Working in consulting, I’ve built (and still do) a lot of slides. One of the most time consuming steps when building slides for me was designing and creating the visuals to replace boring bullet points and lengthy paragraphs. Even with a brilliant idea on how to ‘visualize’ it, I’ve hit a wall plenty of times for not having the right ‘icons’ or ‘images’ to make it come to life. Well all of this just got easier. Like a lot easier.

In this post, I want to introduce you to napkin.ai. The tool that just made my creating process dramatically easier and faster. 

So napkin.ai is a relatively new solution that seems to deliver pretty good results. Personally, I’ve tested a few options including Dall.E (OpenAI), Canva, and Copilot but didn’t find any of these to be quite effective in creating PowerPoint style images. They can create cool images, just not presentations. napkin.ai was different in the sense that it could truly aid me in building components of the slide I was struggling to build. 

So here’s an example of what napkin.ai can do. 

First, I provided napkin.ai with this list of bullet points: 

• Summarize Complex Ideas
  Convert dense text—such as blog posts, research summaries, or strategy documents—into flowcharts, mind maps, or timelines to enhance clarity and engagement.

• Create Visuals for Presentations
  Generate diagrams and charts directly from your notes or outlines to enrich slides for meetings, webinars, or investor pitches.

• Enhance Social Media Content
  Design engaging visuals for LinkedIn or Twitter posts, making your content more shareable and digestible.                                                                                 

• Collaborate in Real Time
  Work with team members simultaneously on visuals, utilizing built-in commenting and editing features for efficient feedback and iteration.

• Customize Visuals to Match Branding
  Adjust colors, fonts, and styles to align with your brand identity, ensuring consistency across all visual communications.

• Export in Multiple Formats
  Download visuals as PNG, SVG, PDF, or PPTX files for use in various platforms and presentations.

Once you have the content inserted into a new ‘napkin’, you’ll see a little blue lightning icon on the left. 

When you click on it, napkin will first summarize the text and then provide you with an impressive list of visual options to choose from.

This is the differentiating factor that I was most impressed by when I first tried napkin. The other applications were able to create visuals but weren’t able to summarize the text content nor incorporate the summaries into the visual designs. 

By having these two steps completed automatically, the potential time savings through napkin is more than impressive. Even if I don’t directly use the images as created, I could incorporate the design elements into my slides and simply tweak them slightly. 

From my experiment, the visuals were simple and slick enough to be directly incorporate into a slide deck but you have the option to manually adjust the color scheme, positioning, text, and layout of the generated images directly on napkin’s interface. Furthermore, you can expand on the styles of each design by clicking on the small blue arrow which will give you slightly different renderings of the design. This enables you to manage a certain ‘feel’ of your overall presentation without being slowed down; you can select a fuzzy sketchy style for an informal audience or go with something more polished for a business audience. 

So here are a few examples of what napkin.ai was able to create for me literally in a matter of seconds.

The images are great but if you wanted to create a truly outstanding deck, I’d combine it with another layer of slide building principles to make your presentation ‘flow’ better. You can read about my previous post on slide building here.

At this point, you might be thinking this is all cool but how do I actually get these images into a slide. No worries there, because napkin.ai will allow you to download the created images into 4 different file types; png, svg, pdf, and ppt. That’s right. It’ll actually allow you to download the image into a Microsoft Power Point format so you don’t have to worry about importing and formatting images. 

As of May 2025, napkin.ai seems to be still testing things out, so more exciting features might be coming in the future. But the more exciting about it being so new is that it’s free.

Even the professional version of the system seems to be free at this point so I’d highly encourage you to check it out before they put a price tag on the advance features. I mean, what do we have to lose? More time spent on slide decks? 

This is all I had prepared for today’s content around napkin.ai. I’ll continue to share any novel solutions that can save you time and energy in the coming posts. I hope you found this post to be helpful and if you did, please leave a comment below and follow me on social media!