Better defaults

In version 2.2.5 I cleared up the default settings in SlideMagic. The way things used to work were aimed at a professional presentation designer: the presentation settings including logo and colour were saved as default as soon as you save the presentation. I have changed that: defaults get saved in the background as soon as you make active changes to the settings yourself, loading and saving a presentation with different settings than yours does not impact your defaults.

I made a big effort to avoid the whole book keeping of colour templates and profiles. I think SlideMagic does the right thing in the background now, and given the few settings options there are, it is easy to adjust something if needed.

You can download the latest version here.

How to create a logo page in a presentation

Yes, I have been in this situation as well:

Tweet of the century. This was my life for 10 years. https://t.co/eayvuTK2MG

— Jon Thomas (@Its_JonT) March 4, 2020

Below is a short video that shows how SlideMagic makes creating logo pages in a presentation really easy. In the first example, I start from scratch with a completely blank page. Notice how logos get plopped in, and how everything lines up instantly in the grid, and how easy it is to add columns, text boxes without having to re-arrange and re-align the entire page. (I have added this slide as a free slide on the template store, you can find it here, stripped of the logos I used because I could not verify copyrights)

The alternative is to start with one of the built-in templates of SlideMagic, search for “logo” in the app and see what slides come up:

Now you can customise the page and swap the logos for the ones you need.

The exact same search available in the online template bank as well (try searching for logo), but users who are downloading the PowerPoint version directly from the web site miss out on the magic of SlideMagic when it comes to manipulating image grids.

My suggested strategy: tweak things in SlideMagic, and export at the very last moment to PowerPoint if you have to share things with your colleagues. You will save a lot of time making those nasty logo grids.

Better PDF conversion

I just released V2.2.3 of SlideMagic, with a big feature update: a new approach to exporting PDF. Until now, I created PDF files by having the program recreate a .magic slide in .pdf, element by element, picture by picture, letter by letter. This got me to 99% accuracy, the 1% being cases where small mistakes would be introduced. For example, a word dropping to the next line because of tiny deviations in font size.

Unlike PowerPoint exports, PDF files are set in stone, you want to send that presentation to an investor, there is no way to fix a quick glitch.

So I changed the approach, the new PDF exporter takes a screen shot of the exact page you created and puts it in a high resolution PDF file. What you see is what you get, 100% of the time, by design. In the process, I could actually delete hundreds and hundreds of lines of code.

The app should upgrade itself in the background for existing users, or you can force the upgrade by downloading a new version from the site.

Other V2.2.3 improvements are mainly under the hood. For the geeks: the app has been upgraded from Electron 6 to 8, with a very recent version of Chrome, and both app and server now share the exact same code to render slides, images, and PowerPoint files, which will save me lot of time as I make improvements. I basically paid my duties for fixing “quick and dirty” copy-paste coding of a few months ago.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Why are all your images black and white?

Yes, almost all the images on my blog and in the SlideMagic template bank are in black and white. Why?

SlideMagic uses (and encourages you to use) a sober colour scheme: basically different levels of grey with one accent colour that should match the dominant colour in your logo. This is a pragmatic choice. SlideMagic is all about business presentations, not art. More colours require additional design skills to get it right. Too many colours can make a slide busy, can create inconsistencies between slides, make the brand identity of your slide weaker. Yes, a pro designer can get it right, and maybe the amateur as well, but - and that is a very important but - it just adds to the time it takes to create your deck. And SlideMagic is all about speed. One accent colour and greys always looks good.

Full colour images introduce colours to your slide that might not always match your colour scheme. Colour schemes of images can also vary wildly between images, creating inconsistent slides. You often see that professional-grade designs (ads, brochures, web sites) use images that have been selected based on their colour profile. The amateur slide designer does not have time for this. That’s why keeping things black and white solves this issue: images blend in, and images look consistent.

Should all images always be black and white? Absolutely not. Personally, I would go for anonymous images to be black and white, but depictions of real things in full colour; your product, your app screen, your prototype.

