Spoon feeding detail

Different types of audiences, different types of questions, and/or different phases in your interaction with the audience require different types of slides.

1. In the first meeting, you introduce an idea with a big, bold, minimalist data chart

2. In a follow-up meeting, you are answered a question about assumptions behind the numbers, or, in a Zoom meeting, your audience sits very close to her screen and has time / visual ability to dig deeper into the visuals than she would be able to when sitting in a big room.

For these occasions, you can make slide variations of the same slide. Seen an example below:

Clicking back and forth between the slides will give the illusion of some sort of animated popup, while in effect the audience is looking at two different visuals. In practice, I would design the busy slide first, then cut things out to create your minimalist slide.

<advertising> Note how easy it is in SlideMagic to toss things around and add (remove) complications to your slide without breaking its visual grid </advertising>

"Still struggling with this..."

Now and then I get to see the presentations that people make with SlideMagic, often in emails with users that have questions or feedback, bugs, and charts which they are still struggling to get right. Yes, there are certain types of slides that SlideMagic does not really like (pie charts, complex system diagrams, anything with circles), but when I open these presentations in “story” view and see how the other 95% of that presentation looks without any professional help, I know things are starting to work. And these are proper A-B tests, since many SlideMagic users were clients of my bespoke design work, so I have seen many draft presentations by them coming my way that were not made in SlideMagic.

Photo by Jonas Olsen on Unsplash

"Muppets"

A while ago it was discovered that investment bank Goldman Sachs refers to unsophisticated, non-professional, retail investors as “muppets” and was deploying massive computing power to trade against them.

“Muppet” is an example of a business language shortcut: one word that summarises a pretty complex concept or customer segment. Short cuts can make internal communication in a company very efficient. Everyone knows exactly what is being discussed without having to resort to long descriptions that change from presentation to presentation.

To the outsider though, they have a different meaning. Many people complain about “buzzwords”, especially when shortcuts that don’t mean anything leak into external communication. Or worse, as in the case of Goldman Sachs, you end up offending a lot of people.

Young kids also find out that is extremely hard to change back nicknames into a more grown up name when you get older. The same is true for business shortcuts. Better choose them wisely at the beginning, because they might just get a wider audience than that first conference room meeting.

With respect to “muppets”. Yes, amateur investors might not understand the interest rate climate, yield curves, market overhang, and inflation risk. They make mistakes, but they could also have a hunch that that weird flat phone with a touch screen could end up being a really desirable product that will change people’s lives 10 years from now. An algorithm powered by a super computer probably would not make that call. Muppets are a nuanced segment with many sides to take in to consideration. Better pick a better word.

Photo by Crystal Jo on Unsplash

Old computers...

My main work machine is in repair, which in Israel, means you lose it for at least a week. So I am back to working on old computers: a 2015 iMac, and a 2016 MacBook. And I must say: things are mostly fine on machines that I abandoned more than a year ago.

The 27” screen of the 2015 iMac somehow feels more comfortable than the LG 5K display that I use with my top of the line MacBook Pro. Processing speed for the work I do (writing code and designing slides) is totally fine. Even on the 2016 MacBook (with minimum spec even for 2016), things are fine. And that light weight is actually a real bonus versus the hot, heavy 15” MacBook Pro. It makes me think of future setups: desktop for the bulk of the work, and an “emergency” lower-spec laptop to enable working outside the office if needed.

The only issue I have is running a Windows machine via bootcamp to build the Windows version of SlideMagic. That software is noticeably slower.

If you are not a gamer, or a movie editor at Pixar, computers probably last a lot longer than you think. Come to think of it, most machine replacements were probably due to hard drive crashes. Now with solid state drives, that might happen for less frequently.

Another upside, I now get to test the SlideMagic app thoroughly on smaller screens and lower-spec graphics cards…

Photo by Nicholas Santoianni on Unsplash

Corporate title pages

I added a number of new title pages to the SlideMagic slide template database: looking up in the downtown area of a city. The sky in the center of the image is a nice empty background for your text.

Typing “title” in the search bar of the SlideMagic desktop app now gives a lot of options to get you started with a title page for your presentation

Pick one of these designs (or an empty slide), and use the image search feature to add the image that you prefer

Hexagons

The new line drawing feature in SlideMagic was put in to support the connection of boxes in organisation charts and flow diagrams, but you can use it more creatively as well. The attached examples of the use of hexagon shapes shows how you can bypass SlideMagic’s strict limitations on shape types (basically boxes). But do you need to?

Photo by Jonas Svidras on Unsplash

How to download your SlideMagic 1.0 presentations

The reminder email has gone out to all SlideMagic 1.0 subscribers to download your presentations before I shut the service down and migrate the platform completely to SlideMagic 2.0. (I will keep the archived presentations but access won’t be instant).

