SlideMagic Blog

ChatGPT is good at writing fluent text because there is lots of quality text around on the Internet to train it on. Most text online is at least grammatically correct, and a subset of online content is of some decent quality at a story level (books, reports, professional news websites, etc.) . Midjourney can make up great images because there are lots of images around to train it on, they do not even have to be that good in terms of composition, the pixels in an image add up to an accurate representation of something.

Now with presentations though…. There are fewer of them around online, and most of these are actually not that good. Even if you were to feed let’s say McKinsey’s entire archive of decks into an AI model, would it be able to produce a McKinsey-style deck based on a prompt? Maybe. But the result would be a consulting-style, dense document, not an engaging pitch deck.

In 2023 the power of ChatGPT is not in automating extremely complicated tasks, but taking out the daily hassle of smaller things. For presentations, one of my favorites are translating long-hand text into tables of short points. “Please summarize the pros and cons of both options discussed in the following text”. What you get back ia a bird’s eye view of all the elements of the story. Often, the first thing an old-fashioned presentation designer does on a piece of paper.

Below is an interesting chart from McKinsey. It combines a column chart with a line chart. The chart only works when a column has a reasonable size though.

I am not aware of any presentation software that can produce these (including SlideMagic), so this might have been bespoke illustration work.

Link of the original post.

Recently, I started writing code to analyse data from all kinds of financial and healthcare data APIs. The amount of information is endless. Most data sources have some sort of dashboard that allows you to slice and dice data in any way or form you want.

Still, the skill to make sense of this all is pretty much the same as it was 30 years ago.

I remember building a lot of company valuation models where I would sit on the buy side of an M&A transaction. As a buyer, I had to rely on outside information and focus on the data that matters. Often, I found that my model was more accurate than the one of the analyst on the sell side, who lost herself in the abundance of data available.

My workflow in the new abundance of data:

1. Use some sort of dashboard to explore what types of data is available
2. Use a spreadsheet as a napkin to scribble analyses
3. Code the analysis on a small scale
4. Scale up the analysis to a full scale

The crucial step is number 2.

Here is one use for a slide deck: keep a meeting organized.

Yesterday I saw someone preparing a meeting with the following ingredients:

• Zoom, i.e., hard to manage
• Content that can spark heated debates
• Lots of participants…
• …and participants who would like to say a lot

A simple slide deck that might not be essential to get the messages across but organized the preparation and will organize the meeting was the solution. All points are covered (once) and will be discussed in an agreed order

While working on my 9xchange site, I used one of my approaches to present a document. “Pages” that sit randomly on a table or surface (see below).

I use this technique as well for the banner image of this blog, see below.

This effect is very easy to make. Take an empty slide / page in any presentation app. Save the document you want to show as individual images (good old screenshots will do as well). Drag the images on to the slide and tilt them. Add a little drop shadow behind them.

Things are not as random as they seem though:

• The angles of the pages need to look interesting, not all the same, not too different
• The page need to be semi-readable (i.e., not upside down)
• Key headings should be visible and very readable
• You need to decide whether to let pages bleed off the page, keep them 100% in the frame. It will create very different effects
• You should select pages that look varied, and interesting and are presentative of the content of the document you want to show.

Here is a headline from last night’s GOP candidate debate: Christie accusing Ramaswamy of “sounding like ChatGPT”

We might hear this more often in the future when it comes to debates and presentations. Things that make you sound like ChatGPT:

• Highly structured stories: intro, your supporting points, the wrap up
• Very polite language
• Zero human emotion, humor, anger, cynicism, fatigue
• No spontaneous tangents
• Arcs of a few paragraphs each

You get the point. It is similar to “sounding like a marketing content writer”, a style that has been around a bit longer.

When your headline says that your product is not another [FILL IN PRODUCT CATEGORY], the audience will believe that it actually is one…

By René Magritte(1898-1967) - Image taken from a University of Alabama site,”Approaches to Modernism”;: [1], Fair use (Old-50)

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.