How to crop headshots in your presentation

The ideal design for a slide that shows your team is a group picture, all taken together. Unfortunately, these are almost impossible to produce. Teams change, and people are hardly ever in the same room (especially now with the virus).

The next best thing is a collage of headshots. Professional graphics designers have a specific approach to line these up properly:

• Make sure that the eye line of all the head shots is more or less the same (at 25-33% of the image height

• Make sure that the sizes of the heads are more or less the same

In PowerPoint and Keynote, this is an absolute pain to do. Getting different images to have the exact same size is tricky. Cropping images to position eye ines is tricky to do, and might undo part of the work that you did to get them to be all the same size.

In SlideMagic, things are easier, because it works with fixed shapes and smart cropping.

Below I plopped in 3 portrait images from the built-in image search engine of SlideMagic. In 2 of the 3 cases, the “AI” smart cropping algorithm did already a reasonable job, in the last case, totally not. But first things first, all images have the exact same size, and are spaced out absolutely perfect.

Next, we are going to drag the central dot at eye level for each of our team members and drag the images inside their boxes so the eye lines line up.

Now we can zoom the headshots to the right size by dragging the zoom slider at the bottom of the slide. SlideMagic keeps the eye line at exactly the level you set it to when zooming.

SlideMagic remembers the layout and crop of your image, for example if you change the aspect ratio of your slide to 4:3, the image still looks OK

Seth Godin chart make-over: Venn vs. 2x2

Seth Godin opened the 2021 blog with a post that argues not to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to picking projects. (You could argue that my own bespoke presentation design projects fit in the “rut” category, and the SlideMagic software is a “lottery”, but on balance the risk of the overall portfolio is small with an option to win the lottery, even if it is modest).

To illustrate his point, he used a 2x2 matrix.

The 2x2 works, but when looking for these type of charts consider a Venn diagram as well. In many cases, the low-low option is not really realistic (in this case picking projects with a low probability of succeeding, and with a low potential upside).

I added 2 charts to the SlideMagic database to show the 2 options, in a different colour scheme this time. Download them from the web or search for “seth” inside the desktop app to access them.

Weave effect in slides

See the slide below. A weave effect shows how vertical and horizontal things are interconnected (in this case stuff I did back at McKinsey). It is impossible to weave shapes in programs such as PowerPoint or Keynote, they cannot be on top in one spot, and at the bottom in another,.

One way to get around this is the visual trick I applied here. Stick to a flat grid of boxes and colour/connect them to fake the visual effect. Super easy to make, super easy to change (adding, removing rows and columns). Below is the basic grid structure I used for this chart:

In PowerPoint and Keynote it can still be fiddly to line up all the boxes, especially when you want to make changes to a grid. You might have to resort to tables with very fat white margins between cells,. In SlideMagic it is super easy and even fun to create these charts. (Pro tip: SlideMagic converts to PowerPoint and can do the hard work for you).

I have added a variant of the slide to the SlideMagic template database (find it here, or simply search for “weave” in the desktop app)

Focal point cropping!

******* UPDATE: The new focal cropping is now out of beta and part of the regular SlideMagic release ********

Happy new year to you all, 2021 has already an important feature update.

I am testing an exciting new feature for SlideMagic: focal point cropping. (I first spoke about this back in August.) For each image in SlideMagic, you can set a focal point, a dot on the most important part of the photo. This can be a face, a feature of your product, a quote on a screen shot for example. If you subsequently change the size or shape or zoom level of the image, SlideMagic will re-crop the image so that your focal point appears in the right spot.

I have seen many examples of focal crops in other applications, but no one did get it completely right. That small house on the mountain you focused still disappears on certain screen sizes, or pictures get completely stretched and distorted when resizing screens or changing the composition of your slide. In SlideMagic, everything stays in place.

A particular design decision in web technology standards made it particularly hard to do (without having to divide by zero). Over the winter break, I rewrote the entire image rendering engine of SlideMagic, which was a bit like replacing the foundations of a house while people continue to live in it.