And.. unlike the downloadable slides in PowerPoint format, the slides in .magic format can be set back to colour, I just flipped the B&W toggle to grey for the moment. Direct PowerPoint downloads are in black and white only. But this might be your excuse to start using the SlideMagic app, and convert to PowerPoint (with full colour images) if you have to later on in the design process.

Photo by Kensuke Saito Surf Photography on Unsplash

Virtual backgrounds in video conferencing

Camera technology is finally good enough to solve the video conference background problem: no more bed rooms, bad lighting, plumbers, kids and/or other unpredictable events behind your back. In the settings tab of zoom, go to virtual backgrounds and set it to the mood you want.

Almost perfect, my hair and sweater pattern did get adjusted as well…

Most of your slides should be tables in disguise

After more than 25 years of designing presentations, here is an important insight: most of your slides are tables. Not only the spreadsheet-type straight table with columns full of numbers, but a more generic 2 dimensional layout of any idea.

Writing text on paper, in a word processor or telling a story verbally, is one dimensional. You make a point one after the other. A good slide adds a second dimension to organise your thoughts.

• Time to show a sequence of data

• Steps in a process or a supply chain

• Pros and cons

• Sales, costs, capital

Dependent on this second dimension, different slide types come out: 2x2 matrices, categorised lists, column charts.

The algorithm picks up some real tables as well…

Many of the classical management consulting frameworks were the result of someone trying to fit an idea across 2 axes. When it worked, you got a nice layout to discuss an issue, and often, you spotted missing scenarios that you did not consider before (“hey, what happens in the low-low box?”)

This also shows why bullet points are poor slides: they are 1-dimensional, you are missing that powerful second dimension to organise your idea.

Now you see why in SlideMagic the table is central to everything. It encourages you to think in 2 dimensions for every slide you try to design. Organising and lining up boxes is difficult in most presentation software. And when you got it to work finally, someone asks you to add another row and take out column 2. Piece of cake in SlideMagic.

Not everyone can become a master designer, but if everyone would create 90% of their slides in some sort of 2-dimensional grid, presentations would be lot more clear. SlideMagic is here to help.

One slide, multiple views

SlideMagic can change the way a slide looks at the touch of a button:

• Aspect ratio, going back and forth between 16:9 and 4:3

• Background colour: between dark and light

• Explanation panel: with or without a side box with space for text for when you are not there to explain the slide in person

In traditional presentation software, this can be cumbersome to do. The software is not to blame, it is by design. If you give the user full flexibility about how to place images, size shapes, and colours she can use, you cannot avoid stretching of image aspect ratios, mixing up slide layouts, and confusing colours when you apply changing to a slide layout. Yes, all can be fixed, but it always takes a bit of mopping up to get right.

SlideMagic has a very rigid colour and slide layout regime, and it pays off, you can go back and forth between different slide layouts instantly. Here are six versions of the same slide, all generated with a single click without corrections:

4:3, dark slide background (see how the app interface itself turns light to provide enough contrast)

Dark background, with the slide-out panel

16:9, dark background

Wide screen, with a light background, the app turns dark again

Light background, with a slider

And back to 4:3, with a light background

The great thing is that all of this works on all the templates that are in the SlideMagic database. At the moment, thumbs will show up on the web site or app search interface in 4:3 with a light background. (This Paris slide can be found here). I have the technology to render slides on the demand (aspect ratio, colour, and even your own logo and corporate accent colour). I store slides a dynamic database objects, not template files, but I need to understand the implications on bandwidth and server processing before I switch that on.

To be continued.

Video: making slides in the app

I am still mainly focused on improving the app, but soon I focus on marketing as soon as I see that a group users really gets hooked on using the product (and that group can be very small). One good way to show what the app can do is short screen capture videos I think. I quickly put two together, without editing, just my playing around.

