Embarrassment...

While cleaning up an old computer, I came across a version of SlideMagic from probably 6 months ago. Back then I thought this was just about as good as it can get, comparing it now to version 2.4.3, I am almost embarrassed to have even released this. I hope I feel the same way about the current version in 6 months.

Only now, I am getting close to the feature set that was in my brainstorm notebook from almost four years ago. I remember coming up with most what is in SlideMagic 2.0 during Web Summit in Lisbon in 2016…

Things still to fix are:

• Connector editing (it works, but it is not intuitive and efficient enough)

• Making sure that previews of template slides show up in your own personal slide branding, rather than SlideMagic blue (without wasting a huge amount of bandwidth and/or processing power)

Photo by Abigail Keenan on Unsplash

My preferred 16:9 layout for presentations

I just pushed a big update to SlideMagic (2.4) to the server and it contains a brand new 16:9 slide layout, the slide title. Most monitors today are widescreen, but unlike movies, I think 4:3 slides look much better. Text lines that run across the entire slide are hard to read, and wide screen slides always force you to make very “stretched” slide layouts.

The side title is the best of both worlds. The title of the slide is moved to the left, and the slide contain area is scaled up now that it has more space at the top. It stays in a 4:3 ratio though. The footer and logo is also moved to the left, creating even more space. The entire design shows up without black bars on a wide screen monitor. Below is an example.

It follows an approach I already blogged about in 2016

SlideMagic has now 4 screen modes, and you can switch instantly between them:

1. Traditional 4:3 narrow

2. 16:9 wide screen

3. A 4:3 slide with an explanation panel to the side to leave notes for when you are not there in person to present the slide

4. The new and shiny 16:9 side title

Soon, I will rerun the PowerPoint conversion algorithms on the server to increase the size of the SlideMagic PoiwerPoint template database with 25%, each slide will now be available in the new format as well,.

(Hmm, the side panel needs some more padding, I will fix that [Fixed in 2.4.1]). There are a number of other new features introduced in version 2.4.

It is now also easier to select the “frame” element of the slide, I added 2 thin selection bars next to the regular grid selectors.

Also the right-to-left mode is completely rewritten (SlideMagic is based in Tel Aviv :-)) so that the side panel and side title show up in the right place.

Version 2.4 is a major update, please report any glitches you might experience.

"Operating system updates" for presentations

Every year Apple releases operating system upgrades for computers, tablets, and phones. Your apps and documents have the same content, but look slightly different. I am trying to push this concept to the world of presentations.

It has already happened (sort of). The slide-out panel to right changes the look and feel of your presentation without changing the content. Over time, I have made subtle changes to font sizes and layout proportions, which means that every SlideMagic presentation in the world will have a slightly different look. Switching to a dark slide background turn the colours of your presentation upside down (in a good way), far beyond just making the background black.

I will try to push this further, by adding more layout options , your slides will look entirely different, including the ones you made 6 months ago, but you can always switch back to another layout format.

Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash

Borders!

I succumbed to pressure from some users of SlideMagic and added the ability to put a small border around a shape. In general I am not a big fan of borders (hence my initial hesitation). Most of the time a slide element just looks nicer when its shape is carried by its colour rather than a surrounding line. In nature, things do not have lines around them.

But.

I can see situations where you might need them. Especially when working with a grid of images of irregular sizes on white backgrounds (for example logos). Adding a tiny box around the shape makes the page look more balanced.

After installing the latest version of SlideMagic (V2.3.24), you will see a tick box appear under the colour menu. The tick does what it expects you to do. Let me know what you think, or update me if you find glitches in the .magic file rendering, or in PowerPoint conversion.

I will now also start using this new design element when I add new templates to the SlideMagic slide database.

While we are on user pressure, other requests that are being lobbied hard:

• One, just one, more colour…. Please.

• If we could somehow make something round (not boxy) in your app… Please.

• Yes, I know that the “connectors” are a bit cumbersome at the moment

Let’s see..

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

What is new in V23

Some new features in version 2.3.23 of the SlideMagic desktop app:

• Super-fast responses when resizing your main window, or reshuffling slides in the story view, even if they contain big images. If the app does not need to re-render an image, it won’t. Rescaling slides is now done by your computer’s graphics processor directly, rather than my bespoke code.

• More clever image repositioning when you change the aspect rate of a shape by expanding and collapsing boxes. Still not perfect, but the app starts to do the right thing.