Some people signed up five years ago, and I got some bounces from people who changed jobs / email address. So, another reminder here if you have an account but did not get your email.

Other people. say that it is not completely clear how to download your presentation(s). Here are the steps:

1. Log in to SlideMagic 1.0

2. Open your presentation in SlideMagic 1.0

3. Select the “export” arrow from the left menu

4. Pick “download .magic file”

5. Download and install the SlideMagic 2.0 desktop app

6. Open the .magic file in the desktop app.

Here are the screen shots of the steps:

(Notice how I removed the hard-wired title page with the black bar from SlideMagic 2.0)

SlideMagic 1.0 sunset, long live SlideMagic 2.0

Towards the end of October, we will be pulling the plug on the SlideMagic 1.0 server. If you are a SlideMagic 1.0 user, you need to download your presentations as .magic files to your local hard drive, after which you will continue to be able to edit them in the SlideMagic 2.0 app.

SlideMagic 2.0 is vastly superior when compared to 1.0, with much more intuitive user interface, instant PowerPoint and PDF conversion, integrated Unsplash and Pixabay image search, waterfall charts, and a huge template database (SlideMagic 1.0 probably had 20 templates or so), just to name a few features. SlideMagic 1.0 was a web app, SlideMagic 2.0 is a desktop app that also works when you are not connected to the Internet, and has deeper access to your computer’s operating system for things like managing files and copying things between windows.

SlideMagic 1.0 users will be getting a reminder email over then next few days. I do plan to keep the SlideMagic 1.0 user presentations somewhere backed up, but access will be on request and no longer instant as of November 2020.

SlideMagic 1.0 was a necessary step to start the journey, it enabled me to get my head around what a modern presentation app should look like. But it has served its purpose.

The SlideMagic 1.0 log in is here: http://app.slidemagic.com, you can try the new app here https://www.slidemagic.com/app .

Subscriptions are now live

I finally deployed the proper subscription backend for SlideMagic. That was a big technical and legal challenge, but everything works now.

When purchasing SlideMagic Pro you are now signing up for an annual subscription, giving you full access to all the features of the platform.

Canceling is transparent: the auto renewals is removed, and you have access to SlideMagic Pro for the remaining days of your subscription. If you decide to renew, you get issued a free “trial” for the days that are left in your plan, after which you get charged when the next subscription cycle starts.

I simplified the complicated license when doing consulting project work clients. No more exceptions, SlideMagic is a simple per seat, per year subscription.

Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash

A clearer pricing model: just subscriptions

As I focused on the user experience of SlideMagic, I kept a temporary payment engine running, it takes a simple payment, but does not yet manage subscriptions. Subscription management is a bit more tricky, you need to keep user payment details on record securely, and manage renewals, cancellations, updates. That will soon all be tightly integrated with the Stripe payments platform.

In the process, I am now taking down the ‘day pass’ pricing option that allowed you to buy a maximum of 10 slide downloads for the duration of 1 day. I think this confusing what SlideMagic is trying to be: a full presentation solution (as opposed to a by-the-slide template business of which there are thousands on the internet).

Now SlideMagic has 2 offerings:

• A free model with access to all slides (for the moment) in .magic format

• A pro model that also includes PowerPoint, PDF conversion, and the ability to add your logo on slides, $99 per seat per year.

The free model gives people a change to get to know SlideMagic, offers a workable solution for users on a low budget (students, etc.). The Pro version is useful for people that need to use SlideMagic for real, share presentations in other formats with colleagues and clients, and need to brand slides in their own look and feel.

I will make sure that the payment engine works in a robust way first, then I will have to resort to modifying the web site with a better illustration of the positioning.

Legal disclaimer: all this can change in the future.

Photo by Catherine Heath on Unsplash

The point of masks

Social media is full of people arguing about masks. Part of the reason I think is that it is such a statement: “Look, I proudly wear one”, “Look, I proudly do not wear one”. I think masks deserve the benefits of the doubt, without becoming overly obsessed with it.

Leaving the debate to the side, and turning to graphics. My Twitter feed is full of diagrams such as this one below (found it here):

The masks and the faces look cute, but it is actually hard to understand the chart instantly. Using the SlideMagic approach to slide design (quick, to the point, good enough design), I came up with the following 2x2 that tries to make the same point:

Now the question is, did I put myself in the shoes of the audience? Maybe not every non-mask-wearing person is a former management consultant who prefers 2x2s… This slide is now available on the SlideMagic template bank, and you can access it free if you search for something like “mask” inside the app (v2.4.29 is the latest version).

