Fast. Easy. Beautiful.
I love retro advertising. In this Mercedes car ad from 1982, body work painting is ranked by its level of “conspicuousness”. White is the most in your face. Signal red somewhere in the middle. And blue midnight blue is even more hidden than black.
The source of the car ad is here. Subscribe to this facebook group for more vintage car ads.
Professional photographs of your team can give a great lift to your presentation or web site. Either individual headshots all in a consistent style, or even better, a group photo of your entire team in one place.
A good photographer will do two things: firstly, make sure that the technicalities such as focus and lighting are perfect, and secondly, try and create interesting crops and compositions.
Having a photographer set your image crop in stone might not always be good though. What looks great in a 4:3 view finder of a camera, can look suboptimal on web sites that need to handle unusual screen sizes, all the way from big widescreen TVs to small smartphones.
The problem usually is that the center composition will stay constant (the subject area of your team that will probably occupy a 4:3 rectangle or square in the middle of your image), but the background can have vastly different aspect ratios.
The solution: have your photographer take a snap which the crop she prefers, but always add a second one completely zoomed out as a backup.
If you forgot to make that second image, you might have to revert to AI tools such as Adobe Firefly to add the missing pieces of background back in.
Firefly is Adobe’s stab at generative AI. I had a quick look at it an and am pretty impressed.
Most current AI image generators make either very cute artificial / fantasy / cartoon style photos, or allow you to create crazy / unreal compositions. For example: creating compositions you would not normally see (an elephant riding a bike), or mixing styles (the US president soloing on a guitar in the style of Van Gogh).
Adobe Firefly is more useful. You can extend backgrounds on existing images, or position objects in pictures. Below are some of my efforts to add a purple cow to an Alpine background.
Here is a basic background. You can now add an object in it. This is the first result after prompting “purple cow”
The placing of the cow is very good, the purple cow itself is totally unrealistic, probably because “purple cow” in itself is not a concept that is very common. You can select alternative versions of the cow that are more realistic (and less purple):
It’s pretty good (although not perfect). Here is the layer that the app generated on top of the background image (I disabled the background layer)
The best feature of the app might actually be the extension of backgrounds. See the example below, the area to the right was added automatically.
Firefly is part of a beta version of Photoshop (it will soon appear in other Adobe apps as well), and as a result requires a bit of Photoshop skill to use it (which will be a drawback from many). You can also access its features via the web interface. Results are pretty good (you can see that Adobe is very good at separating the foreground and background of the image), but the style is still slightly cartoonish.
Why is the quality of Firefly better than other image generators such as DALL-E or Midjourney? Adobe trained its model purely on high quality stock images rather than relatively random internet content.
You can see where this all is going. The quality of images will increase as people get better in feeding quality data in models. Not only stock images, but maybe you can actually analyse entire movies that give you the context of a visual, plus the same image with objects positioned differently. And that I think is the second area for improvement, describing a required composition (background, position of objects, lighting, camera view, etc.).
Check out Adobe Firefly here, including instructions for installation on your computer and/or access the web interface
There are a number of ways you can, or cannot, use titles in your slide. See the examples below. (RSS subscribers might have to open the post on the web to see images).
The classic way is a basic description of what the chart is showing.
The management consulting approach is the message title: write out in a sentence what the chart is supposed to say, and put the description and unit of the data in a subtitle
You can spice things up with an image
And with full image slides, the traditional title does not actually really matter anymore. You can place text anywhere on the image to get your point across. If you are presenting live, you can even omit the exact description of what you are showing
Back in the 1990s, compact disks would show a so called SPARS code. A series of 3 letters that could either be “D” for digital, or “A” for analogue. “DDD” indicates digital recording, digital mixing, and digital mastering.
My late mother in law had a huge classical music CD collection and I would browse it to find a CD to play, when given a choice “DDD” would be my preference since it was clearly a recording of the highest quality.