The first one creates a data table with integrated bar chart (notice how it lines up) from scratch:

The second slide uses the built in slide template bank (the app has access to the same slides as you can search online). Notice how you pull in the template, quickly add in columns, delete rows, and pull in another image. (I am using the beta Unsplash integration here). They key problem with pre-designed PowerPoint templates is having a design layman adjusting a template that was created by a pro. SlideMagic solves that.

Do VCs like short pitch decks or detailed ones?

I am monitoring my server logs to catch broken links now that I am taking years of Shopify links down (it is like playing tennis against a ball throwing machine). One of the URLs that produced a 404 error was this one:

Do-interested-VCs-like-short-pitch-decks-that-stimulate-discussion-or-detailed-pitch-decks-that-demonstrate-thought-thoroughness

Someone must have typed this question in somewhere. Let’s try to answer it:

I think the different types of documents are needed in different stages of the VC due diligence.

Initially a VC is trying to get her head around what it is that you are actually doing. Presenting a massive fact pack with market statistics will show that you are diligent, but will not help her answer the question of the moment. It will also show that you do not really have great sales skills and tact.

On the other hand, showing up with 2 pages TED Talk-style (2 page filling images) in order to have a fresh exchange of ideas freed from bullet points, will not get you past that initial hurdle either.

In some sectors, leaving detail out can actually hurt. For example for a biotech pitch, it can all hinge on the results of your clinical trial, down to nitty gritty statistics. Leaving that out invalidates the pitch.

There is no one-fits-all answer here. Think how much time you have, think at what stage of the process you are in, think how well an investor understands the industry and see what is the right information needed for this moment.

If you are sending a deck via email (“send and pray”), add a bit more information, maybe separated in a clear upfront pitch and an appendix in the back. Again use judgement: details work plans of the team are probably not interesting, additional pages with bio info of the team could actually help (easy to skim, team is very important), confidential IP/technical information or financial data you might not want to email to an investor at all initially.

It all depends.

P.S. Seeing the live logs is actually really helpful, unlike Google logs, I can see a person going left, right, straight, backwards to get to a certain answer, giving me the opportunity to add slides that people need.

Photo of a Peugeot 404 by Joris Molenaar on Unsplash

Closing the old template store, subscribers can move to the new one

The new platform now includes the entire collection of the slides of my old Shopify templates store (and much more of course). Yes, it might be costing me SEO rankings, but I am going to close it down: multiple platforms are confusing for users, and hard to manage. Also the old store was difficult to use for subscribers who had to go through some check out process every time they want to download a slide.

For each paying subscriber with an active subscription, I have created an account on the new platform with a Pro subscription that expires at the same time your subscription on the old store did. I don’t store your passwords, so you have to go to slidemagic.com (this site), go to the log in page, and hit “forgot password”. After entering the email address you used for the old store, you should receive a link where you can create a new password (invisible to me).

I will keep the slide download option running on the platform, because that is what people are used to when it comes to buying presentation-related things online, but selling templates is not the main point of SlideMagic. The pro subscription also unlocks the full feature set of the downloadable presentation app. Try using it:

• Super easy to customise templates

• A lot, lot more templates available

• PowerPoint export so your colleagues do not have to notice (of course you can tell them about the secret of SlideMagic).

If you are stuck email [email protected], and I am here to help.

Photo by Rhys Moult on Unsplash

Presenting sensitivities

I added a few more slides to the database today, one of them was this one: a template to present a sensitivity analysis.

Why this particular layout?

• It is nicely spaced out, a calm composition for so much data

• Numbers are disconnected from the spreadsheet: rounded up, entered by hand

• Colours, bold, are used to direct the eye to what is important, and what is secondary

Some thoughts about how and when to present this type of analysis:

• Presenting sensitivities and not the same as analysing them. The latter is the homework that you should have been doing before the presentation. Figure to what factors your model is sensitive, decided whether that is how it should be, then gather more information where needed to increase your confidence in variables that can make a big difference. What is left to discuss are sensitivities after you did everything to minimise and/or understand them.

