SlideMagic explained, well, in a slide

The diagram below is in typical SlideMagic style. While a professional designer can do better, the slide looks professional, everything lines up, has a clearly recognisable branding, and takes very little time to make.

I scribbled down this slide for myself, to see how to position the online template bank and the desktop app. This diagram is probably not the best way to start marketing SlideMagic, but it shows what I try to achieve for an “internal audience”. (And frequent blog readers probably fall in that category :-))

It took exactly 5 seconds to make the slide available in the template store and the app itself (you can find it here. I put it in the free tier for now, it is a good test case for the PowerPoint conversion quality, and the slides that the algorithm thinks that are related (still work in progress).

Lighter variants of your presentation color

I ran into this slide (fragment) presented on an online course site the other day (I now digest tons of these to refresh my coding skills):

It shows a common problem in PowerPoint: you picked a nice theme colour (deep purple in this case) and you need variants of it. (This presenter figured out that too many colours makes your slide deck cluttered, hence SlideMagic only allows one :-) ).

The default model to make colour changes is to modify its brightness. It almost always work to make things darker, the other way around though can create a problem for very saturated colours. You don’t notice the saturation level at dark levels, but on brighter variants, that elegant purple becomes cute/bright pink.

The solution: change colour saturation as well as brightness. This post on my blog from 10 years ago (what?) describes it:

PowerPoint 2010 gives you the option of a spectrum of different shades of the same color. This is great to design charts with a consistent color scheme.

However, if your template contains colors that are highly saturated, the suggested lighter shades of your color will be too bright to use as neutral color nuances. Here is how you can fix it. (Click on the image for a larger picture.).

Create a new base color by reducing the saturation (in laymen's speak: make it more grey). Open the color in your color template (format shape/fill/solid fill/color/more colors)Switch the color model from RGB (red, green, blue) to HSL (hue, saturation, luminance).Reduce the (S)aturation value, while keeping all other variables the same.Use a lighter shade of this new base color instead and save this as a new color in your color template.

A (by now blurry) image with additional clarification:

A simpler approach:iInstead of changing the RGB values of your colour, simply add transparency to the dark colour. This works great on white backgrounds, but will create problems on coloured surfaces.

Another approach building on this:

• Create a shape with the dark colour over a white background

• Increase the transparency until you reach the desired level of “brightness”

• Hover over the box with a colour picker and add the colour you just picked to your slide colour palette.

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Freelancing and career stability

Now and then I get people considering a career change asking me about life as a freelance consultant. “Isn’t that a very uncertain profession, when compared to someone in a permanent position?”

My answer: not really. Yes, you need to get your first clients/projects, but if you do good work, clients will refer you to other clients, and clients will come back. A person in a permanent position has one employer (who can go through reorganisations and other fun things you do not control), whereas you can hedge and spread the risk among multiple “employers”.

There are a number of things to consider though:

• The biggest one: do great work. As small independent business, you depend on word of mouth advertising. A beautiful website, massive SEO efforts, might get you the first inquiry, but then people want recommendations. You simply write off an unfortunate purchase of a $5 book that was not great, a 1-month consulting project is different. Most internet marketing has very low funnel rates, freelancers rely on 95% conversion.

• While the downside for a good freelancer is limited, the upside is probably limited as well. It is hard to scale a bespoke service business. You want to add a second person and not dilute your offering, that person probably needs to be as good as you, and as a result will need to be paid as well as you. Two times the revenue, two times the cost, the same profit. For my own presentation design business, I realised 1 employee (myself) was a great business model, and 50 probably is. But the role of making sure that 49 people have enough work and do it well, is a very different one from helping clients yourself. In short, as a freelancer, you are likely to pretty much the same thing in a few years from now as yo do today, albeit better and a bit faster. In a big corporation, you can go up the ladder and do different things every couple of years.

• There are things that freelancers often overlook in their pricing: pensions, disability insurance, etc. etc. All this protection that a regular employment position usually offers.

In short, it depends…

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Working on slide searching and tagging

Some of the world’s major artists got popular because they documented their life and motivations for their work in letters (Van Gogh etc.). Maybe the same will happen with this blog, and my journey from helping 1 client at a time to get better presentations, to hopefully thousands/millions eventually.