• Changing the slide aspect or background has now been added to the “view” drop down menu, so you can switch back and forth really fast without having to go through the settings menu.

• Subtle changes to the user interface, that makes the app look sharper on higher resolution displays.

The app will try to update itself in the background, or if you are impatient, go here to download the latest version immediately.

Photo by gdtography on Unsplash

Slide template for a RACI matrix

On request of a user, I have added templates with a RACI matrix to the SlideMagic database. (It does not happen often, but this is the first time I actually heard about this consulting framework, the responsibility assignment matrix). In SlideMagic it is super easy to manage all the columns and rows of the table. If your colleagues are not ready for SlideMagic yet, use the app to create the chart, then export to PowerPoint.

How to change the default colour in SlideMagic

SlideMagic has a simple colour scheme: lots of variations of white, black, and grey, and one strong accent colour. Why?

SlideMagic is all about making presentation design efficient. This simple colour layout almost always looks great, and is very recognisable when you set the accent colour to the dominant colour in your logo.

How do you customise SlideMagic to your own preferred colour instead of SlideMagic blue?

1. Go to the settings menu by clicking the cog wheel in the bottom left of the screen

2. You have 2 options to set the new accent colour:

   • Upload an image, after which the app will extract suggested colours from the photo (pro-tip: upload your logo)

   • Enter an RGB code directly

3. Go back to your slides and the whole deck will be set in the new colour scheme. Also notice that the app itself changes its user interface colour to the complement of the presentation colour you picked.

Quick update

As usual during the summer, things are a bit quieter on the blog at the moment. But instead of me and my family traveling the world, I am turning the SlideMagic rendering engine upside down. I focus mainly on performance. You might not have noticed, but the current app is re-rendering slides frequently, especially with screen resizes and in the story view mode. In the new version, these re-renders will go down to almost zero. Furthermore, I am making the app respond better to different screen resolutions and sizes.

My approach to writing the app is similar to the way I (used to) build financial models. Start simple, complicate and add things, and then clean up and simplify again. Dramatic simplification fo the code will enable me to think about a selective number of new features again

Photo by Lukas ter Poorten on Unsplash.

The "corona crop" to change the appearance of crowd sizes

A recent tweet:

Can we all stop believing the accuracy of those telephoto-lens "packed" beach/street photos. It's a cheap trick, and one easily done. Below are 2 photos taken by me 20 seconds apart. Change the angle to straight along + crop = corona-tastic looking crowd. pic.twitter.com/AlpHvumW2p

— Ed Fidgeon-Kavanagh (@Clearpreso) June 25, 2020

Why does the crowd look denser in the second image? When you make an extreme zoom in an image your brain loses the context in which the original photo was taken. Images are 2D, so no sense of depth here.

Lessons:

• When news outlets publish images to show crowd sizes, see at what angle they are taken. Drone shots from above are the most reliable

• If you need an image of a crowded street or other public place in your presentation, you can use this effect to your advantage. Download a very high resolution image with a flat camera angle, and apply a big zoom/crop.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

How to get all the slides...

Many users ask for this. It is possible today to browse slides in the template bank by simply hitting an empty return in the search bank, you get served a dozen of random slides.

Still, I am not making this the core of SlideMagic. “Getting all the slides” is a very PowerPoint-like workflow. In PowerPoint it is hard to customise templates (adding/deleting boxes), which encourages you to eyeball a large number of slides you designed previously and pick the one that closest matches what you need today.

SlideMagic is different for a number of reasons:

• It is super easy to customise templates: no need for eye balling. Simply start with a layout that is vaguely in the right direction and make a few adjustments

• Many slides in the SlideMagic template bank are image-based, which generates a huge number of slides that are only usable for very specific situations. Eye balling to get inspired will take too much time and might give you a headache.

• The database starts to get lots of slides that are almost-duplicates: title pages with different titles, small variants of the same concept. Not good for browsing

In general, the template bank gets too big for browsing, and I am only just getting started….

Photo by HelpStay.com on Unsplash

What's new in version 21

Two big changes:

• More intuitive image cropping, where you see parts of the image that are not covered in the box as semitransparent when editing the image. (When you click away or go into presentation mode, the cropped image will show).

• I simplified the settings menu: now there are 2 screen modes, 4x3 and 16x9, and the explanation box slider will go to and from these screen ratios as needed.

Existing users will updated automatically, or you can download the latest version instantly.

