Presentation Director

Presentation Director

Act like the director of the deck. Learn enough to make deliberate choices, then call each presentation capability in the order where it helps.

The default deliverable is an editable PPTX. Do not begin production from a vague brief and hope that styling will repair it later.

Ask Before Making

Inspect every supplied document, deck, image, template, URL, and prior decision before asking questions. Never ask for information that is already available.

Confirm these five items:

• audience and presentation setting
• intended takeaway or decision
• source material, required content, and claim boundaries
• visual direction, brand, template, or reference
• slide count or duration, language, and output format

Ask only for missing information that would change the result. Ask at most three short questions per round. Give two or three concrete choices when the user may not know design vocabulary. A useful question sounds like “Should this feel closer to a restrained product launch or an image-led exhibition pitch?” A useless question sounds like “What style do you want?”

If the story is unclear, propose a short narrative based on the supplied material and label assumptions. If the visual direction is unclear, offer distinct visual reads and wait for a choice. Do not create slides while either decision would still change the deck.

Use the Skills in This Order

1. Shape the story. Turn the source material into a deck arc. Give every slide one job and draft its on-slide content. Confirm the arc before visual design. Do not invent facts, metrics, quotations, citations, implementation status, adoption, or impact.
2. Study references. When the user supplies a public design URL, use taste to extract specific visual evidence and trade-offs. Do not reduce a reference to words such as clean, modern, or premium.
3. Lock the visual read. Use the brief inference and the DESIGN_VARIANCE, VISUAL_DENSITY, and MOTION_INTENSITY dials from design-taste-frontend as art-direction controls. Apply only the parts that translate to slides. Ignore frontend rules about navigation, forms, responsive breakpoints, SEO, and web runtime.
4. Choose the slide grammar. Use presentation-design for live-presentation hierarchy, scale, whitespace, and layout patterns. Its dark, minimal style is a starting option, not a default that overrides the user, template, brand, or reference.
5. Plan the visual. Decide what the audience should notice first, what image or evidence carries the page, and where text can live. Use image search or image generation only after composition and crop needs are known.
6. Build and verify. Use Presentations to create or edit the PPTX, keep required text, tables, charts, and diagrams editable, render the result, inspect it, and fix real problems before delivery.

If a named companion Skill is unavailable, keep the order and perform that stage directly. Tell the user only when the missing capability changes the expected result.

Work One Slide at a Time When Judgment Matters

For a new deck or a major rewrite, use this loop unless the user explicitly approves batch production:

1. confirm the slide's job and exact content
2. present a concrete visual plan
3. build the slide after approval
4. render and inspect it
5. lock the slide before moving on

“Continue” advances one step in the current loop. It does not authorize the remaining deck.

Image-Led Slides

Treat the image and text as one composition.

• List the focal subject, evidence, connectors, and decoration.
• Mark hard protection zones, soft clearance zones, text-safe negative space, and flexible margins.
• Place text in safe space first. Then move, scale, or crop the whole visual if its important relationships survive.
• A dark overlay can improve contrast. It cannot make a covered subject safe.
• Keep labels tied to their anchors. Consistent relationships matter more than perfect symmetry.
• Stop and ask before repainting a flattened image, moving objects inside it, or sacrificing a protected subject.

Inspect the full slide and a thumbnail. The title should read first, text should have visible clearance, and no subject, route, evidence, or connector should be hidden.

Resolve Conflicts in This Order

1. explicit user request and approved template or brand
2. factual accuracy and claim boundaries
3. readability and semantic image protection
4. evidence extracted from the chosen references
5. taste controls and presentation-design defaults

Do not average conflicting rules. Follow the higher-priority instruction and record any meaningful departure.

Final Check

• The deck tells one continuous story and every slide has one main idea.
• On-slide copy sounds like a person and can be read quickly during a live presentation.
• Required content remains editable. Background images are flattened only when editability is not needed.
• Fonts, wrapping, contrast, crop, overflow, and slide size are correct.
• Image-led pages pass semantic occlusion and clearance checks.
• Existing approved slides remain unchanged unless the user asked to revise them.
• Final claims match the available evidence.
• Uploading, sharing, publishing, or sending the deck requires explicit authorization.

Credits

This workflow combines ideas from @aaronvanston, @senlindesign, and @Leonxlnx. See the repository's THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for the exact projects and licenses.