See below how the desktop app adds dynamically generated slides to the search query. I am not running that on the server at the moment, since 1) it will take a lot of processing capacity that is now being done on individual user machines, 2) I do not consider the web store to be the optimal user experience: downloading slides, and then opening them in the app, but maybe I will change my mind at some stage in the future.

Customer service

This tweet exactly applies to SlideMagic:

Customer service is often how startups bridge the gap between the potential of the ambitious thing they're building, and its early unreliability.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) August 25, 2020

SlideMagic had a few glitches, but unlike established software products, users that suffered got the CEO himself to add designs to the template bank, recover presentations, gave refunds after people claimed they ‘never intended to make that purchase’, deploy patches within a few hours, and say ‘thank you’ even in the very few cases where feedback was not worded that nicely.

I think SlideMagic is getting close to the finish line as a proper and robust product as I am using it intensely myself now. Thank you all for your patience.

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

Further cleanups

Things are a bit quiet here on the blog, as I am using my annual blogging summer holiday to cleanup SlideMagic further. New features are frozen for the moment, as I am 100% focussed on making the app as stable as possible and have been posting regular updates frequently. If you are a frequent user of SlideMagic, you should now be running version 2.4.28.

One visible change I have made in the latest version is a slightly larger image zoom slider, you can see it in the screen shot below. I rotated the slider, it now appears vertically, allowing me to give it more space and make image zooming more precise.

Updates should install automatically eventually but you can force an update by downloading the latest version of SlideMagic manually.

What do you mean, "presentation"?

This is a comment by my 15 year old daughter. She sees SlideMagic or PowerPoint as software that you can use to create your school project or make a photo compilation to share with your friends.

She is right. “Presentations” are mostly documents that capture an idea. Only a small percentage of these slides actually get presented on a screen in front of a live audience. “Presentation Zen”, TED Talks, Steve Jobs, and others have taught us how to make good live presentations, and SlideMagic can support this.

Now it is time to take on the quality of the other 95% of slides that get produced in businesses (and schools).

Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash

Image cropping with a focal point

SlideMagic can switch back and forth between multiple layouts, and needs to handle rapid changes in the grid of a slide. As a result, aspect ratios of images get changed all the time, tripping up your carefully selected image composition. At the moment, the app is storing different crop and zoom levels for different aspect ratios, but that solution is not ideal. (You see how Squarespace gets it wrong with the banner image of this blog post).

I want to get to the point where a SlideMagic user can click a focal point of an image, after which the app will do the hard work of re-adjusting the crop automatically. Doing research, I see a lot of “AI” applications that can figure out what the focal point of an image should be, there seems to be nothing that deals with focal point-based cropping itself. The solutions I see, are ones where you can store multiple crops of the same image, after which the most appropriate one gets selected.

I started scribbling a manual algorithm to come up with reasonable compositions. Here are the first (manual but automateable) results applied to some cows on a beach in Africa, the first image is the original.

It works pretty well, on the the extremely horizontal one gets cropped too low, I would have shown a bit more sky on that one. Let’s see if we can get this to work, both in terms of the algorithm, and the user interface.

Photo by Vince Gx on Unsplash

An OKR slide template (Objectives and Key Results)

Not enough SlideMagic users have discovered that I try to respond to requests for new or missing templates. Today I added a template for an OKR sheet, Google’s approach to managing Objectives and Key Results.

SlideMagic is particularly useful for slides like this, it is easy to add rows, adjust the layout, and now those boring percentages can be visualised easy with a bar chart that always lines up with your table.

Search for “OKR” in the SlideMagic desktop app and it will pop up and ready to work on for free, alternatively, pro subscribers can download the template (in .magic or .pptx format) from the online template bank.

Let me know if you need more/different types of OKR templates.

New arrows are now live

The latest version of SlideMagic has the new arrow feature available, finally enabling me to discontinue the dreaded connectors. Arrows are big and bold to show cause-effect relationships or other forces. I made an algorithm to let them do the right thing in terms of layout in various box sizes, and in various aspect ratios, both for horizontal and vertical shapes. In PowerPoint and Keynote it is fiddly to get arrows to look exactly the same once you start changing the angles of the pointer by hand.

When converting to PowerPoint (a pro feature), your arrows will show up as editable PowerPoint arrow shapes.

I can now call SlideMagic 99% feature complete (hmm, line charts?) and will focus on hardening the application to make it absolutely stable.

The legacy connector feature will stay in the background. If you load an old slide that uses it, the legacy arrows will be rendered and you can edit them. If you have to add more legacy connectors, simply shift-click on the connector icon, and you will be given the option to use the old feature.

