Keynote vs. Powerpoint, and why Ludus is better.

There’s no denying it. If you work for a start-up or own a small business, you know that presentations are crucial to your company’s growth. Great presentations, aside from being able to carry a well-constructed narrative, allow for your brand to really stick in the minds of your audience. Especially if you’re the one creating these presentations, whether you’re an entrepreneur or a designer, you want to be able to exercise as much creativity as possible to get your points across and make people remember you.

I feel the same way.

At known, I’m no stranger to creating presentations and deck templates for many of our start-up clients. Having used both Keynote and Powerpoint applications to create memorable and dynamic brand presences, I was surprised when I began reading articles about in-browser applications within the past year. Aside from Google Slides, which is basically a more stripped-down Powerpoint, I discovered an app called Ludus which boasted “limitless creativity” from the get go.

After having used it for the past few months, Ludus has replaced both Keynote and Powerpoint as my presentation app of choice. It’s leaner, meaner, and if used right, can make your presentation downright epic. Here are my top 5 reasons why Ludus kicks the crap out of ye olde Keynote and Powerpoint:

Works on both PC and Mac

As a long-time Mac user, it can be very challenging to create something for the other platform, especially when there are so many things that may/may not work from Mac to PC. Ludus being a web-based tool means it’s cross-platform. I can design on my Mac at work, go home and steal my girlfriend’s PC, and work on it there without any problems at all. And I won’t have to worry about some features not being compatible for whichever type of computer. Ludus does a great job in creating a seamless, clean experience for both Mac and PC users.

 

Any Fonts You Want. Really.

As a brand designer, I’m pretty particular about the fonts I’m able to use across marketing materials. With that said, I’ve always cringed at the thought of having to use a default font for Powerpoint decks. For the longest time it was what made sense. Keynote was a bit more liberal with font usage, you would just have to send the packaged fonts to whomever needed them. Embedding fonts? Practically impossible for either.

With Ludus, you can either use the entire Google Fonts library, or you can do what I do, and click+drag your TTF font files into the browser. Ludus will render them into “web-fonts,” making them usable for the presentation. Hate defaulting to Calibri all the time? Me too. Is packaging fonts a necessary evil? I agree. Click and drag your fonts into Ludus, and then forget about it.

…Which leads me to my next reason.

 

No More File-Size Worries

Powerpoint has terrible compression features, in fact, it’s the worst I’ve ever seen. You literally have to compress everything to the lowest dpi possible (96), and even then the file size could still be way too big to even email. Especially when you’re dealing with nice hi-res photos and graphics, you’ll have little-no chance of getting this to your client or team-mate if it’s at the wrong size. Same with Keynote as well.

With Ludus, you just send a link.

Yup. You just send a link, and that person will have literally EVERYTHING. No worries, need to embed images or fonts, no compression woes. Everything your collaborators will need is in a single link.

Oh, and speaking of collaborators…

Collaborate on your Presentations

For some of the things I mentioned above, collaborating on Powerpoint and Keynote presentations was practically impossible. The closest thing to either is Google Slides and iCloud, and even then those are still difficult to use for various reasons. Keynote on iCloud has abbreviated features compared to its desktop app, and Google Slides just doesn’t have the basic features that designers need. Ludus allows for the same collaborating experience that Google Slides has, but with all the features the app can offer. Simply perfect.

 

Images and Video Handling & Customization

This final reason for me is the creme de la creme.

The team at Ludus truly crafted this platform to be a creative presentation super-app. In Ludus, not only can you copy and paste imagery and videos into your presentation, but you can get even more creative with them with blending modes and other visual treatments. You can bring in videos from either Youtube or Vimeo which again, since it’s a web-platform, you don’t have to worry about file size—let alone if you customize it a bit more. Ludus also makes it very easy to gain access to icons from sites like The Noun Project, or photos from Unsplash. You can even gain access to the finest cat GIFs from GIPHY.

At the end of the day, Keynote and Powerpoint are still the norm and will need to be used. But denying that the needs for collaboration and better visual features exist is just foolish. Ludus is the one platform to really understand those needs and act upon them, and I hope you’ll see it too.

…Did I mention it’s free?