Learning Science Lab | LSL Meetups | Beautiful.ai

Slides are present in the majority of classrooms. Presenting visual materials like charts, graphs, illustrations, and just general notes can help with teaching, but it also poses a lot of challenges. Adhering to good design principles can be difficult, and spending time working on layout and design is often a distraction from focusing on content, especially for instructors without a lot of visual design training.

The most common tool for creating these materials has been PowerPoint for many, many years. Google Slides offers a cloud-based alternative, but works in fundamentally the same way. Recently, a number of new software tools have become available that leverage AI or new design philosophies to make creating slides easier and more streamlined and—hopefully— more maintainable. We'll be looking at one called Beautiful.ai.

Beautiful.ai takes a different approach to slide design than tools like PowerPoint or Google Slides. Suppose you want to create a comparison slide with four columns that each display key statistics from different countries. In a tool like PowerPoint, if it's not already featured as a predefined layout in your PowerPoint template, then you have to build this layout yourself or try to make a design work within SmartArt. This often means a lot of time spent manually drawing shapes, arranging them, and carefully spacing them to create the layout that you want.

Beautiful.ai takes a different approach. It offers a much wider selection of responsive templates that allow you to choose a layout based on the kind of content that you want to insert, and then automatically adjust for things like different numbers of items. There are pros and cons to this approach. The pros are that it makes it much easier to keep a consistent, professional look across your slide deck and to add content without spending extensive time fiddling with different design options. For most people who don't have visual design experience, the end result is going to look much cleaner and be much easier to build. However, in situations when you do want to work outside of the provided templates or make specific manual adjustments, then the tools available to do so are much more limited. (The need to work outside of these templates often indicates an issue with your slide, such as including too much content onscreen at once. But there are always exceptions to the rule, and Beautiful.ai may struggle with these exceptions.)

Beautiful.ai is a cloud-based tool, and while that makes it easy to access, it also does pose some concern for holding on to your content long term. Many faculty members have large libraries of slides generated over the years, and one of the key advantages of PowerPoint, despite its many limitations, is stability. It's been around forever and is widely supported. Beautiful.ai, being a startup, might be less reliable in the long term.

And because Beautiful.ai is a browser-based tool, you'll need to present from the web. This could pose issues if you're at a venue without an internet connection, and you may lose some of the more polished animations and transitions if you export to other formats like PDF or PowerPoint.

However, it also offers a modernized approach to slide design that has the potential to make creating new slides much more efficient and to make maintenance across a large body of work much more reliable. It's worth looking into if you're building out new content. If you've been frustrated with keeping designs consistent within PowerPoint or Google Slides, we recommend trying it out on a small project. It is paid software, but there's a two-week free trial, so you can evaluate it before committing.

Beautiful.ai is just one of many new presentation tools exploring fresh approaches to content creation. We'll be looking at more of these in future posts.