The new arrows also give me more design freedom to start expanding the template library with new slide layouts that features these ‘fat’ arrows.

Fat arrows are great for showing cause-effect relationships

Arrows follow the color scheme of the cell, black on accent, will give you this result

You can place background images behind arrow elements

SlideMagic arrows are converted to fully editable PowerPoint arrow shapes when converting (pro feature)

Thinner arrows can be created with the line new line drawing feature

The perfect arrow...

I am replacing the connectors in SlideMagic with 2 features. The relatively thin lines that connect boxes in a diagram went live yesterday. Currently I am working on the 2nd feature: fat arrows to show cause-effect relationships or other forces.

As I already discussed back in 2017, it is tricky to get arrows to look right in presentation software. The aspect ratio of the containing box, the angles of the arrow, some come out great, others won’t.

And even if you got one right on your slide by moving the various sliders in the shape, how do you make sure that the 3 below it look exactly the same? Oh, and then you need to insert a fifth one and squeeze everything a bit…

I think I am on to a possible solution. I scribbled an algorithm on a piece of paper, now let’s see how to bring it to life in SlideMagic, and then convert them to PowerPoint. The latter might have to be via an image rather than a dynamic shape. Below is a screenshot of my development machine. Work in progress.

The new line drawing mode

I just deployed version 2.4.16 on the server that has the first version of the new line drawing engine of SlideMagic built in. This will be the replacement of the cumbersome ‘connector’ feature that was inherited from SlideMagic 1.0.

Any presentation app needs some sort of approach to drawing lines, especially to connect boxes in diagrams. Freehand drawing and line dragging goes straight against the philosophy of SlideMagic, which forces you to keep everything lined up, evenly spaced out on a grid.

The connectors solved this by micromanaging lines, you have designate a box to be a line box, and then meticulously set the line configuration inside it. The result is a line grid that perfectly scales up and down with your grid. But this can be a pain to maintain, especially if you are working in a very fine grid.

So I can came up with a compromise and added a separate line drawing layer to the ‘frame; of the slide, the background that sits behind the work area of the slide (i.e., not the title and the footnote). Selecting the frame will highlight a Manhattan-like grid of dots, between which you can draw any (straight) line or arrow you want, across the entire slide. This line patter will move with changes to the grid, but - and this is the concession - is not 100% tied to the boxes in your chart. But I think it is a price well worth paying, imperfections are easy to fix.

A side effect, it is now also easy to draw a fat border around a group of boxes if needed.

Below is a bare bone organisation diagram.

The old connector system required fiddly editing, see below.

The new line drawing layer makes things easier. As soon as you select the frame of the slide (click the long bar at the top, or the tall column to the left of the slide), you are presented with a grid of dots.

You are free to add lines from dot to dot across the entire slide (yes, even ones at an angle)

All of this makes it easy to connect boxes in the required way in your diagram

Feel free to download the latest version of SlideMagic and play around with the new feature and let me know your feedback. There are a lot of design decisions that I had to make. Keep line editing mode active to go to the next dot, connect line segments in one shape, dragging of lines (or not). I think the current model works, where lines stay on the chart as individual segments. I will need to implement the multi-select on them though, and work on an algorithm that removes double segments, and combines two consecutive segments into one.

YC advice on pitching

YCombinator has made library of support material for startup founders available online for free. One of the results for a search on ‘pitch decks’ produces this. Some things to highlight:

“Be excited. Your pitch should not sound memorized. Intonation, cadence, and projecting help a lot”

“Actually explain what you do, and do it quickly”

“Don't be "cute" with your points, be declarative”

“If you make a joke, telegraph it. If you're not sure the joke will land, cut it

“Charts should be easy to understand - make one point with any graphic or chart. Don't make people read charts - they'll stop listening to you.”

“Line graphs are better than bar graphs when showing growth” (Not sure this is the case)

“TAM should be bottom up, not top down” (I.e., not 0.5% of $5billion)

“Coolness and legibility are not orthogonal, they're diametrically opposed”

It is important to understand where these suggestions are coming from: very experienced investors that are focusing on very, very early startups and hence need to sit through many, many, pitches with a huge range in quality (both in terms of pitch quality and company/founder quality). That explains the feedback of make your title readable, don’t use thin fonts, make your slide clear that when I look up from answering an email on my phone, I still know what is going on, don’t be cute, tell what you actually do, etc.

Still, if you are an early stage company looking for funding, this is your audience, better give them what they want. And remember, part of your startup pitch is testing your ability to sell a product to a matching audience. Selling your company to investors, or selling your product to customers, or helping investors sell their stake in your company to another investor in the future, all require similar skills.

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