Deck system

A slide library for people who are not designers

The sales team at The Everything Combine writes its own decks every week and needs a library that works without a designer on every slide, so a writer types a text file and gets a finished deck back.

I built a first version of that: twenty one layouts, a plain text format for the content, and a builder that reads the one and writes the other.

What it solves

The standard travels in the file instead of in a review, so the type scale, the grid, the palette and the folio arrive with whatever layout the writer picked. It runs on the Python standard library alone and makes no network request.

How it works

Two equals signs and a layout name start a slide, a word and a colon fill a slot, and indented dashes make a list. The builder writes one self contained HTML file with the fonts and images embedded.

What it refuses

Every layout states its own standard at the top of its file, its slots among them, 118 across the library with 43 required. The builder writes nothing unless the whole deck passes, and a headline too long for its layout comes back as a character count instead of shrinking to fit.

Sales brief

The nine slides below run as spec, one text file built from nine of the twenty one layouts in TEC's identity, with every line taken off tec.ltd. The type scale sits under them the way a writer types it.

Plate, which opens the deck and closes it, with the TEC logo taken from tec.ltd byte for byte

TEC sales brief, the agenda slide — Agenda, numbered, and the layout turns it down on a deck of under six slides

TEC sales brief, the ruled field of five service areas — Ruled field, a note to a cell, since a paragraph belongs on a slide of its own

TEC sales brief, the statement slide — Statement, one sentence at display size, and a sentence needing a comma and a but goes on two slides

TEC sales brief, the section divider — Section divider, a number, a title, and one line of context, kept out of short decks

TEC sales brief, the three stages across — Stages across, three on one rule, the last square blue because the last stage is the one the room buys

TEC sales brief, the quote slide — Quote, one to a deck, and it takes a name under it

TEC sales brief, the stag with the caption beside it — Image with caption, where the words sit beside the picture instead of inside it

TEC sales brief, the closing slide — Closing, which names the next step, since a thank you wastes the last thing on the screen

== data
headline: Type scale in one column
items:
  - Display | 88 px | 100
  - H1 | 50 px | 57
  - H2 | 28 px | 32
  - Body | 21 px | 24
  - Caption | 16 px | 18
  - And the folio | 12 px | 14

Six sizes and no others, as the content file writes them