So finally, finally, I got a tool in my hands that I wish I had 5 years ago already:

• Create slide layouts and variations super quickly

• All in a consistent format

• Some way to store and organise all the original files, PowerPoint conversions and slide image thumbs (in different formats)

• A way to tag, describe, and search slides, and also organise, slide, and dice this “meta data”

This was the “easy” part, but a required step to get on to the next phase. How do you actually best describe slides, what slides are related, what suggestions for other slides should you give a user.

My current setup is one big playground. The number of templates is now double that of the current paid Shopify store. I am changing things and experimenting with instant feedback (whether searches are relevant, how much time it takes to complete them.

For most content on the web, and documents in corporate databases, you can use a Google approach to slides: you get a dozen links or video thumbs, and a human eye can quickly go through the clutter and find that document she is looking for. For slide layouts, this is not good enough.

Work in progress.

Against the light

In the early 1990s at McKinsey, presentation design was actually document production. Hand-written sheets of paper would be entered into a computer by full time graphics designers. Each word, each line, each graph. Then the whole thing would be printed and bound in books.

I remember the final quality check of the Amsterdam office manager: holding the pages against a strong light to see whether the titles, footers, page numbers, and margins of the slides lined up. You were in trouble if they didn’t.

Getting these basics right is very hard in today’s PowerPoint, If you copy and paste slides between masters, the alignment of objects will be off. If you change screen sizes (from narrow to wide screen and back), things go all over the place. Or, if you use/buy other people’s templates, they won’t fit well in your company’s slide layout. This is not PowerPoint’s fault, any software that needs to give total design freedom to its users will have this side effect.

I went through this the hard way myself, as I am making the slides of my “old” template store compatible with the new format of SlideMagic 2.0. Hundreds of slides that require small corrections to get things to line up properly.

With SlideMagic, professional designers might complain about the lack of flexibility in layouts, the rest of us will be extremely happy with how easy it is to tweak templates, screen sizes, and copy slides between presentations.

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It makes sense, but it does not

I have been in many of these types of presentations:

Sometimes a big company does something, and you know exactly what every slide in the PowerPoint looked like, and all the slides made *sense*, and followed on logically to the conclusion... except that somehow the conclusion makes no sense.

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) January 17, 2020

Some of the reasons why the overall conclusion of a presentation does not make sense, while the individual slides do:

• Maybe the people, the organisation, and its culture is not the right environment to make a plan happen. Who is going to do it?

• The probability curve: on average, normally speaking, the strategy makes sense. But what if things start deviating from the average. What is the potential downside and could it be catastrophic to the compony?

• The self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, the deck has 50 slides, discussing 50 different aspects of the idea, but when you look at it, they all depend on ver few (maybe even one) assumption about the market outlook, a valuation of a company, etc. That assumption could be wrong.

Unlike for big companies, for tiny startups the opposite could be true. The slides might not all make sense, but the team is fantastic, the downside is not that big, and an angel investor is willing to bet on that one big assumption.

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Slidemagic 1.0 templates merged into 2.0

I am working hard to get rid of the Shopify template store with its shopping carts that are great for buying t-shirts, but not convenient for downloading presentation templates.

As a first step, I have now merged most of the slides of the Shopify store into the SlideMagic 2.0 database. Beta testers who go to the web site, see the templates alongside the new ones generated by the app without noticing the difference.

For 80% of the slides, I could easily convert them to .magic (the boxy ones). These slides appear in the template store with both a .magic and .ppt download option (the .ppt conversion is generated by my software, rather than the manual adjustments for screen size etc.). For the other 20%, I have uploaded the .ppt file without a .magic option. If you are just after .ppt downloads (hopefully you will change your mind at some time), you can use the template store without noticing the difference.

Users that access the slide database from within the SlideMagic app will not see the PowerPoint-only options.

So, hopefully I can retire the Shopify site soon, and I will migrate the subscribers to the new site. And, this exercise gave me some insights into what shapes I should add to SlideMagic, and what shapes are actually not required at all.

