Slidebean: Presentations Made Simple

AAll of us, both music professionals and artists, need to present something at times. Creating a presentation may not be a very exciting activity, but if you’re speaking at a music conference or pitching an album, it’s in your best interest to present your work or idea in a professional way. So, what are your options? Keynote? Powerpoint? You can do a lot with those programs, but how many of us enjoy it? And let’s be honest, how many of those presentations that you’ve seen at conferences actually looks good?

For those of us that aren’t graphic designers, it’s not that easy to create something that’s both informative and good-looking. Fortunately, we’re not the only ones with this problem; there’s quite a few apps popping up that offer tools for creating presentations, and Slidebean is one of them. Slidebean wants to simplify presentation creation, but does it succeed in doing so?

A Slidebean presentation consists of three parts: Settings, Content, and Design. It’s in the Content part that you’ll be doing most of your work. The interface is clean, and adding content to your presentation is easy, whether it’s a quote, bullet points or an image. The streamlined structure of the service gives you an overview of your presentation and its content. Slidebean autosaves your presentation, so there’s no need to constantly save.

Another feature is the image uploader, where you can choose to search pictures through 500px, upload a file from your computer, or insert a URL. Embedding videos is not a problem; simply insert a YouTube or Vimeo link and you’re set.

The design of your presentation is based on a selection of different layouts and color palettes. At first, I thought that there were too few layouts to choose from, but once combined with the different colors there are numerous variations. The good thing about Slidebean is that it let’s you focus on one thing at a time: first the content, then the design. This makes for a user friendly, good-looking presentation, even on a smartphone.

Slidebean is useful for anyone wanting to give a presentation, whether you’re a student, teacher, speaker or cult leader (maybe not the last one, but you get the point).

If you want to make your presentation private, be able to download it as a PDF-file, or add a customized color palette, you have to upgrade (for $4.99/month). It might bug some people that the customization options aren’t that many. For example, you can’t change font size or transitions between slides – you’ll need to make due with the available layouts. However, this is only nitpicking; when it comes to creating professional and clutter-free presentations, Slidebean is the way to go.

Oscar Hjelmstedt is a Swedish journalist, student and bass player, with a passion for music Tarantino-flicks.