This post on the F1 Instagram account has an interesting solution to the labels of a data chart: When the column is tall enough, the label is put inside with a contrasting white font color If not, the label is put on top, if possible with a font color that matches the column 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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 wo ..read more

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 m ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 th ..read more

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 ..read more