If you like/use a free tool a lot, click the “buy me a coffee” button!
Tl;dr
- KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Color
- colorsnapper / colorslurp: grab hex codes (mac).
- palettelist: pick 2 colors, make palette
- fundamentals
Fonts/text
- archetypeapp: picks good fonts
- whatthefont: identify fonts
- compart: unicode reference
Images
- pexels.com
- negativespace.co
- openverse.org
- nappy.co Stock images with diversity (Default stock websites are bad about this.)
Utility
- cleanup.pictures: remove items from image.
- remove background
- pngtools
Graphics
- undraw.co, storyset.com: input hex, make vector illustrations
- artify.co: vector illustrations
- thenounproject: icons
Make an abstract design:
Make a diagram
- https://app.diagrams.net / https://draw.io
- https://www.lucidchart.com
- https://math.mit.edu/ennui/
- https://drawsql.app
- https://tikz.net/tag/neural-networks/
- https://ditaa.sourceforge.net
- http://alexlenail.me/NN-SVG/LeNet.html
- New diagrams out of MIT
Misc
- Book: storytelling with data - cole nussbaum knaflic
- Using whitespace effectively
- Colorblindness simulator
More
- OG powerpoint themes (this is all you need 99% of the time)
- slidesgo, slidescarnival
- gumroad: small samples of larger themes are available for free. Works well if you just need a few slide types.
Canva, visme, venngage, etc:
- I’ve seen students make nice slides using slidescarnival + canva.
- I think canva is hard to use, but you mightl ike it!
- CAVEAT: a tab might say “data viz”, but these are not tools made for data scientists or data analysts. You’re not the intended user, they made it for someone with different needs and simpler data. Please don’t put them in your project.
Searching slide themes
- Searching by purpose can cut down time. “Thesis defense” slides usually come with a problem statement, objectives, methodology, and conclusions already - that’s less rearranging for you to do! We had someone use “investor pitch” format a while back and pitch his project to us, that was fun.
These are tools I have found helpful, but you should think hard before using them! Nontechnical people don’t want to see your code in a presentation. But, if you share code to advertise yourself, for personal branding purposes, to share code with other technical people, make it look nice.
- https://carbon.now.sh (there are a million derivatives of this.)
- http://knutsynstad.com/fauxcode/
- https://showcode.app