• The ranges of the variables you show should be realistic. This is not an exercise in mathematics, but an attempt to really understand what drives the future.

• Pick dimensions that are not correlated, if the risks on the x and y axes are the same, you are not adding much insight.

• Try flipping the analysis upside down, instead of showing deviations from the base case, show “what you would have to believe” in order to get to a certain number.

• Be careful when sharing this type of data if you are in some negotiation about valuation. If the other side understand your model, they can basically salami slice the valuation using your own excel. You need to understand the sensitivities, but sharing them directly might not be smart.

The slide layout is available inside the SlideMagic app, or here on the web site.

What it took

Building a product is slow, but steady going. I jotted down this list of the various hurdles and went through to get a useable product today:

• Design the UI: most of this was done for version 1.0 five years ago

• Understand the basics of Javascript (with 1990s Pascal to start from)

• Understand post 1990s programming concepts: objects, methods

• Get an environment up and running so that I actually could run a simple piece of code

• Find a way to get access to the data (presentations) version 1.0 was producing.

• Setup an environment that turns a program that says “Hello world” and turns it into a desktop app

• Figure out a way to scale text in a browser environment, preserving the exact proportions of design elements (resize your web page, this is not what most web pages need).

• Get github and multiple versions to work

• Build the first rendering engine that actually displays a chart: text boxes are easy, scaling images a bit trickier, data charts get nastier even

• Find a way to register clicks and make things editable: shapes, menus, in different context.

• Copy the rendering engine to a generic format (for thumb nails in story mode for example)

• Duplicate the app engine to enable multi-screen presenter mode (running 2 processes and a master process that talk to each other)

• Enabling on-screen editing of text, graphs, image dragging, image cropping, flipping

• Building the grid editing system (implementing my patent)

• Build the PowerPoint conversion

• Build the PDF conversion

• Build the image export

• Build the printing functionality

• Add automatic 16:9 to 4:3 and back conversion

• Add automatic dark/white background conversion (beyond simply changing the background color)

• Enable multiple windows (each window is a full copy of the render process) and coordinate settings between them

• Build user authentication: pro users get features others don’t have access to via a web server, involving password hashing and building a user database

• Build the first version of the online template database: search slide layouts inside the app, but pull data from the central server

• Hook up unsplash image search

• Hook up noun project icon search

• Create an auto-update mechanism that updates the desktop app in the background when new versions are released

• Get the mac app to run on windows as well

• Get certified with Microsoft and Apple so that people don’t receive scary warnings when installing the software

• Build the full-scale slide template server, integrating the PowerPoint-only content from the old one

• Get payments working

• Build the front end of the marketing web site and the template store

• Get PowerPoint conversion to work on the server as well

• Build the management console to manage slides, users, and the search algorithms

We are going into the next phase now with a live product, direct user feedback is exciting, but it also means I cannot pull off some of the dramatic overnight feature and architecture changes I did over the past year. To be continued.

Photo by Thomas Galler on Unsplash

The genie is out of the bottle

I just took the password wall off the SlideMagic 2.0 app, so everyone can have a look (www.slidemagic.com., you just need to create an account. Payment plans are working on the template store, which should also be reflected in the app. I am sure there are hidden bugs lurking, but I keep on pushing. Remember that I do not have a 24/7 support organisation up and running yet… Valentine’s Day 2020 is a memorable day already :-)

Photo by Cesira Alvarado on Unsplash

Accounting...

A quick update (things are a bit quiet on the blog this week).

While the SlideMagic app is my project that I can afford to take some time for to go through multiple beta iterations to get it right, the template bank is a much more straightforward business, I want to get it running on the new platform as soon as possible.

The key functions work: search a slide (search algorithm is still being improved), and you can download it in multiple formats. The “only” thing left to do is the payment infrastructure. I got the account management and download book keeping working which leaves me with one nice challenge: EU VAT accounting for digital downloads.

