SlideMagic Blog

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)

I took on the challenge from this tweet:

The embedded tweet is obscuring the image, here is the original taken from the BBC:

I think these icons are very cute, but are very hard to understand. I quickly put the following together in SlideMagic.

In the philosophy of SlideMagic, not the design of a pro, but very clear and very quick to put together. Notice how I kept things simple, by including the theoretical 0-16 years in nursing home residents, there won’t by any but the big horizontal bar shows the message “everyone” and maintains the visual harmony.

I have added this vaccin priority slide to the SlideMagic template database. You can access this slide for free by simply searching for “vaccine” from within the SlideMagic desktop app.

********* 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.

More or less every year since 2008 when I started this blog, I posted around the winter break that I would pause writing to enjoy a holiday with my family. This year is a bit different. I am currently completely rewriting the image rendering engine for SlideMagic with a number of objectives:

1. To finally enable proper smart cropping of images: if you scale an image, change its aspect ratio, crop, resize, whatever, SlideMagic will do the right thing and keep the item you want to be in focus, where it should be: in focus. The math for this is actually tricky, let’s hope I get it to work.
2. Improve the performance of the application dramatically, especially when zooming/resizing and repositioning images. I should be able to match “video game”-type response rates
3. (To remove a dependency on a very weird 1990s specification standard how images are rendered on web pages).

Non-beta SlideMagic users will not be guinea pigs for my plumbing changes, don’t worry.

Happy holidays everyone!

Photo by Mike Kotsch on Unsplash

I have been keeping a low profile here over the past week as I continue to improve the performance and stability of SlideMagic. I feel a bit like a construction contractor: putting up the house is easy with very visible progress, but getting those last tweaks done is time consuming and relatively below the radar work.

Under the hood things improve very well. The tool gets used more intensely now so every corner it will soon be tried and tested. I notice that I am fixing some of issues that are similar to the ones I encountered with PowerPoint’s public software releases (as an industrial user, I hit them first). My software development budget is a bit lower than Microsoft’s but we are getting there.

Photo by Cesar Carlevarino Aragon on Unsplash

Stack charts are very useful. So useful in fact, that SlideMagic does not support pie charts (by design).

They are very easy to make in Excel, but using them straight in a presentation is tricky. First there is the overall formatting of the chart, then there is the legend which is never connected to the chart itself, and does not leave enough space for text other than ‘new’, ‘old’.

I just overhauled the stack chart in SlideMagic and forced to be tightly integrated with the slide grid. Adding/deleting rows to your slide will add/delete data series to your stack chart. Furthermore I have actually removed the legend from the stack chart shape itself, what is left is only the option to add lines that point to boxes outside the chart. This gives you total freedom to do whatever you want with the chart legend, small, big, or even huge text boxes. Everything lines up, you can even fit stack charts in tables if you want.

The charts below give you a sense of what the new engine does:

The old stack charts will continue to work in SlideMagic for the moment. If your charts have them, you can edit them. If you want to make new ones, click + and you can still make them. An old stack chart can instantly be converted into a new one by selecting it and clicking the icon.

Stack charts in the template database are still in the old format, I will convert them over the coming weeks to the new format.

For subscribers who are using SlideMagic to download PowerPoint templates only: I have re-run the conversions of the entire database to solve some issues with arrows not being rendered correctly. All should be working fine now, let me know if you still find a slide that does not download correctly.

Pro-tip: try the SlideMagic app, a much more convenient way to work with the template database, convert to PowerPoint (if needed) as the very last step in your workflow.

Many people are surprised that SlideMagic is a desktop app. “Hey, it is 2020, not 1995?” Well, the SlideMagic desktop app is a bit different than the things you would run on your machine in 1995. It updates frequently (sometimes daily), and constantly is in touch with the slide data base server. I would actually call it a “dedicated browser”: a front end for the SlideMagic server with features such as dropdown menus and drag/drop between multiple windows that you cannot find in a regular browser.

People agree that on phones and tables, a dedicated app gives a better experience than a web page. The same is (still) true on a desktop.

Photo by Ilse Orsel on Unsplash

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).

An update.

A couple of days ago I released version 2.5 of SlideMagic with lots and lots of small updates that were sitting on the todo list. When designing, I cannot stand it when a small detail is off, and the same applies to software development. And like in design, most users/viewers won’t notice these individual details, but when taken together they add up to something. This slide does looks right for some reason, this app just works for some reason. Opening up SlideMagic should trigger an update to version 2.5.3 (writing this on November 11) after a few minutes, if not, you can visit the SlideMagic download site to install the latest version.

I am making changes to the positioning as well. That download or app landing page is now the home page of SlideMagic and no longer the web site that says that SlideMagic is a template bank, but also an app, and also a place where you can download entire presentations. All confusing, and still a left over of the SlideMagic template store on Shopify. The Shopify store is closed, and (that was quite a moment), the entire V1 version of the SlideMagic web app has been wiped from the server.

So the web site (still WIP) now reflects what SlideMagic is: presentation software with a uniquely clever user interface and a huge built-in template data base.

Photo by Bruce Warrington on Unsplash