SlideMagic Blog

A SlideMagic user requested additional templates in the area of organization design and benchmarking. I added these two upon request. (Don’t tell anyone the secret that these slide design request are usually put up within 24 hours after asking for them.)

Simply searching for ‘process’ in the app will reveal them, or search online via this link. Pro users can convert them to PowerPoint (students, did you see the free SlideMagic Pro plan for you?).

Most appliances come with a “quick start guide” in addition to a detailed manual. A good quick start guide:

• Is not a dumbed down version of the manual
• Has an order that is natural to the new user, tackling issues as they come up
• Has a clear objective to get people going

The manual is the exhaustive reference guide written by the product engineer, the quick start guide is the pitch to the user. Think of your presentation as the quick start guide of that huge strategy document that is open in your presentation software.

Safety instructions, terms of use, privacy statements, safe harbor statements, nobody reads them. Lawyers have diluted them so much that it takes a long time to reverse engineer the original message. In addition, most people more or less know (or assume they know) what is written in them.

The same is true for mission statements and other corporate “standard “ texts. They all sort of say the same, many of them are not credible, and in most cases do not add anything to the story of a presentation. The audience switches off until something more interesting pops up.

In the worst case, you might have lost your audience all together. “Ah, it’s going to be one of these decks”

Students can get free access to SlideMagic Pro. The signup and validation process is no longer cumbersome, you can get started straight from the pricing page:

In spreadsheets or databases, things should be clearly labeled. Every column has a heading that describes what’s in it. When it comes to slide design, you can allow yourself a bit more freedom. Look at the 2 slides below

In the second slide, I omitted detailed descriptions of data that is probably clear to the audience, and grouped things together in one box. Easier on the eye.

Dream Studio uses machine learning to create images based on sentences and keywords a user enters. Unlike searching for an image based on a keyword in a big data base with tagged pictures, Dream Studio would generate pixels from scratch. Some results are stunning, others have surprising errors (faces that are not finished for example).

You can also mix and match art styles (the image below is a mix up of Mondriaan and Van Gogh).

At the moment these type of services are a gimmick. People try a few creations, share them, and move on. But in a few years from now, this might be the way image “databases” work. No need for that database anymore as photographs are created on the fly,

(Another similar service is DALL-E, but it has a waiting list)

This is a nice Twitter thread:

1. Polyptoton The repeated use of words with the same root, like destroy, destroyer, and destroyed.
2. Anadiplosis The repetition of the last word of a clause at the beginning of the next.
3. Anaphora The use of the same word or words at the start of successive clauses or sentences.
4. Epizeuxis The immediate repetition of a word or phrase.
5. Epanalepsis The repetition of a word at the start and end of a clause.
6. Antithesis The use (and contrast) of two opposing ideas in a single clause or sentence.
7. Aysndeton The omission of a conjunction (e.g. and, or) from a series of related clauses.
8. Anastrophe The inversion of normal word order.

Read through the entire thread by @culturaltutor to see examples.

Students are eligible for a completely free SlideMagic Pro subscription, and I have now automated the validation process for a number of markets:

• Austria
• Denmark
• France
• Italy
• Germany
• Spain
• Sweden
• The Netherlands
• Turkey

After you have registered a free account with SlideMagic, you can visit this link to start the validation process. If your account is based in one of the above countries you get instant approval. Clicking the “I am a student” button will take you to the login page of the university or school you are currently studying at. After a successful login, your SlideMagic Pro subscription will automatically be switched on.

For other countries, we are still using a partly manual approval process.

All this was made possible through a partnership with InAcademia. If you run a web site that needs student validation it is worth checking them out.

It is hard to communicate an idea for a new song without the help of the full band.

• When you play the basic idea on one instrument to someone else, that person misses the context that it is in your head: the result a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.
• The same can happen to you. You had that brilliant idea, but when you get back to your note book the next day, the scribbles sound like a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.

The same is true for your presentation. Your audience is missing the context that is in your head, and the slides / your story is the only thing they can rely on.

A nice video by Adam Neely who talks about stage fright from a musician’s perpsective: