Build a presentation by pasting JSON

Paste a JSON document that describes each slide (what kind it is, what it says and how it looks), and Magpie creates the whole deck, laid out and ready to edit.

There are two ways in:

• On Create presentation, choose Paste JSON as the starting point. The document builds a new deck.
• In the editor of a deck you already have, More → Import JSON replaces every slide in the draft with the document's, when you select Replace the slides. A deck you have already published keeps showing its published version until you publish again.

Select Copy the prompt in either import box to copy this format with instructions, paste it into an AI chat you use, describe the deck you want, and paste its answer back into the box.

You describe slides, not positions. Each slide names a layout and supplies its words; Magpie places them and sizes the text to fit. The theme sets the look: a style chooses fonts, colours and the shapes that decorate each kind of slide, and any colour or font you give replaces the style's. Where the layouts do not draw what you want, a slide can place its own text, shapes and lines as elements.

Once the deck exists, every slide is an ordinary slide: move, resize, retype and delete anything on it in the editor, and change its fonts, colours, gradients, opacity and rotation with Edit selected. There, a gradient's start and end colours can be changed; any colours between them stay as imported. Background in the editor replaces a slide's gradient with the colour you choose.

The whole document is checked before anything is saved: if any part of it does not fit the format below, nothing is created or replaced, and the message names the slide and the field that caused it.

The document

{
  "title": "Q3 review",
  "theme": { "style": "creative", "accent": "#ff5a5f" },
  "slides": []
}

A colour is a hex colour such as #d04838 or #f60. Wherever a colour can be a gradient, the field says so; see Gradients.

The theme

Every field of the theme is optional.

If you choose a dark background and no text colour, the words are set in a light colour that can be read on it, and the other way round. A slide with its own background and no colors is treated the same way, and so is a style's coloured title or section slide.

Styles

Fonts

A font is written by its name: Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, Montserrat, Poppins, DM Sans, Work Sans, Nunito, Space Grotesk, IBM Plex Sans, Source Sans 3, Oswald, Raleway, Playfair Display, Merriweather, Lora, Source Serif 4, IBM Plex Mono, JetBrains Mono, Schibsted Grotesk, Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Times New Roman or Courier New. The PDF from the mobile app sets text in a standard font of the same kind (serif, sans-serif or monospaced).

Gradients

A slide's or the theme's background, and a shape's fill, can be a gradient in place of a colour:

{ "type": "linear", "angle": 135, "stops": ["#ff5f6d", "#ffc371"] }

Slides

Every slide takes a layout and the fields that layout shows; a slide without a layout is a text slide. Every layout takes eyebrow, heading and subheading. A field that belongs to another layout is refused, and so is a field that is not listed below.

Magpie sets each layout's words at the size that fits: long headings and long lists are set smaller.

Elements

elements places text, shapes and lines where you choose, on top of what the slide's layout draws, or behind it with "behind": true. A blank slide is made of elements alone. Use a layout for a slide's words where one fits, because a layout sizes its words to fit and an element keeps the size you give it.

A slide is 1,600 wide and 900 high. Positions are measured from its top left corner in the same units, and so are sizes and text sizes. An element may start off the slide or run past its edge, and the part outside is cut off, which is how a circle bleeds off a corner. A slide can have up to 60 elements in elements, and up to 100 in all, counting what its layout and style draw.

Every element takes type (text, shape or line, required), opacity (from 0, invisible, to 1, solid, the default) and behind. Text and shapes also take x, y, w and h (required: the top left corner, the width and the height) and rotation (degrees clockwise about the element's centre).

A line is drawn from one point to another, so it can run at any angle. It takes no x, y, w, h or rotation.

A complete example

{
  "title": "Q3 at Ridgeway Cycles",
  "theme": {
    "style": "creative",
    "accent": "#ff5a5f",
    "palette": ["#ff5a5f", "#ffb400", "#00a699", "#7b61ff"]
  },
  "slides": [
    { "layout": "title", "eyebrow": "Quarterly review", "heading": "Q3 at Ridgeway Cycles", "subheading": "Sales, the workshop and what comes next" },
    { "layout": "agenda", "heading": "Today", "items": ["Where we got to", "What shipped", "The plan for Q4"] },
    {
      "layout": "stats",
      "heading": "The quarter in numbers",
      "stats": [
        { "value": "£412k", "label": "revenue, up 18% on Q2" },
        { "value": "1,240", "label": "bikes serviced" },
        { "value": "4.8", "label": "average review" }
      ]
    },
    {
      "layout": "cards",
      "heading": "What shipped",
      "cards": [
        { "eyebrow": "Workshop", "heading": "Book a repair online", "body": "Bookings now fill the workshop four days a week." },
        { "heading": "Next-day parts", "body": "Two new suppliers deliver the next working day." },
        { "heading": "Gift cards", "body": "Sold online and in the shop since August." }
      ],
      "notes": "Spend the most time on online booking: it is the one they asked about last quarter."
    },
    { "layout": "section", "eyebrow": "Part two", "heading": "What comes next" },
    {
      "layout": "timeline",
      "heading": "The plan for Q4",
      "steps": [
        { "label": "October", "heading": "Calendar sync" },
        { "label": "November", "heading": "App beta", "body": "Twenty customers test it." },
        { "label": "December", "heading": "Launch" }
      ]
    },
    { "layout": "split", "side": "right", "heading": "What moved to Q4", "bullets": ["The mobile app", "Loyalty points"] },
    { "layout": "quote", "quote": "Booking a service took me a minute.", "attribution": "A customer, September" },
    {
      "layout": "blank",
      "background": { "type": "linear", "angle": 135, "stops": ["#ff5a5f", "#ffb400"] },
      "elements": [
        { "type": "shape", "shape": "ellipse", "x": 1050, "y": -200, "w": 700, "h": 700, "fill": "#ffffff", "opacity": 0.2, "behind": true },
        { "type": "text", "x": 130, "y": 320, "w": 1000, "h": 200, "text": "Thank you", "fontSize": 150, "font": "Playfair Display", "weight": 700, "italic": true, "color": "#ffffff" },
        { "type": "line", "x1": 136, "y1": 560, "x2": 700, "y2": 560, "color": "#ffffff", "strokeWidth": 6, "dash": "dotted" }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

If an import is rejected for a reason you can't work out, Contact support.