A lot is going on here, in terms of underlying math and how the user interface works. I won’t spell it out in detail here, the app should respond naturally without you having to think about it. The basics are in place now, but I still see a lot of improvement opportunities to the image cropping algorithm including automatic object detection.

I have released the feature only as a beta version at the moment, it will not update for non-beta users. Before the official release I want to make sure everything works for new presentations, maintain backward compatibility for older presentations, that there are no hiccups when downloading templates from the SlideMagic template database. If you want, you can install the latest beta version via Github here, the next time you start SlideMagic again, the latest current version will install back.

Below some screen shots where you see the feature in action:

This new cropping engine also enables me to take out this “hack” to deal with different image aspect ratios and images

A box for each point

It is really easy and quick to add bullet points to a text slide: hit return and start typing away, boom, you found a place for that other thing you want to say. Check.

SlideMagic does not support automatic text bullets, and you need to put each item in a separate box. Bummer.

This is by design. (Let me explain in a number of bullet points).

• Boxes look a lot better on a slide than a list of sentences. The equal size and background colour compensate for different length of text content. Everything is always lined up and spaced out

• More importantly: the box hurdle is a little ‘brake’ in your writing process. Do I need 3 or 4 boxes? Should the points be one, or multiple slides? Are the points equal in weight, or is one a sub point of the other?

• The list is hardly ever the post visual layout for a slide, maybe boxes should be lined up next to each other, centred around some central box, go up, go down? When writing text lines, you are not even considering these layouts.

When designing slides, I spend most of my time thinking about the layout, the amount of rows and columns in the page and how everything fits. Once that is settled, the rest follows. I want you to do the same.

Photo by 🇨🇭 Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

Use the whole page

White space is a good thing in design. It makes text breathe, the whole page looks calmer somehow.

This applies to business presentations as well. Cut text that is not required, make images as big as possible, and your slide starts to look like a well-designed ad on a billboard.

However, in some cases, a business presentation slide is not meant to be a fashion ad. Think of the sales target data for the next quarter, or the new IT system architecture that you need to get approved. What I often see in SlideMagic is a “left over battlefield” with the final product of a complex table or system diagram. After many iterations it finally looks like it should look and everyone agrees to it.

In the process, the designer forgot to clean up, and remove rows and columns that are no longer needed. In SlideMagic, you can get rid of them with a few clicks and your entire diagram or table will scale up instantly, in the right proportions.

Yes, you gave up some white space around the edges, but overall the chart is more practical. To make things calmer, consider cleaning up data and text in the cells of your diagram instead.

Example: COVID chain of infection

A slide came flying by on Twitter:

I might a quick remake of this slide in SlideMagic, in line with the SlideMagic philosophy: quick, clear, nothing too fancy (= time consuming) and added it to the SlideMagic template database since it could be a useful basis for any slide that needs to show some sort of chain of events.

What did I change?

• Removed the low-contrast red on black colours

• Took out the simplistic icons and replaced it with no-nonsense clear numbers

• Rounded up numbers so to avoid cut up people (audience is not hard core scientists)

• Put in a proper bar chart to show the magnitude of 416 vs 3, instead of an icon count

• Flipped the design left to right to make the flow in time more clear

This slide demonstrates how easy it is to line up bars of a data chart, arrows, and text cells of a table in the overall slide layout (an absolute pain on other presentation design software).

Bullet point alert

Bullet point slides are a no-go, they are boring, hard to understand, and look ugly and SlideMagic tries to discourage you from making them.

Still, SlideMagic is not dogmatic and recognises that there will now and then be an occasion where you need to put 3 things on a slide (agenda items, next year’s strategic priorities, the fact that your product is faster, cheaper, and lighter). In the SlideMagic desktop app search for “list” and you are presented with lots and lots of list-style templates (yes, bullet point slide templates).

But in these templates, each list entry is a new shape, a new row, to make the slide visually more appealing. And SlideMagic’s grid engine makes it super easy to add and delete rows. If the message of your slide is “we need to do 3 things”, one of these templates will do the job perfectly to communicate that.

Often though, bullet points creep in when you are not really designing a list-type slide. “Ah, where do I put these points as well?” The points are not important enough (are they?) to merit a new slide, or drastic surgery to the layout of the slide. You end up adding a few quick dashes to a text box.

