# The world deserves a better presentation software: my pitch

URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/reflections/2015/11/22/The-world-deserves-a-better-presentation-software-my-pitch-1ec9e2a8a57/
Published: 2015-11-22
Author: Abhi Nemani

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_I often — like you I bet — have to make slide decks fast, very fast, and need them not to look like what I made back in the 8th grade. I’ve taken classes on slide design, made a few 1,000 myself, and I’d admit that never have I been able to quickly, easily, and reliably been able to make a professional, yet human deck in under 30 minutes. That ought to change, I think. The modern web is just too good for this to be so hard._

So here’s my pitch:

### General Principles

* Slides should be fast and easy to create and not ever strain the eyes of your audience
* You should be able to create slides through just your browser and they should work everywhere and anywhere (and yes, that means you fonts)
* Never should there be faked 3D animation — or animation of any kind — projected by an adult.

### A simple theory of slides

There are basically four types of slides that you should ever really want to have:

* Photos
* Quotes
* Charts
* Screenshots

#### _Photos_

Photo slides should be simple, beautiful, powerful — and most of all easy to include and optimize:

* Smart search from flickr, instagram, Facebook and other social image platforms for super simple starts
* Instagram-style and -ease filtering and cropping to add charm
* And automated permalinking, attribution, and short link to be a good person

#### _Quotes_

Quote slides should let the words do the talking:

* Smart search from quote websites and copy/paste functionality from websites/blogs for quick starts
* Big, bold, and mostly universally accessible fonts to make sure the words are heard
* Option for photo-slides as backgrounds to spruce them up (optional, not required)

#### _Charts_

A charts slide should convey one point, and one point only as simply as possible; that means using chart and graph styles that people actually know and understand:

* Sync up with Google Sheets and then restyle with D3 and a clean CSS for beautiful, simple bar, line, and pie charts (that’s it)
* Smart copy/paste functionality to take Excel data into a non-Excel looking chart
* Only a few “process” charts (read: a vegan diet of SmartCharts): linear, hierarchy, and cycle

#### _Screenshots_

Screenshot slides should be just like a screenshot: fast, easy, and reliable:

* Just type in a url and automatically pull in a recent (but then archived) shot of a URL to get things going
* Super simple cropping and filtering functionality just like photos
* Stored archives of your past screenshots for posterities sake since, well, sometimes websites fail

Let’s go make this happen. A world of current and future procrastinating presenters will be forever at your mercy.