My mother in law would answer that this was actually totally irrelevant. What matters is the conductor and/or solo artist that delivered the performance. A poor quality AAA recording from the 1950s might have been the best rendering of a particular piece of music ever.
There is an interesting parallel here with presentations: the actual performance and the supporting slides.
Image By Attosaur - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, source.
… of slides.
It takes time and effort to create a good presentation. So when a next meeting comes up, it is tempting to borrow from a previous presentation that was already created. And typical presentations that are readily available are:
Investor presentations of the last fund raising round
Board presentations
Product / sales presentations
We recently needed to pitch a tailored, one-off, joint service offering with a strategic partner. The first draft of our presentation:
About company A (lots of slides, with an investor presentation flavor)
The market need for what company A does
The generic solution of company A to solve this market need
The team of company A
About company B (lots of slides with a product presentation flavor)
The technology of company B
The results and achievements of company B
What company A and B can do for you (1 - 2 slides)
Basically 2 generic company introductions, with a few minutes left to talk about the joint solution we were pitching to the client. We changed things around to focus almost everything about the specific problem of the client, and the company introductions were reduced to appendix background reading.
Be careful when using free images of people from Unsplash. Some of these have be come really popular. Marlene R. on a web site that rents ski and mountain bike gear, has the exact same head shot as Vignette F., one of the demo users of 9xchange.
You can find the image here: photo by Edward Cisneros on Unsplash. It shows up on page 1 of a search for “woman portrait”
…when you prompt it to generate your presentation, maybe you are on to something new! AI generators predict what to write based on information it ingested before.
Now what if your AI generator comes up with a brilliantly written pitch?
A feature that was long overdue: today we added a color picker to the SlideMagic settings page. Better late than never. Click on the big bar to reveal the pop up. If you want, you can still enter RGB codes. With the eye dropper, you can now sample colors anywhere on your desktop. Make sure to have V3.1.7 installed to use this feature.
(Proud of my daughter Mia who insisted to put this in, and actually wrote the code to do so herself)
I added 2 additional AI generators to SlideMagic, the produce a slide with some text and an image based on your prompt. One generator pulls the image from Unsplash, the other creates it from scratch. There is no update to your SlideMagic app needed to see the extra image generators.
See an example below:
Clickable links are the fundamental building blocks of the web page format that was developed in the 1990s. In the early days of the web, you could spend hours getting lost in clicking the blue links in text pages. In modern web design, these pure text links are less useful though.
Sometimes I see them as a reference to a core element of the story. Our product has a <link>key competitive advantage</link> that helps drive our <link>amazing financials<.ink>. He user who clicks links is leaving your story line flow. Seeing messages in the wrong order, tripping up a sequence of big picture versus detail, and is probably not returning to the point she came from.
Web design guidelines in the 1990s also prescribed not to add the work “link” to a URL, but rather put descriptive text: “the 1996 financial results” so that Google and other web search engines would index the page correctly. The result is a page where the reader never is completely sure where it ends up when clicking a URL.
How do I use plain text links? Mainly for references, in the same way academic papers use numbers to refer to relevant resources. A home page of a company, a link to a photographer for credit, download links for documents, references to previous blog posts. And often, I violate the 1990s guide line and call the link what it is, a link, so that the reader knows what to expect.
I just returned from my summer break and will start picking up blog posts again. (Looking at the date, this month is the 15th anniversary of this blog…)
I swapped the DALL-E image generation engine for a different one, and the quality of the AI-generated images in SlideMagic has improved dramatically. Prompt and responses behave similarly to Midjourney. Below an example of a few quick prompts. (I on purpose forced the 1950s vibe on the last 2 images)
Make sure to have version 3.1.5 installed to see the new image engine. There is a cost associated with generating these images, hence this feature is only available to SlideMagic Pro subscribers. Other AI-related functions (slide and story line generation) are free for all users.