The moment you have to resort to this emergency bullet point solution, it should trigger an alarm bell. If it looks like I should change the fundamental slide layout, or even create a new slide, maybe you should…

Architecture diagrams

I am starting to experiment with different chart types in SlideMagic. One experiment: IT architectures that consist of users, servers, databases, clouds and lots of lines.

The built-in icon search, combined with the new line drawing feature does a pretty good job actually. And while SlideMagic is not a dedicated tool to design network architectures, it might actually force you to make better architecture diagrams in presentations. Let me explain.

Detailed network diagrams have the same problem as detailed spreadsheets when it comes to presentations. They are project work tools to run analysis and plan work, they are not tools for communication. When I need to make a data chart, I always disconnect from the spreadsheet and resist the temptation to copy-paste. Instead, I pick the 10 numbers that matter, round them up to the relevant precision, and plop them in a very simple bar/column chart that tells the story.

The same is true for IT architectures. If you want to present an architecture overview on a slide, that slide needs to be understood almost immediately when putting it up (like all slides in your deck). If tangled connections, boxes, servers make that hard, then the only thing your slide communicates is that your architecture is complex, not much more.

Again, disconnect from the working papers. Think about your message: ‘my architecture has 3 layers’, ‘my system connects the systems of 15 suppliers’, ‘my system is entirely on premise’, whatever that message is, make a simple chart that supports it.

Remember, presentation slides are usually not project briefings for network installers.

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>

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.

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

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.

Using heat maps in your presentation

This is a neat visualisation of the COVID outbreak in Florida:

Why does it work?

1. It uses colour intensity to introduce another dimension of data in a column diagram: time, number of cases, and age range.

2. The colours are nicely chosen so the chart gives the impression of some sort of fire being lit (which is unfortunately the case).

These charts cannot easily be created in PowerPoint, this one is generated by some code. But you could give it a go in PowerPoint.

• Take a standard column chart in PowerPoint

• Make all the data series have the same value, the age brackets you want to use

• Set the gap between the columns to zero

• And now comes the hard part: manually add different colours to each data point. To select a data point click it twice in quick succession (one click will give you the entire data series wiping out your detailed painting effort in one go)

Here is a quick search for heat maps in SlideMagic, I added one design that sort of resembles the COVID chart. You can see how the new slide layout with the side title I introduced a few days ago comes in handy to create more vertical space for data.

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

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.

Make any presentation look better

I took a recent draft presentation that came across my desk (in PowerPoint) and took out all the specific / confidential information and images, replacing them with dummy text and boxes.

This was by no means a final deck, but it highlights something that most people get wrong when creating a slide deck: tidying up your layout.

Some slides have a white frame, others having images bleeding off the page. Icons are different sizes. Things are not properly aligned. Get all these things right, and your deck will instantly look good, even without fancy fonts, graphics, colours.

This is easier said than done. In PowerPoint, you have the freedom to place anything, anywhere you want. You realise in the last minute that that particular text needs to go in, well it will always fit.

SlideMagic will not let you get away with this. Grids are strictly reinforced. Many users complain about that lack of freedom. I need that 5th box, and now the whole slide layout cannot handle it. And this, exactly, precisely, the process a professional designer has to go through. Unlike you, she does it instinctively and switches the slide layout. With SlideMagic, you will be reminded (kindly) as well.

Here is a quick layout of what a deck like this in SlideMagic should look like. This is not “super design”, SlideMagic helps you make a decent looking deck in the minimum amount possible. “Super design” requires a lot of investment (time and money), which gets you a great looking deck, but one that is sort of set in stone, it is very hard hard to make changes to it. Great for your IPO road show, less so for an every day presentation.

SlideMagic converts instantly to PowerPoint, here is the same deck ready to share with colleagues who are not using SlideMagic yet.

You can download the latest version of SlideMagic here and check it out yourself. (Notice the little SlideMagic logo that is sitting in my PowerPoint toolbar, it is the beta version of the SlideMagic PowerPoint plug in)