Slide Layout Optimization

This week I'm sharing AI tools I use regularly—and more importantly, the less obvious ways I'm using them. See the comments for links to my features on AirOps, Granola, and ElevenLabs. Today: Gamma, an AI-native presentation tool that I discovered through Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter (another perk of that paid subscription—free access to their pro plan). Most people know you can use AI to generate slide decks from scratch. But here's the workflow that actually saved me hours of work: The situation: I was co-presenting at a LearnWorlds summit with Margarita Loktionova. We had detailed notes, a template from the event organizer, and limited time to pull it all together. The traditional approach would be: - Manually recreate the template styling in our deck - Copy-paste our notes into slides - Arrange and format everything - Add visuals and balance the layout Here's what I did instead: - Imported the event's Google Slides template into Gamma - Let AI analyze and recreate the styling (typography, colors, layout) - Fed it our outline and notes - Watched it generate formatted slides with suggested layouts - Made minor edits and exported back to Google Slides What impressed me: - It nailed the typography and general layout from the template - Turned bullet points into well-balanced slide layouts - Offered dozens of layout options for each slide (great for non-designers like me) - Added contextual stock images (which I could easily remove) - Exported cleanly back to Google Slides for final polish The quirk: Sometimes it added extra content beyond what was in my notes—expanding concepts in ways I didn't intend. This was easy to catch and delete, but worth watching for. Beyond presentations: I'm also using Gamma to repurpose blog posts into visual infographics for social media. Give it a URL, and it scrapes the content and creates shareable visual slides. Way more engaging than screenshots. Pricing note: There's a free plan to start. Paid plans unlock unlimited AI presentations and remove branding. The pro plan (which I get through Lenny's newsletter) includes API access. As someone who previously used Slidebean (which is solid), Gamma's AI-first approach just makes the whole process faster — especially when working with existing templates or content. I'll drop resources in the comments, including links to earlier tools from this week. What presentation tools are you using? Have you tried any AI-powered options?

How to create great MBB slides as a PRO (even if you’re not a designer) I’ve probably made over 10,000 slides in my career. According to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule, that technically makes me a slide master God. (Or maybe just someone who needs new hobbies.) But here’s the twist: I’m not a designer. I’m a lawyer by training. My natural design instincts are zero. And yet, I’ve learned to make slides that work, not because of fancy design skills, but because of a few simple principles that anyone can apply. Here’s how to make slides that actually work: 1. Always start with the message. Before adding any charts, graphs, or visuals, ask yourself: • What is the key takeaway? • How do I want the audience to react? • What elements best support this message? Tattoo this on your brain: A slide where the elements don’t support the message is a bad slide. Period. 2. Use a strong title and subtitle. Every slide needs a clear title that tells you what it’s about and a subtitle that provides the key insight. Example: • Title: “Global sales performance” • Subtitle: “North America drives 60% of growth” 3. Stick to simple and consistent layouts. A good slide should be easy to read at a glance. My go-to layouts: • One chart with commentary: Chart on the left, key takeaways on the right. • Two simple charts side by side: For comparing metrics or trends. • Three columns: When comparing options or showing steps, use three aligned boxes with short text. • Image and text pairing: Image on one side, the message on the other. Keep it simple. The art belongs in the museum, not on your slide. 4. Less is more with text • Bullet points, not paragraphs. • Short phrases, not long sentences. • If your slide looks like an essay, start over. 5. Alignment and precision matter. Nothing makes a slide look messier than poor alignment. • Align elements consistently. • Use symmetry wherever possible. • White space is not your enemy, clutter is. 6. Keep charts simple and actionable • Bar charts, line charts, scatter plots, stick to what works. • Always label axes and show units. • Highlight key data points. 7. The 5-second rule • Can you tell what the slide is about in 5 seconds? • Is the key insight crystal clear? • Would a stranger understand it instantly? The bottom line: If your slide doesn’t support your message, it’s just a distraction. And if your message isn’t clear, neither is your impact.

A well-designed slide is: - fast to read - easy to trust - and hard to ignore. But here’s what I’ve seen too often: ❌ Slides that look like dashboards (cluttered, busy, overwhelming) ❌ Or slides that look like Excel exports (rigid, uninspiring) That’s why I pulled together this guide These 9 principles will help you design slides that work for real life FP&A settings: board decks, business reviews, management updates ✅ Repetition Use consistent layouts, fonts, and titles to speed up reading. If the design changes at each slide, that looks like a puzzle ✅ Balance Distribute content evenly so no corner feels heavy or empty There is a sort of center in your slide. Start from it ✅ Contrast Highlight what matters Contrast is how you direct attention ✅ White space Give your content room to breathe If there is too much, it's unreadable ✅ Pattern Use one clear layout logic It makes slides easier to scan and navigate ✅ Hierarchy Start with the message, then show the data ✅ Simplicity Strip the non-essential. If your slide takes 30 seconds to understand, it’s too slow ✅ Alignment Even one misaligned box breaks flow. Fix it And it's not only me 😁 ✅ Variety Pick visuals that match your message Sometimes a table works better than another bar chart Your slide must not contain all the data you have It's a support to your message Which principle do you feel is the hardest to apply?

