Presentation slides are crucial for designers to pitch ideas, drive alignment, and showcase designs.
However, creating them can take a lot of time and effort, which includes choosing an appealing theme, finding compelling visuals, creating an effective layout, and telling an engaging story.
I was intrigued by the trend where numerous products are already addressing this challenge. Moreover, they leverage AI to help individuals create high-quality presentations quickly.
There were a few tools that I heard about repeatedly, and I was excited to try three of them:
Let’s dive in.
The Prompt
I used the same prompt as I mentioned in an earlier newsletter on gathering insights around best practices in questionnaire design.
So now imagine a scenario where I want to present those insights to a larger audience and I need to put together a presentation slide deck.
I went ahead to test those AI tools with that prompt and scenario.
Gamma
Had to sign up first and this was the landing page after signing up.
Due to the character limit, it didn’t let me paste in the long prompt with the specific design principles. So I had to use a one-line prompt instead, “Sharing 8 design principles of designing a high-converting online questionnaire”.
Gamma rapidly generated the outline for me based on the one-line prompt I provided.
However, the outline, being AI-generated, was different from the principles I wanted to include in the slide deck.
It was a good first step, but I needed to update the principles one by one.
Aside from that, Gamma offered over 50 themes for me to choose from, which was a pleasantly surprising variety.
I picked a theme and was able to receive a presentation slide deck within 15 seconds.
The slide deck exceeded my expectations. There was a good variety of slides tailored to different types of content. The slide layouts were well-designed, and the visual style was consistent.
However, I did have to edit the content on every slide.
That said, Gamma provided a robust set of editing features. For example:
1 - Iterate images with AI
2 - Use templates and components
3 - Use AI chat for assistance
I wasn’t sure if I would want to engage with the AI chat given its limitations, but it was still refreshing to see.
Overall, Gamma appears to be an exciting tool for non-designers and designers alike to put together a lightweight, attractive presentation slide in very limited time. Its interface is delightful to use.
Pitch
I was in a webinar the other day and saw someone presenting their work. He didn’t have a design background, but his presentation slide deck looked really nice.
I noticed the watermark “Pitch.com” and decided to give it a try.
Pitch’s landing page reminded me of Gamma’s. And same with Gamma, the character limit also only let me copy and paste in a short prompt. So I used the same one-line prompt that I used for Gamma.
It took about 15 seconds to generate the slide deck.
The result didn’t impress me. Compared with Gamma:
The content generated on each slide required more revisions.
There were limited styles to choose from except for a few colors and fonts.
There were limited components to drag and drop in.
That said, my favorite part of Pitch was not its AI tool, but rather the amount and variety of good templates created by Pitch and the community.
And I found the template that the engineer used in his presentation too.
Takeaways
Using AI to help generate presentation slides is an exciting concept.
The generation process is fast and smooth.
However, the limitations of these tools restrict me from providing detailed prompts.
If I had to create a presentation slide deck using one of those three tools, I would choose Canva.
If someone is looking for a new, one-click AI tool for creating presentation slides, I would recommend Gamma.
For slide deck inspiration, I would check out Pitch and Canva.
In addition, there are two other popular AI tools on the market:
I didn’t test them due to their restrictions. If you’ve tried them, let me know. Curious what you think?
That’s it for today!
In the next issue, I'll share an exciting experiment with AI, inspired by a mentorship session I had.
Stay tuned.
—Xinran
P.S. Questions? Thoughts? Just reply to this newsletter. I’d love to hear from you.