improvement, describing a required composition (background, position of objects, lighting, camera view, etc.).

Check out Adobe Firefly here, including instructions for installation on your computer and/or access the web interface

Finally, a color picker...

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)

Two more AI generators

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:

Working on a DALL-E replacement

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

Work in progress...

See the image below. I am blending AI-generated slides and images, and things are not completely right yet…

Automated table generator that compares items

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.

SlideMagic 3.0 with generative AI!

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.

SlideMagic and generative AI update

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.

Why does it look like PowerPoint?

It is often quick and easy to use PowerPoint to draw a diagram. No need to install and learn new specialized software. A few boxes, lines, a screenshot, and you are done. But why the result totally obvious a PowerPoint slide, even if you are not using the program to present your visual?

Over the past years (decades for some) we have become so used to seeing PowerPoint slides with the built-in fonts, standard color palettes, that most people will recognize it instantly. But when your end product is a screenshot, you don’t have to worry about things like font compatibility and presentation templates.

• Change colors and fonts to match the document you are working in

• Let go of the restrictions of the aspect ratios for a slide (4:3, 16:9) and pick something that is appropriate for your diagram.

Prompting...

I have been experimenting extensively with prompting ChatGPT for the use in presentations. In a sense, I am glad that I did not raise huge amounts of money a few years ago in order to build features that now more or less come out in a few minutes.

Still there is a difference in “hacking” some quick results in a demo and having a stable product that can be used in the front line of presentation design.

These features have all to do with the automatic generation of layouts and story lines. Further out in the future though, there might be other applications that can replace the slide deck as the central tool to pitch ideas.

This presentation tool is not a presentation tool

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

Taking out a point in a line graph in PowerPoint

A PowerPoint post today, why not… Someone showed me a little trick to remove a point in a line graph. Useful when you have one year with missing data, and simply interpolating the value between the 2 neighbors would be bending the truth. Putting a zero leaves an odd line (see below).

If you select the data point, (not the data series), and go into format data point and the paint bucket, you can set the line to “no line” (see below).

Repeat the process for the neighbor to the right (see below).

As a result, some weird things are happening to the data series labels though. Also, this standard PowerPont/Excel chart is far from presentable in your slide deck. An alternative approach in SlideMagic? Put in a column chart with a zero column value.

Football charts in SlideMagic

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

Fixed slide titles

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.

Side panels in separator slides

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.