Photo by sept commercial on Unsplash

Appearance

Wearing a mask in times of the virus (probably) protects you somewhat from catching the virus, (probably) protects others from you. Individually, the change in odds are probably not that big, but as a society as a whole (the perspective of the government), a small change in infection rate can have an incredibly positive impact (exponential mathematics).

But there is something else, a mask has a social function

• A mask signals that it is not rude when you don’t shake my hand

• A mask signals that you are probably a careful person in general and therefore OK to be with (from 1.5 meters distance)

• A mask makes others think (feel guilty) whether to do the same

The mask signals who you are.

This ‘appearance’ also applies to your presentation. You can have the perfect story line, slides with little text, clear and crisp headlines. But the look and feel of your slides says a lot about the culture of you and your company, irrespective of their content.

With SlideMagic, the look and feel is sorted.

Photo by Fran Boloni on Unsplash

URL juggling

Some readers noted that the slidemagic URL sometimes returns an error. As a result I am juggling the URLs fo the app, template store and blog once more. The slidemagic.com URL will now point to the main site and app, the newly acquired slidemagic.blog will point to the blog that I host with squarespace. The blog.slidemagic.com URL will be phased out.

I am putting redirects in place so that everything keeps on working as it should. My main focus is the 10+ year archive of blog posts. My SEO ranking might drop a bit, but this is not my main worry (yet), as I am still focussing on getting the users that are trying out the SlideMagic app to keep on using it, before ramping up marketing. SlideMagic is not a catch-convert-sell slide template business (there are thousands of those), but an attempt to find a way to change the way people make presentations, which requires some patience.

If you are interested in the details: squarespace does not really work well with subdomains (blog.slidemagic.com, instead of www.slidemagic.com), and does work well with the Cloudflare content delivery network + DDOS protection (Israel-based web sites are not always popular). Pointing a blog.slidemagic to squarespace, also means that you have to point the “naked domain” slidemagic.com to squarespace, which then clashes with my server etc.

Let’s hope it all goes back to normal soon.

Photo by Harrison Moore on Unsplash

What is the forward email?

The most effective introduction to investors is via a referral of a mutual connection. When this mutual connection is ready to put her personal credibility on the line and forward your pitch to an investor, the pitch changes. No small talk, no waffly market backgrounds, and actually, no (or very little) structure, they get straight to the point.

The forward email is likely to be something like this:

• I know this person from ….

• She did this in the past and delivered on all fronts

• Here is a new idea, it is something like an X for Y

• It looks interesting, the obvious question mark is Z, but W could be the wild card that can make the difference

• It could fit nicely with your other investment V

• Have a look and let me know what you think.

Maybe it is a good idea to already think about what your forward email is going to look like, before you ask someone to send it.

Photo by Matt Ridley on Unsplash

Working on improved image cropping

Working with images is turning out to be one of the most powerful uses of SlideMagic. The built-in image search gives access to an endless flow of great images, and the grid makes it really easy to layout these photos in a beautiful and consistent way on a slide.

Aligning images has always been difficult in presentation software (it is only worse in word processors), and that bit is solved by the SlideMagic grid. Next up is image cropping. Most design tools use some sort of overlay that allows you to mask/reveal an image. Even as a professional designer, I still struggle with this.

In SlideMagic, you simply drag an image around in a box to decide what part of the photo you want to reveal. I am working on 2 improvements:

• Showing the entire image in semi-opaque when you are editing/dragging it around to give you. a better orientation of what you are doing

• Creating a way to keep the image focused on the most relevant part regardless of changes to aspect ratios or zoom levels of the photo. At the moment, I store to image positioning versions (one for 16x9 and one for 4x3), but in future releases I want to automate this

The challenge here is to offer something that works without turning SlideMagic into a complicated photo editor. Work in progress.

Real estate (fund) pitch presentation template

SlideMagic is very suited to make decks that promote real estate projects or funds. It is easy to manage pictures of properties and add boxes with information about square feet and returns. I have added a template for a real estate fund pitch to get you started.

Note that when searching for slide templates, you do not need to resort to keywords such as “real estate” (it will give some results now though), any layout that shows lists, or grids, or portfolios, or screenshots will do. Real estate presentations use very generic layouts.