This is all a bit of a ramble by a product manager who is trying to justify and integrate past product decisions :-) What it means in practice:

• You signed up for the SlideMagic template store in the past: you can access the same templates, but also new ones

• You signed up for the new SlideMagic 2.0 app: you will have access to a great set of templates that are super easy to customise and don’t even miss the PowerPoint-only ones. (And, all your work can be converted to PowerPoint at the press of a button)

The SlideMagic 2.0 template database is now already a lot bigger than the 1.0 one. To be continued.

Beta: related slides

For sites such Amazon or Netflix, ‘related products’ searches have become reliable and useful. On my Shopify platform it was very difficult to implement a link to “related slides”. Now that I have acquired the required coding skills, I looked around at other out-of-the-box search solutions (even with the help of some suggestions by blog readers), but I have not found something that could work for me in SlideMagic 2.0.

I think a good search algorithm is absolutely crucial for a slide template engine. Simplistic tag searches are not useful. “Here is another slide about "‘strategy’). You need to take into account how a slide looks, what message it should carry, what audience it is relevant for, etc. etc. And then in addition, bring in how popular a slide is.

I am breaking my head on finding a good way to index slides and make them accessible in search, both on the web interface, but more importantly inside the desktop app.

Today, I completed a very first version to get the basics working. Still far from perfect, but already better than the Shopify site. Next up is a refinement of the tags, the tagging structure, and the user interface. And of course: getting the performance right.

This has not been incorporated in the desktop app yet, I am using the web site as a playground for ideas at the moment.

Work in progress.

Any Office add-in experts out there?

I am trying to create an add-in that brings the SlideMagic 2.0 template store right into PowerPoint: search for slides, “click”, and the layout appears in your document. I thought that new Office APIs would make this really easy. I have a web server already up and running, the only thing is to move to the task pane at the right of the PowerPoint screen.

Googling around, the tricky bit seems to be the final step: inserting the slide template into the user’s presentation. The PowerPoint version of the Office API seems to be really limited. The furthest I can push it is to open a brand new presentation inside PowerPoint with the selected template(s) in it, the user then needs to copy them across as a final step.

Maybe one of my readers can point me to a solution? (Or maybe encourage Microsoft to expose this feature in their API, it will open up a whole raft of possibly very useful PowerPoint plug ins I think).

Obviously, I can dive into the world of hardcore manipulating of XML/PPTX files, but I am not sure whether that investment in time and effort is worth it.

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Boxifying...

The philosophy behind SlideMagic is to save making everyday presentations:

• A bank of useful templates (still small, but growing rapidly now)

• A clever search algorithm

• A proprietary UI to make obvious changes to slides at lightning speed (with the option to convert to PowerPoint)

• A simple framework to make all slides look uniform and consistent with corporate branding

But there is one other important component: simplifying (call it “boxifying”?) layouts.

Shapes and layouts that are great for drawing on paper or a whiteboard, are harder to get right and look good on a computer, think circles, arrows, curved lines. Professional designers know how to space text out evenly, add white space, line up the 7 levels perfectly on a circle at even distances. For the rest of us, this is a lot harder, or maybe even impossible. Not everyone has that eye for design, you know your slide looks bad, but you somehow cannot pin down why.

Another problem with these “sketch shapes” is that they are not ver efficient to hold text. Try adding long words in a circle shape and you run into problems. (The Japanese figured out a way to create square water melons so more of them would fit in a fridge).

And maybe you have that eye for design, then you still need to invest all that time to get your shapes and layouts right. Time that is worth it if you are designing your annual sales team kick off keynote address, time that is definitely not worth it when bashing out the quarterly numbers for a quick review meeting with the team.

As an example, see this alternative layout to the classical Venn diagram that I recently added to the SlideMagic 2.0 slide database. Less pretty, but it still looks decent and is easier to work with.

200+ template file now in 16:9

The Shopify platform is cumbersome for digital downloads, having to put slides through a shopping cart all the time. I am working on a better solution: integrating the “old” template store into the SlideMagic 2.0 platform.

