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Stock images can be cheesy and cliche, and the current AI image generators are trained on tons of stock images. So if you ask for an image using a stock-image-like prompt, you will get a stock image…
Stock images can happen to the best of us, above, SlideMagic had a go at “a happy group of young adults taking selfies”.
I saw the following slide coming by in my Twitter feed (original post):
Here are some things I fixed:
(For those of you interested in the political context: Israel is fragmented in many population groups, the Israeli high-tech sector which is mostly secular, pro-democracy, situated around Tel Aviv, and not really represented in the current government is making the case that it generates a big chunk of the Israeli economy and is bank rolling many other sectors.)
I am making updates to the server plumbing of SlideMagic, to ensure uninterrupted service, please log out and back in to the app. Apologies for the inconvenience, but this keeps everything safe and secure.
I deployed a new version of the SlideMagic app today with security updates. The server was patched too. Please let me know if you experience any issues.
When quickly putting a draft presentation together, it is tempting to not spend any effort at all on design and layout. “We can always fix that later”.
I would argue the opposite. Make the draft look as good as the final product will be. It sets the entire mood for the project. Looking at messy / ugly charts is not a big motivation to do great work. Messy / ugly charts encourage people to add bullet point and too much text, because you can always remove it later.
The good news is that a simple chart with simple content does not take a lot of effort to design properly. Fix proportions, alignment and colors and everything looks great in a few clicks.
(Pro-tip: use SlideMagic for your draft documents)
This post on the F1 Instagram account has an interesting solution to the labels of a data chart:
The advantage is that this enables you to make the column graph taller as a whole (no need to budget extra space for the labels), and it is easer to put a background image as most labels (in tall columns) have enough contrast against them.
The vertical orientation of the labels though…
See below a screenshot of a news article discussing a pipeline review of a pharmaceutical company. Some drugs will be cut and the editor added an image of a worker chopping a tree.
Not sure about this. For this type of publication and news, another cliche image of the main entrance of the corporate building with a big logo might have been more appropriate.
Here is an attempt to redesign a Nikki Haley Instagram ad. I removed the bar charts (with the skewed axes) and added images to make the viewer really visualize the 2 scenarios.
I added the following slide to the SlideMagic library, search for “Biden” in the app and it will show up. Alternatively, find it here for download. Pro subscribers can convert slides to PowerPoint.
I am doing a number of service updates to the plumbing of SlideMagic to keep things secure. You might be logged out in the process. If things are not behaving normally, please log out and back into your account. Sorry about this.
I have not been posting for a while here. As you know, I am based in Tel Aviv, and the attacks of October 7 made it impossible for me to continue and write a frequent “happy blog post” as if nothing happened.
This blog is about presentation not politics, so I won’t start a discussion here that repeats what has already been said everywhere. When reading and listening to all these opinions, keep this in mind: everything changed on October 7. Whatever you thought on October 6, needs to be reevaluated and reconsidered. Old narratives don’t work anymore. Whatever side your on.
I am continuing to work incredibly hard on my other startup in the medical field, where I try to tame “chatty” generative AI bots to provide disciplined and structured information which is not obvious at the moment. The results are actually very promising.
My blog was always about spontaneous ideas that came up during my work in presentations that go online without much though or planning. I spend a little less time in the world of presentations at the moment, but will try to start posting again slowly. I also owe users a few bug fixes in SlideMagic.