From Image to Editable Slide: Introducing SlideCoder’s Layout-Aware Generation Framework 👉 Why This Matters Creating polished slides requires balancing content, design, and technical execution—a process that’s error-prone and time-consuming. While tools like PowerPoint APIs and LLMs help automate slide generation, they often fail to preserve visual fidelity or handle complex layouts. Imagine trying to replicate a detailed infographic or a multi-element dashboard from a static image: existing methods might miss fonts, colors, or spatial relationships, leaving you with a generic result. 👉 What SlideCoder Solves This paper introduces "SlideCoder", a framework that converts reference images (e.g., PDFs, screenshots) into editable PowerPoint files with three key innovations: *  Layout Segmentation: A gradient-based algorithm splits the image into logical blocks (text, shapes, images) while preserving their spatial relationships. *  Code Synthesis: A hierarchical retrieval system pulls relevant Python-pptx API snippets from a knowledge base to reconstruct each block accurately. *  Self-Correcting Execution: The system iteratively debugs generated code to avoid syntax errors and alignment issues. The team also released "Slide2Code", the first benchmark for evaluating slide-generation systems across difficulty levels, and "SlideMaster", a 7B open-source model optimized for this task. 👉 How It Works 1. Decompose: The input image is divided into regions using color gradients and recursive partitioning, ensuring even dense layouts are processed accurately. 2. Describe & Retrieve: Each region is analyzed for content and style, then matched to standardized API calls (e.g., “rounded rectangle with bold text”). 3. Assemble: Code snippets are combined with layout-aware prompts that enforce proportional scaling and alignment rules. 4. Refine: Syntax errors trigger automatic corrections, like adjusting parameter orders or adding missing imports. In tests, SlideCoder achieved 40.5% higher accuracy than GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 on complex slides, with near-perfect execution rates for simple layouts. Why It’s Relevant This work bridges the gap between visual design and code-based automation. For technical communicators, educators, or anyone creating data-heavy presentations, it offers a path to reproduce intricate designs without manual effort. The code and models are open-source, inviting further exploration into multimodal document generation.

Stop overcomplicating your visual design. Consistency is where I see most people fall down with visual design, it is the catalyst between your course looking professional or haphazard! Just using colour, icons and photography in a consistent way can help the visual design of your course feel and appear more deliberate. We can simplify this even further down to text size and font choice too. These seemingly insignificant choices have a big impact. Constantly darting about between styles or colour increases the cognitive load for the user. Sending their eyes all over the place and wondering if they've accidentally clicked out and jumped to a whole new eLearning entirely!! Remember, good design should go unnoticed. It should be so seamless that the user barely picks up on it. Think about it, how many times have you remembered bad design over good? But this doesn't always mean including complex layouts or detailed imagery. No. In fact you want to keep things simple, consistent and recognisable. See my examples here from the same eLearning. A consistent colour scheme and recognisable illustration style are used and slides are uncluttered and balanced. Did I draw these illustrations myself? Absolutely not! Who has time for that! I jumped over to a royalty free site and made sure to source them from a similar creator, helping to maintain consistency. So here's my top tips for ensuring consistency in your visual design: 1. Choose a colour scheme of no more than 4 to 5 colours. Include in this a background colour and font colour, the other 2 or 3 can be accent colours. Make sure to check for an accessible pairing too. 2. Define your header and body text font and size. Pre-programme this into your authoring tool so that it defaults to this each time you create a new slide. 3. Find an icon style you like and stick with it. Do you want outlines, full colour, black and white etc? 4. Decide if you're using photography, illustration or both. If illustrations, research a style you like and ensure there are plenty of resource out there for you to source your illustrations in this style. 5. Use the master for layouts! Keep forgetting where to place your header? Use the slide master to create slide layouts which you can then amend as needed. This will ensure your header and body text are always positioned in the same place across slides. This is just scratching the surface, but hopefully will be a good starting point for anyone struggling with visual design. #GraphicDesign #VisualDesign #ELearning #DigitalLearning

I've built 1,000s of slides in 7 years of consulting and strategy roles. Here's the 3-step approach that I use for every slide: 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟭. 𝗪𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲 You're starting at a blank slide canvas thinking "where do I even start!?" Well, you start by writing the slide header. The slide header should be written as an action title. The action title communicates the insight or "so what" of the slide, without needing to interpret any data. Here's what I mean: ⛔️  Revenue over time ✅  Revenue grew 15% p.a. over the last 3 years, which is 2.5x the average 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟮. 𝗨𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗼𝘂𝘁 The role of the slide body is to communicate the insight with data, so the insight determines how you should structure the slide. For example, if your insight has two parts, then you might want to break your slide into two columns. Or if your insight is about a complex relationship, then you might want a chart on the left side and some explanatory text / labels on the right side. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟯. 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 Executives will question anything they cannot verify. This means that every claim in your action title must be backed by data on the slide. Make sure it is explicitly shown without requiring any mental gymnastics. So choose the simplest and most elegant chart for showing your data. It goes without saying but "kind of supported" or "implied" is not good enough! -- Find this tip useful? Please give this a like 👍 or repost ♻️ to help others and follow me Dan Galletta for more tips like these.