From text to slide deck

Sleek slide decks are like a form of art. You know it when you spot one, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes it so visually appealing or how to replicate it. They’re also a time suck – writing the content is one thing, but getting it to look cohesive on a fixed canvas? That’s a whole other beast.

Gamma launched yesterday to make the latter quicker. The tool lets you focus on writing and uses flexible cards and fluid layouts to automatically align and fit the content. The makers liken it to building a Notion doc that converts into a presentation. It lets you embed GIFs, videos, charts, and websites, and has a “one-click” feature that allows you to restyle the entire deck without having to rework it each time. You can measure and understand engagement through built-in analytics and collect feedback from your collaborators using comments and reactions.

First-time founders Grant Lee, James Fox, and Jon Noronha met while working at Optimizely, an A/B testing tool that was acquired by Episerver in 2020. After coming out of stealth a year ago, the team raised a $7M round with participants including Airtable and Patreon founders, as well as Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan, and LinkedIn’s former CEO, Jeff Weiner. “While we're still super early, we're excited to open things up today, and wanted the PH community to be among the first to try out the product,” Lee shared on yesterday’s launch, which racked up 1,200+ upvotes.

The team also shared a little behind the scenes of building Gamma: “We ‘eat our own dogfood’ / ‘drink our own champagne’ here; every week, someone makes a deck and presents on it. Topics have been as varied as the History of McDonald's McRib, UFOs, woodworking, and tattoos.” We might give this a try for our next team gather.

We’ve covered alternatives to Google Slides and Powerpoint in the past, so seeing new tools wanting to disrupt the space feels exciting.

What do you use?

• Jollylook Pinhole’s DIY kit lets you build your own vintage pinhole instant camera using environmentally friendly materials.

• If cringeworthy LinkedIn posts are your jam but you lack the creativity, Viral Post Generator analyzed 100,000+ viral posts on Linkedin and uses AI to craft new ones. Share yours with the makers.

• Artboard Studio is what Figma and After Effect’s baby would be like.

• Codiga lets you create, share, and use snippets for 15+ languages from your IDE.

snoopForms is an open-source alternative to Typeform, aimed at both engineers and operators.

The tool’s no-code editor lets you pipe your submissions to one central hub to manage and forward the data where you want it.