In the mean time, I now have converted the file with 200+ templates from 4:3 into 16:9 format as well, you can find it here. Subscribers can download it for free.

"Good with computers"

Being “good with computers” had different implications when it comes to presentation design over the years. From my experience as a management consultant:

• Pre 1995: professional graphics designers produced your slides, you could simply sketch ideas on a piece of paper. As a junior analyst you marvelled at how senior partners seem to be shaking new frameworks out of their pencil with zero effort

• 2000: if you demonstrated that you understood PowerPoint, you were instantly designated the entire team’s graphics designer, but only during out of office hours (18:00 to 09:00, and weekends)

• 2005: Everyone starts to produce their own charts, and being proficient in PowerPoint could actually give you an edge. Including images, even videos, complex data charts.

• Today: technical proficiency is no longer required, as more and more people understand that the best slides are really simple slides.

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Clearer, not prettier

As technology progresses, visual “stuff” is usually the first that gets added, because, well, we can

• Huge wings on cars in the 1950s

• Drop shadows and gradients in Windows XP

• Realistic textures on iPhone screens

• LED displays and indicators on consumer electronics

• Animations and effects in PowerPoint

• Highly sophisticated frameworks dreamed up by management consultants

• Massive BI management dashboards

But after a while, we start to understand how technology really can make things clearer and more useful, and the initial “because we can” features get eliminated.

The way people communicate in companies is going through a similar transition. Long, formal memos, are replaced by email, informal slack messages with a “Dear Sirs” greeting.

Presentations need to go through a similar transformation. I am working on it.

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Template store 2.0

It is slow, it does not have many templates yet, it does not look that pretty, it is optimised for Chrome only at the moment, but it is a major personal achievement: I can create slide templates in the SlideMagic desktop app super fast, bulk upload them, manage their search tags, convert the .magic file to thumb images, store everything in a database, allow people to search, download .magic files, .pptx conversions, and manage pro (beta) and non-pro subscribers.

The objective of this web-based template server is to give potential SlideMagic users a taste of what is possible with the app, and serve people who are not willing to use a non-PowerPont user interface to manipulate charts (their loss :-)).

This effort was not a strategic grand plan: I needed a good search engine for myself to optimize tags of slides in the database quickly, and saw that it was very easy to expose that functionality to all SlideMagic users.

Check it out: https://cloud.slidemagic.com, and let me know of any bugs, or major glitches. I am keeping the number of beta testers ver low, since there are obvious bugs that I still need to iron out.

In the near future, I hope to roll the current template store that is hosted on Shopify into my own platform, bug that requires completing the payment platform and upping things to production-grade technology that is expected by paying customers.

The next technology challenge will be go back into the world of databases (which I left behind in 1992), and see how we can make searching of templates smarter (and faster).

To be continued.

UPDATE: If you experience downtime, it could be because I am updating the way slides are saved to speed up search time. The database did not enjoy huge image files, storing them separately on Amazon AWS now.

We only have the first half of the year

This chart that was published in the WSJ shows a good way to highlight financial data when you only have the first half of the current year available. You create a stack chart that only appears for this, and last year. For this year, you only show H1 data in the matching color.

I have add a template to the SlideMagic 2.0 database with a setup for this type of chart. It is extremely easy to add more years to the data history.

Some of my bespoke design clients were very eager to push things further, why not add an extrapolation for the H2 data, assuming similar growth? Well you can, but you should realize that your chart just became a totally different one: it no longer reports what happened, instead you are putting your name on the line for delivering the H2 numbers.

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Presentation designers: specialise

Being an introvert, I do not particularly like or benefit from visiting industry conferences. A few months ago, I made an exception and visited one about software (the new industry I am joining). One of the insights was in sales and marketing: young enterprise software companies benefit hugely from focusing on just one industry sector in the beginning. Not because their software is specific to their industry, but:

• Focusing on 1 industry allows you to get to know that sector really well from a sales perspective, you speak their language, understand their needs. Big companies with big sales departments can afford to do this for every industry sector, a tiny company, with a tiny sales department (probably just you) can do it as well (maybe better) for just one sector.

