SlideMagic Blog

Like coding, mathematical language needs to be precise and as a result looks super scary to the outsider, turning of many people that might have had an interest in exploring more. Here is a great picture that should be an inspiration for the rewriting of mathematics education:

Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash

I started the subscription slide template store almost a year ago, and the first subscribers will soon receive an email alerting them about the upcoming subscription renewal. I must admit that over the past few months I have not added as many new designs to the store as I had planned to, since I am investing a lot of time in developing the next generation of the SlideMagic app.

I have lots of ideas for new slides, but the underlying platform makes it very cumbersome to maintain everything, especially in multiple slide formats and aspect ratios. The Shopify platform I am using is built for selling t-shirts in different sizes, and is less suited for digital downloads.

A 1 year unlimited download is still a tremendous deal with the current library, but I understand if people decide not to roll over the subscription into a second year. The site should give you the tools to stop the subscription, if you need help please reach out. Obviously, you are invited to continue to support me as I am trying to change the world of presentation design.

The new app will include a better solution for accessing templates, now that my coding skills are reaching a point where I am less dependent on out-of-the-box platforms. Eventually we will get there.

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Back in the 1990s, as an “alien” Dutch person working in London, I got constantly corrected for my habit of splitting infinitives. Doing some more research now, I found that it basically does not matter what you do. They should have told me earlier…

There is one thing to think about though. There are still many people around who have not read this blog post and/or done the research. If you need to write something to someone you need to impress and don’t know very well (a job application for example), maybe splitting infinitives deliberately is not the best idea.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

After diving into JavaScript, Electron, and Node.js to refresh my coding skills, it is now time to get into front end design. I never followed developments in this area very much and now discover the similarities between slide design and interface design. This article by Steve Schoger has recommendations that apply to presentation design as well:

• Lots of grey shades
• Only one real primary color, but use it with restraint
• Super contrasting accent colours to highlight things
• No lines around boxes
• Make sure your color saturation palette looks good, and use it consistently

Photo by Harpal Singh on Unsplash

Dark or light background, it is a choice, and both can lead to overcrowded, ugly slides full of bullet points. For some reason, people do a better job when working on a dark slide background. Possible reasons?

• The dark slide is a clear break from the colour format of most project working documents., there is less temptation to just copy/paste that spreadsheet and call it a slide?
• The minimalist dark Apple product launch presentation is just etched in our brain and serves as an example?
• Dense bullet points are actually harder to read on a dark background than a light one?

Who knows, but if it works, it works…

Photo by Good Free Photos on Unsplash

I get these type of requests to improve a presentation a lot, first when there are budget issues, and now more recently when I say that coding my app consumes 100% of my time. Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes in good freelance design work:

• Doing quick fixes will turn you into well, a quick fixer, you join anonymous army of freelance designers that do patch work and compete on price. If not you, we will find 1,000 alternatives exactly like you. The race to the bottom as Seth Godin would call it.
• Fixing slides is the last step in the process, first comes understanding someone’s story. That is a big fixed cost investment that you need to put into every project, even if the draft slides look decent.
• Presentation design work can only be really effective when you have the creative freedom (and budget) to tear up the entire draft design and pick your own consistent approach.
• Quick fixes always need to be completed quickly, doing a lot of these projects means you always will be extinguishing emergency fires and never get around to doing your real work. It is more productive to be able to plan your work over a longer period of time. Quick fixes actually impacts the quality of your overall work.
• Substandard work creates a self reinforcing loop: you will attract similar types of clients, and you are no longer proud of the work you show when someone asks you for recent design work that you did.

I recently watched the documentary “This is it!” about Michael Jackson again and remember the scene in the middle where the director is picking the handful of lead dancers for the MJ show from a line up of hundreds and hundreds of highly talented people that made it through the first selection filters and made the journey to the stage.

The parallels with pitching for an investment to experienced investor are striking:

• He does not need to see an entire performance start to finish, he has seen it before
• He compares every dancer to every other dancer who is on stage, but also subconsciously against all the other candidate-dancers he has seen and picked before.
• His mind and eyes wanders all over the place without a clear structure or script
• He uses a heavy dose of gut feel
• He is looking for someone who has that bit of “something special”, both in terms of objective capability, but also drive and ambition
• He know he probably makes mistakes (picking the wrong dancer and not picking the right dancer who standing in the back row)
• He probably forgives a newbie who makes a rookie mistake in auditioning and actually enjoys discovering a new talent (or the opposite discounts the talent of the “auditioning pros”)

This does not mean to throw all the rules about presentation design out of the window: the context is just different when you for example pitch a crypto startup to a crypto fund who has been funding crypto companies for the past 2 years.

I love investing in good writing instruments. Here is the current line up (with a new addition):

• Apple pencil for notes I need to keep (meeting notes, important concepts for my app development, ideas for new blog posts)
• Mechanical pencil for sketching disposable charts, diagrams, concepts that either need partial creative erasing and/or a ruler (read the review of my trusted Lamy 2000 mechanical pencil here)
• And now: a nice roller pen for other “disposable” notes.

Since I started my career at McKinsey back in the 1990s I have been using pencils for everything. Back in the day, all charts and slides were sketched by hand before being produced by a graphics designer who understands PowerPoint (or Solo before that). But, pencils leads break easily when writing enthusiastically and have low contrast, hence the addition of the pen.

The Lamy 2000 roller pairs nicely with my pencil. The design is almost identical to the classic fountain pain, but with less staining (I am left handed), and the need to get that writing angle perfectly right. I think a roller is better for short notes than a proper fountain pen. The Lamy has a perfect balance (wit the cap placed on the back), and somehow the plastic that is used in the pen gives it a really nice brushed feel, and a perfect weight. Only drawback, those two tiny grips that were part of the original design and produce that satisfying click when the cap is closed.

Full colour images can clash with the colour palette of your presentation colour scheme. Three options:

• Pick a different image (search for “orange” in Unsplash for example)
• Use grayscale images
• Or… adjust the text colour to the image (see example)

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

While battling the rendering of images in PowerPoint via JavaScript I remembered that my ver first piece of software was actually a “presentation design tool”. Back in 1985, in the final years of high school, I submitted a program as an entry to a programming contest.

Screen drawing was in its infancy then, and I noted that all programs were “destructive”, you drew something on bitmap canvas and could store the end result, but there was no way to edit / undo your master piece at a later stage. My program stored individual actions which had 2 benefits: you could edit your drawing, and it took far less tape space to save the file (a line just takes 2 points to store).

The program was written in Basic on a TI-99/4A (which had a screen resolution of 256 pixels I think). Unfortunately, I did not win the contest. I think the winner was a shopwindow advertising application written by the son of the local butcher that enabled horizontal scrolling of the latest entrecote prices in big characters on the screen. (The butcher himself seemed to know more about the intricacies of the program than his son though). I think the jury thought this had more practical application than a presentation design program.

Image via WikiPedia