SlideMagic Blog

That is an ambitious title to start my first blog post after my return from a summer holiday in Asia!

Through a series of coincidences I ended up reading through a number of popular science books about quantum mechanics. I remember getting all carried away in the briefing session of a presentation design project for a startup in the field of quantum computing. My academic knowledge of this field was basically high school chemistry, so I added this topic to the list of things that needed a refresh. A holiday was the perfect occasion. I am sure I was the only one at the side of the pool dusting of theoretical physics knowledge.

From a presentation perspective, the fascinating problem that quantum mechanics struggles with a the lack of either a visual or verbal language to describe concepts. The mathematics is water tight and has proven to be really useful (lasers, semiconductors, LEDs, etc. etc.). But when you try to take a step back and want to understand what it actually all means in the context of your daily routines, things get confusing.

It is all the result of some form of Anamorphosis, projections of phenomena that get scrambled when angles or dimensions no longer line up. Every scientist is looking for that ultimate simple underlying concept that can explain/visualise/link quantum on a small scale to the more traditional physics that we see everywhere around us at a human scale.

In case you are interested, here are 2 books on the subject: Beyond Weird, and What is Real?.

Seth Godin in hist latest blog post:

And yes, there’s a mustard analogy in everything you do. In how you shake hands, in the typeface you use in your presentation (and whether you call it a ‘font’), in the volume you choose for your voice when in conversation.

Yes, there is a difference between “typeface” and “font”. Typeface refers to the style of a character, (Helvetica), font is the specific instance of that typeface (Helvetica 12 bold italic), which corresponds to a specific drawer with letters printers once used.

As someone who presents himself as a professional designer, I should be a purist, but don’t tell anyone, but I use the word “font” all the time. It sounds better is shorter, and an issue that is relevant for me recently: “font” is easier to fit in a dropdown menu of an application than “typeface”.

Photo by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash

Things are a bit quieter on the blog as I am continuing to work on SlideMagic 2.0. There was a small personal triumph as I finally acquired the skill to code a web server and remote database and read/write slides and users to it.

This enables me to start finally working on a proper search mechanism for template slides. I have a pretty good idea in my head of a mechanism where a user can click around between related slide layouts, visual concepts, business concepts, but it is (still) tricky to code this in software. When I succeed, I could probably file another patent, but for sure can claim SlideMagic 2.0 uses “AI”, which always sounds good.

To be continued.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Back in university, whenever we had a few more advertisers for the student association magazine, we immediately went for more expensive paper, full colour, or sophisticated binding.

This is a bit like throwing fancy effects at a presentation. In both cases, it does not always work.

Very heavy rough paper works for wedding invitations, but on a magazine, it looks like a brochure for expensive wine fridges.

Heavy satin finish paper looks beautiful on a thick 100+ page, coffee table book, full of A4±sized pages with lots of white space in it. Not so much for the A5-sized, loaded page with the calendar of the weekly drinks gatherings, plus 10 more pages.

In many cases, black and white photos with just one highlight colour makes things look much prettier than noisy images with random colour palettes.

Fancy is not always better.

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

If you want to download many slides from my template store, the process is a bit cumbersome: you have to add slides 1 by 1 to the check out card, and then download load them individually. My vision (hate that word) was to create a super useful slide search engine which you then accessed on an as-needed basis. The problem is the Shopify platform (which is designed to sell T-shirts, not digital downloads).

Slowly but surely I am building up the skills to start running my own template server, as a web site, as a backend to my new SlideMagic 2.0 desktop app, and possibly as a plugin to PowerPoint itself. Until that is all launched (and built), I am going to make life easier for current store subscribers: making all slides available in one downloadable file.

On request, I put a quick 200+ slide file in PowerPoint 4x3 format up (you can find it here, free to download for subscribers), the other formats will follow.

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

I am posting a bit less frequent these days since all my posts originate directly from the work I do day to day, and presentation design work has pretty much dropped to zero at the moment…

So what is happening with SlideMagic 2.0? I pretty much completed the desktop app but still think it is not ready for public release as small bugs continue to pop up, and I keep on discovering tiny, but annoying usability issues for which I do not need the help of others to discover them. The feature set is frozen, but experience is super important for a presentation design app (the big issue with version 1.0).

Hunting tiny bugs is not the most inspiring things to do, so I split my day now between this, and the next challenge: creating a template “store” with a smart search engine that integrates tightly with the app (unlike the current Shopify site). Technically, this is a lot simpler than the complex desktop app that I created, but for me it is a bigger challenge as I need to dive into the world of server design, which did not really exist when I graduated in Computer Science in 1992.

The potential upside should be interesting though, as this is the final barrier for me to go all out in thinking about what technology can do to help make the creation of presentations easy. Again, I will start with the tinkering approach, slowly iterating towards a product that is useful (which involves backing out of a lot of dead end alleys.

I have started using SlideMagic 2.0 extensively now to shake out every single possible bug (I can’t believe all the things that can go wrong in software). The more I use the tool, the more I come to realise that SlideMagic is a design language that happens to be supported by a tool, and not the other way around.

Trying to break SlideMagic 2.0

• Titles, footnotes, (small) corporate logo, page numbers, the slide content, all of them have a fixed place in the layout
• Mainly greyscale slides with one strong accent colour to make things pop out
• Rigorous adherence to the grid, everything lines up with everything, text, images, arrows, data charts, labels, everything
• You can use any shape you want, as long as it is a rectangle with sharp corners
• It is technically not possible to create a bullet point dot on a slide
• It is technically not possible to stretch images out of their aspect ratio

The constraints of email and instant messages have made corporate communication a lot simpler and more efficient: text can be brief, informal. Something similar needs to happen to presentations.

The coding of my app requires me to descend into the detail of font and screen sizes: SlideMagic 2.0 renders slides on the screen (HTML), in PDF, and in PowerPoint. It requires some fiddling to get things to look exactly the same in all three of these channels.

This post by Geetesh Bajaj explained nicely why things can go “wrong” in PowerPoint. Switching from “4:3” to "16:9 onscreen” mixes up all the font sizes. Why? Font sizes are expressed in terms of character height. The “16:9 onscreen” mode keeps the width of the screen, just makes the height smaller. The result, all text looks way too big.

Recently, Microsoft added the “wide screen” setting. This is the one to use. The height of the screen is kept the same, the width is made longer.

PowerPoint screen sizes explained by Indezine

If you are never switching layouts and masters, and/or are not coding presentation software, all of this should not worry you. The only thing that matters is 4:3 versus 16:9. Still, when you have a choice, pick that “widescreen” option to make life easier. for you.

Photo by Jon Ander on Unsplash

Over the weekend I read a profile of Christine Lagarde and how she rescued a EU crisis meeting once by passing around a bag of M&Ms (sugar kick) and suggesting to move all documents aside and start writing points of agreement on a blank sheet of paper.

It is incredibly hard to get a large group of people to agree on a complex document (or presentation) on the spot. Sometimes, the list of bullet points is the best solution:

• Short informal language
• Everyone has full visibility fo what is written
• Any distracting side comments can easily be parked

Image via WikiPedia

I usually don’t put animations in my presentations, they don’t add much, and in web interfaces I find them mostly annoying. I just discovered an exception: the tile or story view of presentation software. If you add or remove slides from the grid in one “bang” (instantly rendering the sequence of slides), your brain gets confused and does not seem to understand what just happened.

I have something else to learn…

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