In February of 2018, we launched Beautiful.ai with the idea that there was a better way to build beautiful presentations than having to start from the traditional PowerPoint blank slide. We realized that by incorporating design rules and the best practices of information design, we could build a product that made it dramatically quicker and easier for non-designers to create compelling and great looking slides. Over the past few years, we’ve grown Beautiful.ai to nearly a million users in over 190 countries including Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, SMBs, entire classrooms, and individuals— all looking for a better way to communicate their ideas visually. And while we still fully believe that Beautiful.ai’s future lies in our smart technology to automate the design process, we’ve recognized that for some users, the limitations and constraints of our Smart Slides could occasionally be frustrating or hard to learn— especially when they want to do things that our slides might prevent.
So, today we are releasing Classic Slides for Beautiful.ai. Classic Slides give you unlimited flexibility to design your slides as you see fit with a more familiar authoring canvas. You can add shapes, pick any color or font, draw paths, and position things wherever you’d like. You can start from a blank canvas if you want or, if you’re working with a Smart Slide and you just want to customize it a bit further, you can break the design AI and convert it to a classic slide with one click. If you’ve got a bunch of existing slides in PowerPoint, you can now import them into Beautiful.ai as Classic Slides to use side-by-side with your Smart Slides. And, of course, we couldn’t resist evolving the traditional authoring experience in some super cool directions like multi-block text styling, widgets for displaying code and equations, our library of device image frames, and powerful table and chart components.
Still, it wasn’t an easy decision for us to release Classic Slides into Beautiful.ai since in many ways it goes against what our core mission is— creating beautiful slides for you. We still believe that our design AI is what differentiates us from the other presentation maker tools available and we hope you’ll continue to use our Smart Slides most of the time— but now we’ve got an escape valve for you whenever you need to go a little bit further or build something that we might not have a template for just yet.
Sometimes you need total control of a slide. Now you have it. Use Classic Slides for one-off designs, and Smart Slides for everything else. Log in today to see the updates!
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