The EU put all kind of laws in place to get a cut of the profits that the internet giants are making over their head. That is all great, but in the process they created complicated accounting rules that also apply to me. I as a tiny startup need to have the same tracking in place as Spotify.

This is a technical challenge that will not move humanity forward (unlike the UI of my app, or the new slide search algorithms). But, I have to crack it. Hopefully in a week or so, my system accurately adds taxes (or not) depending on your country, as an individual, as a company, with valid (or invalid) EU VAT numbers, and generate reports for my own book keeping and refunding EU tax authorities at the press of a button. My accountant (a big international firm suggested I do this manually, I think there must be a smarter way to do this. Pfff.

Work in progress

Photo by Ray Reyes on Unsplash

How to add captions in PowerPoint, as you speak

I did not realise PowerPoint could do this: put captions or subtitles on your slide live, while you speak into a microphone. Instructions how to get this work can be found here.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

404 clean up

After putting the new site on my own server in the root of slidemagic.com, replacing squarespace, I got to see the amount of traffic my 10-year-plus blog is actually getting. First, I thought that I was under attack, but they all seem legitimate Google searches that keep on coming and coming.

Over the years, I have moved my blog across various platforms, and now I could see that the link conversion did not work very well, a huge amount of 404 / page not found errors. I let the server log run for 24 hours and by now have probably caught most errors with smart redirects. Let me know if you still encounter problems.

The logs also shows the ridiculous amount of automated hacking attempts. My site is not very high-profile (yet), but various IP addresses from the usual countries are constantly trying to find the Wordpress log in page (I am not using Wordpress) and other security leaks. Let’s I hope I did not leave a door open anywhere.

I am putting more protection in place at the moment, which might in turn result in short hick ups in the web site’s availability. Apologies for that, but hopefully it will prevent bigger problems in the future.

Business model for SlideMagic

I put up my first thoughts of the pricing and business model for SlideMagic on the beta web site. The basic logic:

• A free tier that allows for a basic desktop app install and access to the free templates

• A pro tier with a yearly subscription to the desktop app including pro features (PowerPoint/PDF conversion, in-app template search), and access to the full template bank

• A day pass with 10 pro slide template layouts (online only, not from within the app)

• The beta tier (to which some of you have registered), 30 day access to the fully fledge app, without access to the pro template bank

The table below summarises things:

I am pondering how to treat independent consultants that sell decks with SlideMagic templates in them to their clients. I think I will follow the model that most paying stock photo sites use: a new paying client mains a new payed license. So a consultant can use her license to make slides for her own firm (pitching projects), but as soon as she uses SlideMagic on a paying project, she needs to expense a new SlideMagic license to the client.

What do you think? Fair, practical?

Working like crazy without being tired

Back at McKinsey I had a grueling lifestyle: long hours and always feeling tired. Many years later, i think I put in the same amount of hours getting SlideMagic 2.0 up and running, but…. I am not feeling exhausted all the time.

The secret? Focus. No commute, no travel to (unnecessary) meetings, I can pretty much get 10-13 hours of productive time each day (6 on weekends).

Also it helps to focus on what you liking doing next: crack that difficult algorithm, make the site look better, do the accounting, it is all a different mindset that is not available on command. Being able to choose what to work on is great.

Work in progress.

Photo by Vladislav Muslakov on Unsplash

New site now live

The migration of the site to the root url slidemagic.com worked. I took the opportunity to clean out a lot of old links and analytics scripts that were still hiding in the squarespace template. The only thing that is still running on squarespace is this blog and the HTML version of my book from a few years ago. Everything is now my own server.

I am thinking very hard about moving the last bits over from squarespace, the site has become slow and buggy over the past year. Maybe it is better to host it myself, with a more minimal format, without the big banner images and glitter that we do not need. The challenge is to migrate 10 years worth of posts across… We will see.

Rebranding and juggling URLs

I am throwing around URLs over the weekend as I slowly position the new sever into place. Things might break, formatting might be strange. Work in progress…

Photo by sol on Unsplash