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)

Yesterday’s slide about the UK’s vaccine priorities is a good example of the SlideMagic philosophy to creating presentations: making something that looks decent, very quickly, so you can get on with more important things than making slide decks. SlideMagic is for every-day-presentations.

What is done right:

• You get the message instantly
• The design is preserved in whatever screen or aspect ratio you choose
• It is super easy to add/remove columns from the design without creating mayhem in your layout
• Fonts and colors are sorted and fit instantly with the corporate branding

What the pro designer would have done differently for a big keynote address:

• No duplication of shape labels
• Line up the shape labels 1-2-4-6-X in a straight diagonal line
• Nice L-shaped boxes by either creating a custom shape, using different padding margins across the slide, or using a clever stacked overlay of rectangles
• Label the columns between the breakpoints, rather than “>70” labels

Adding each of these finishing touches would have added a lot of time, and make it a lot harder to apply changes to the slide (“oops, we have a 45+ category now as well, please fix it, I am on in 5 minutes”).

Maybe I find ways to solve some of the compromises above in the future in a different way, but in the mean don’t be embarrassed by this result and get on with the work that is really important. Spending slides is no longer an excuse for procrastination.

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

As I went through to the process of refreshing my 1990s computer science degree, I am now trying to help to teach my teenage kids the basics of coding as well. Not as obligatory homework, but something that is fun to do. Some observations.

1. Unlike in 1986, it is actually very hard today to get a basic environment up and running to write a few lines of code. All the stuff you need to install. The HTML screen rendering complexity that is great to produce web sites on different devices, but an absolute pain to put something basic on the screen. So I actually need to deploy a fair share of my own coding horse power to build some basic functions that my kids can use to do something like plotting an ‘x’ in a coordinate system, reading keyboard inputs, getting code to wait for a few seconds. And there is of course the challenge of getting a small web site you build on your own machine to show up on a real URL.
2. I don’t believe in special kid programming languages or programming tools. I see the big problem with language for grown-ups as described in point 1, understanding the actual concept such as variables and loops is pretty much the same. And once kids get into it, they can continue to build out their skills that are useful in the real world, and are everywhere around them (inspecting code in web sites they visit for example). So HTML, Javascript, and CSS it is.
3. Coding is all about doing. Watching videos or in-person lessons is boring. Doing algorithm homework-style problems is boring. You want to get that frog move across the screen, and you try everything to get it to work because you want to, not because you have to.
4. Learning how to learn from others online is an important skill. Answers posted online can be wrong, outdated, not relevant. Sifting through information overload and tolerating ambiguity is important.
5. I found that the key to getting kids started is the presence of interesting problems for them to solve. Here are a few:

Overheard in a conversation. “I used to create lots of PowerPoint decks 10 years ago, but would not know how to do this anymore today”.

Graphics designers need to learn how to use Sketch, InDesign, and yes, PowerPoint. Coders need to learn how to work with software development tools.

Twenty years ago, mastering presentation software was a skill. First, dedicated graphics designers and/or secretaries would translate hand-drawn designs into PowerPoint. Then, the junior analysts on teams started to figure it out.

Putting a presentation together is now as normal a task as sending an email: it is a required skill for everyone (from new recruit to CEO) without the need for extensive training. If training (or memory) is required, then it is a software problem. SlideMagic is trying to solve it.

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.

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