![]() So you don’t have to worry about whether highlighting a portion of text will cause confusion over whether that emphasis means the text should be deleted or if it’s something that must be read. When you only have a few ways to emphasize something - bold, italics, headings, etc. - it’s suddenly less ambiguous and more obvious what the hierarchy of emphasis is. ![]() Instead, you’re free to think about what you’re actually saying. When you open a Paper doc, you don’t have to start making decisions about design and formatting. We want to help you focus on the substance before you worry about the style. But if you start with an outline, build a long-form narrative, then use that narrative to build complementary slides, you end up with something closer to what cognitive psychologists would recommend: simple slides that are light on words, without a ton of bullet points.įocus on how ideas are organized, not how they look Withĭropbox Paper, we want to turn the paradigm on its head. If you think too much about the presentation of your content, you’ll focus on the presentation to your detriment. If you start with a bunch of empty slides that need to be filled until they contain everything you need to say, you end up with walls of text and convoluted, hard-to-follow thoughts. That’s why we think it’s time to stop constraining things by design convention from the outset. Those are all decisions that should be made at the end, after you’ve developed your narrative. You don’t know what your content will be until you have an outline. You don’t know what theme you want until you have your content. When you open up a presentation deck, it asks “What theme do you want?” and “What title do you want?” But you won’t know what the title is going to be until you’ve decided what you want to say. ![]() Why do so many tools force people to start by making formatting decisions instead of letting them focus on the flow of their ideas? When you create a new presentation deck, you shouldn’t have to choose the aspect ratio before you even know what you’re going to project it onto. But I’ve watched countless people start making presentations, and without fail, they’ll fiddle with their title slide for far too long before they even know what they’re going to talk about. In a world where many people have never even laid eyes on a carousel slide projector, why would new software need to be tethered to old conventions?īegin with your ideas, not the format of your presentation The point of a presentation is to tell a story. So a viewer is likely viewing your deck on different screens with different aspect ratios. But today, devices come in all different shapes and sizes. For example, presentation software followed the formatting of traditional projectors that used 35mm slides. But how many people need that anymore? Most of the attempts to move this technology forward just port it along to the next medium, to the web, to mobile devices. ![]() Most of them were fundamentally designed to make documents that print on an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper. The evolution of collaborative co-editing tools For decades, people have become accustomed to using editing tools that are optimized for the wrong tasks. That’s why I think it’s time to rebuild collaboration from the idea up. Sometimes, the tools themselves are actually an obstacle to the creative process. What I’ve found is that few solutions are in sync with the way people create, or the way teams collaborate. As part of the team at Dropbox, I’ve been working on ways to help people develop ideas together, even when they’re on opposite sides of the world. Since my days as the co-founder of Presentate, I’ve been asking why so many collaboration tools get in the way of creating great content. They’re not setting you up for success, because they aren’t always optimized for the right things. It isn’t your lack of imagination that’s the problem, though. But confronting a blank space can feel daunting. Creating something out of nothing is a beautiful challenge.
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