• Referrals is the strongest lead generator, and, if you are working in a specific industry, people are likely to recommend you. Referrals go between similar companies (biscuit manufacturer to soft drinks bottler), or up and down the chain (advertising agencies, food retailers).

• Design styles, the technical side of presentation design work, is likely to be similar as well in a specific industry sector. TED Talk big picture slides won’t get you very far in a private placement memorandum pitch to institutional asset managers for example. If your background is in art & design, the first one is you, if you are an engineer-turned management consultant, the second one will feel more comfortable.

For freelance presentation designers something similar works. Startup pitches are similar, and very different from let’s say a big corporate sales pitch, or a quarterly investor presentation. Within startup pitches, there are similarities between segments (for example biotech companies).

So, to avoid being caught in the race to the bottom (I see lots and lots of new freelance presentation designers setting up shop), maybe specialise in a sector? Geographical proximity to your client is no longer required, so the world is begin enough to carve out your niche.

What sector to pick? It might be coincidence. That recent project that you aced for a client, could be an indication that she is operating in a sector that suits you. Good luck in 2020!

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Breaking changes on the template server

I have kept the beta tester group of SlideMagic 2.0 very small exactly for this reason: I am moving things around on the template server that will break access of older beta versions that are around. Sorry for this, a new version will become available soon.

The changes are needed to maintain a good search performance as the size of the template database grows and involves a lot more image-heavy slides. Also, I am working on the marketing site that will allow searching of templates for non-subscribers without the ability to download them, to get a preview of what is cooking in the kitchen.

A side-effect of this is that I will offer subscribers a web-based download option, useful for those who are not interested in using the new SlideMagic edit app (even if they should), but want the layout straight in PowerPoint format. The server is now able to turn .magic files directly into PowerPoint slides.

A happy 2020 to all of you!

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2020

Thinking of 2020, I am working hard to make it the year that I get SlideMagic right. I think presentation software is one of the hardest user interfaces to innovate, given the big existing installed base (user interface, file format), and software offered by players with deep pockets that is from a technical point of view very good and pretty much offered for free.

My objective for 2020 is not the number of users, profits, revenues. I think this is where many VC-funded presentation startups have gone wrong, not taking enough time to get the product right and pushing for growth.

Instead, I want a handful of users that start using the product to keep using it. The early signs are very encouraging, but these are friendly people that tolerate the incidental bug, which obviously will not fly with a broader market. Ironing out bugs is one challenge, but the big lever I have is the template database, including the type of slides it offers, but more importantly, how it helps you search. Now that I got the slide editor pretty much done, I can devote most of my attention to this in the next year.

I am wishing all readers a fantastic holiday and the best 2020 possible.

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(Finally) free to really think

For the first time in months, I am spending more time designing slides than writing code as I am building up the template database. It is a great feeling to see all that hard work paying of now as I add one slide after another to the database at a very high speed.

This also puts me in a position to start thinking really what SlideMagic (maybe 3.0?) could do, now that I have a basic platform in place that can store/search templates, all listening to a uniform design layout. What if there are eventually thousands, and thousands of slides, keywords, concepts? Things can get interesting!

Yes, there is still the challenge of turning 2.0 into a proper company…

To be continued.

V25

I just released version 2.1.25 of SlideMagic with more bug fixes and performance improvements:

• Better integration of copy-paste and other clipboard function with Mac OSX and Windows, enabling you to copy paste things between SlideMagic and other applications

• Fixed the mystery bug that stopped slide rendering when you flip an image

• Fixed an issue where crop rectangles would be reset after compressing an image

• Fixed an issue that could corrupt .magic files upon exiting the application (thank you, one of my frequent blog readers)

On the server, the browser now tells you that your password reset link has expired, rather than producing a generic message that something is not quite right.

I am starting to feel happy with the application as I am using it now myself really intensively to build the template database, but I am keeping the number of beta users small at the moment, just to make sure. One important decision that I need to make before expanding the user base, is the freezing of the file format, I am still pondering making potentially breaking changes here.

The update should install automatically in the background if you leave your existing SlideMagic app open in the background. Beta version from a few months ago have now expired as we move into 2020, please contact me if you have an issue re-starting the app.

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