A trick to make more relaxed portrait photos

See below the secret of a pro photographer (follow Scott). To get the most natural and relaxed images of people (for example your team) for your presentation, say the photoshoot is over, and then take a few more shots… (Click the arrow to see the next image)

View this post on Instagram

Today I’m going to share a little photography tip! Often when you ask someone on the street to take their photo (and they say yes) they are flattered but a little tense (especially if the photographer is wearing a mask and during a pandemic) ! I find if I shoot until I get an image I like and then tell the subject “great! I got it!! We’re done!” The subject then relaxes into a pose so much more natural! Quickly I shoot a few more frames of that genuine moment of relief! These two images I captured yesterday of @bashari.ansari are a perfect example of this , both capture a side of her personality in very real but totally different ways. Please don’t use this little trick to replace me!!! I love my job!!

A post shared by Scott Schuman (@thesartorialist) on Jun 11, 2020 at 7:03am PDT

A nice team photo is so much better than a page with headshots in inconsistent formats.

If there is no alternative (traveling to get everyone in one room is hard during this pandemic), there is always SlideMagic with lots of team slide templates that can help you make those headshots look as consistent as possible!

Photo by Uyen Nguyen on Unsplash

Organisation charts

Organisation cultures are changing. Traditional hierarchies becomes less important, and project teams often become the engine of doing things. Also outsiders such as freelancers do not fit in nicely in big structures. At my time in McKinsey in the 1990s, we could have full meetings about whether a line should be dotted or not, and who would have to be drawn slightly higher than someone else on a page. Mistakes here were especially painful in a presentation to the management team.

Organisation chars in presentation are tricky for two reasons: it is hard to get all the boxes right on the page from a technical point of view, and it is hard to make everyone happy that the hierarchy and lines of the boxes reflect reality.

At the request of a user I have added a few more organisation charts to the SlideMagic slide template database. Complex organisation diagrams are not SlideMagic territory (if they are. hard to draw, the audience must also find them hard to understand). Instead, I created a few simple templates that can lay out the structure of an organisation in simple way, cutting the amount of lines, and increasing the size of text boxes.

If you present your chart as a a rough summary of the organisation rather than an exact reflection of hierarchy, you might just get away with it. If you pretend to be precise, people will nitpick..

The “connector” element in SlideMagic is still the weakest drawing tool and I am thinking about a new diagramming user interface now that my front end HTML design skills have improved significantly over the past year. As usual, the problem is not technical. Also in PowerPoint with its more sophisticated diagramming interface, it is hard to get connecting. lines to do what you want. They always angle and bend in a different way than you want them to.

The SlideMagic grid structure comes in really handy when changing screen aspect ratios, or adding/deleting columns in your organisation chart. Everyone lines up instantly. In PowerPoint rebalancing an org chart is major surgery.

In the mean time, feel free to reach out and/or email sketches of organisation diagrams you think cannot be generated from the current template database, and I will do my best to add them to the collection.

TAM slides now in SlideMagic

A SlideMagic user could not find a TAM (total addressable market) slide and used a service I am offering that not many people take advantage of: request them to be added. You can find 4 new slides about TAM here.

About the layouts:

• Unlike most of the traditional TAM slide templates, I did not go for concentric circles. Yes, SlideMagic does not do circles (yet), but I find these hand drawn circles always misleading. It is very hard to get the circle size to be accurate. Hence the more simple bars.

• TAM is a bit of a buzzword, I hence I tried to avoid using TAM (available, or addressable?), SAM, target market, etc. and use normal English instead.

About TAMs.

Watch out with using TAM slides in your investor pitch. Yes, it is included in many template guidelines, but believe me, investors do not really respond well to the type of analysis where we identify a $15 billion universe, $100m or which we can address, and $200k sales we are going to get in year 5. Also, most of them do not like buzzwords.

A TAM-like concept is useful when you want to introduce a new market (i.e., a bucket that does not exist in any Gartner report yet). Rather than calling it TAM, or trying to relate it to any of these buckets, maybe provide a simple analysis instead of what people in the world could spend on services like this. Show the assumptions you made, bottom up. This does not try to create a new Gartner bucket, but instead educates the investor how to think about your market.

Do sanity check though against commonly know Gartner buckets, it might be an obvious question you are going to get.

Pretty template, ugly slide

Most corporate presentation templates are designed starting from an empty slide. The designer feels the urge to spice things up a bit with logos and other graphical elements. Now when you actually use that template (designed for a blank page) with everyday presentation content, things start to clash.

The same things must have happened to the designers at BMW, who forgot the license plate that would be plastered over the front of their new car design….

The next time you brief a designer for a new PowerPoint template, give her a full slide deck including content, let her create a design you like, then strip out all the elements and see what you are left with.

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