A few months ago, I added a DALL-E AI-image generator to SlideMagic. AI-generated images can be great for presentations:
You can get very precise in defining what you want to see, much more so than browsing endless stock images search results that are not exactly right
You can make images look visually consistent across a presentation
The DALL-E engine is not accurate enough though. Especially when it comes to humans/faces. Midjourney is doing a far better job at this but is not (yet) providing 3rd party API access to its engine, the only way to get images out is via a web-based interface.
I am starting to look into deploying the same open source models that are actually the basis of Midjourney, directly into SlideMagic. You can see the results below and they look very promising. More to come.
Image found with an automated prompt to a stock image site
Open-source AI-generated image
Very poor result from DALL-E
See the image below. I am blending AI-generated slides and images, and things are not completely right yet…
Another day, another SlideMatic AI feature.
SlideMagic has a collapsable slide side panel in which you can describe the story of your slide in case you are not present in person to present it to your audience. You can access side panel view from the “view” dropdown.
As of V3.1.3, SlideMagic can now suggested a slide summary automatically with the help of some AI. Simply click “(Re-)summarise at the right bottom of the slide to see the panel get populated. The quality of the results will depend on the amount of text in your slide. See an example below
Using this feature will switch the app to side panel view, you can go back to your preferred slide layout via the “view” dropdown menu.
I am continuing the gradual upgrading of the SlideMagic AI capabilities. Today, I added an automated content page to the automated story line generator. For each section in your presentation outline, you now get a slides with all sections, plus the current one highlighted. (See the screenshot below).
More updates and refinements to come
I added the second AI-powered slide generator to SlideMagic. It creates a simple feature comparison of the items you enter. So this time it is a single slide rather than an entire presentation layout. See the screenshots below.
It was an interesting learning process to figure out how to “tame” OpenAI and get it to produce consistent outputs and data formats that I can use in layouts. I still need to improve the adjustment of font sizes based on the density of the output. More and better generators to come.
You need to update the app to version 3.1.1. to see the new features (or higher, this was written in June 2023), if it did not happen automatically, simply re-install SlideMagic from the home page.
I just soft launched SlideMagic 3.0 that now has a direct backend integration to OpenAI’s ChatGPT (in addition to the AI-based image generator I put in earlier).
My objective was to get the basic engine running. So things are very simple at the moment. When you try to insert a slide, you will see a new option: “AI-generated slides”. Clicking the icon will lead you to a new form where you can input a prompt. Hit “submit” and be patient, and the app will generate a simple presentation layout with separator pages based on your prompt. See the screenshots below.
I am planning to release many, many more of these generators. More sophisticated story lines, chart template generators etc. now that the basics are in place. Next steps for me is more “prompt engineering” (SlideMagic adds a lot of content to the prompt you submit in the background), and expanding my chart generation engine to take in more human-like responses from ChatGPT and turn them into SlideMagic boxes.
The generative AI feature is free for all to use at the moment (as long as it does not hit my OpenAI account too hard), SlideMagic Pro users can export these AI-generated charts to PowerPoint.
I am continuing to experiment with OpenAI to see how it can help us make presentation design easier. Generative AI feels a lot like the early days of the Internet in the end of the 1990s. People did not really see that “Internet” was not really a unified tool that could do wonders for business, but rather a description for hundreds of different applications and use cases that happen to rely on a web browser.
The same is true for generative AI now. I don’t think that I will come up with the ultimate AI-based presentation tool overnight that can read your thoughts and deliver the slides at the press of a button. Instead, I will try to release bite-size features that can make the life of a presentation designer easier.
And some of these might not even be very clever. Anyone can go to ChatGPT and get it to produce some presentation skeletons or summaries of text. But there are ways to make prompting of the engine better for presentations. You can save a lot of time by having a user interface straight into SlideMagic, and most importantly, it saves a lot of time when SlideMagic creates the slides for you (in .magic and/or .pptx). The latter has nothing to do with AI, but rather improving the slide generation engine that I already built.
Watch this space.
