SWYSIWYG, the Website Tool I Always Wanted
A web page building tool that has the ease of creating presentation slides but for HTML
One of the only reasons I am tied to using a Macbook is that I produce a lot of decks and like Steve Jobs, cannot stand Powerpoint. Jobs had Keynote built for himself and it is a surprisingly elegant and subtle application. At least it used to be, since Jobs died it has degraded and several features such as image blur have disappeared while the app overall has become a bit more complicated.
Despite all this, I find Keynote is the quickest and most efficient way to tell visual stories and presentation decks are on the one hand responsible for some of the most artless media in the world, but on the other, they codify storytelling into something that democratises it, for everyone.
I am a big fan of simple structures and formulas for communication, from minimalist Philip Glass’ music, to John Cooper Clarke’s, punk poetry to Ken Burns’ stills based documentaries, Adam Curtis’ text plus archive footage and music overlay, Jonathan Meades’ beautiful architectural criticism or Lawrence Lessig’s keynote talks, punctuated with words on screen in a distressed typewriter font. All of these are formulaic masterpieces.
The formulaic content model I have been obsessed with for decades has been lists and the perfect list can be profound, such as the best of Desert Island Disks. I have spent my life building lists and list tools, from Oobject to RSS, and created the visual bookmarking concept behind Pinterest, as a wishlist tool, WIsts, and now I’ve taken some of my insights from lists tools to presentations.
I like simple and obvious things that look trivial in hindsight, but which everyone needs. And this is why I have built SWYSIWYG.com, a web page building tool in an era where surely web building tools are a thing of the past and nobody needs another one. But I do, and I have built for myself what I always wanted so that I can merge the world of presentations and PDFs with something that can be hosted on the web and indexed by search engines and parameterized by LLMs.
SWYSIWYG stands for Simple What You See Is What You Get. It is a web page building tool that has the ease of creating presentation slides but for HTML. It breaks two dogmas of responsive web page design that I believe have done incredible damage to web design in the name of supposedly good ‘design’.
Instead of breakpoints and responsive elements of a web page that automatically adjust, there are two versions of every page, one for landscape (desktop) and one for portrait (mobile). You lay out elements on a slide, exactly where you want them and they look exactly the same (WYSIWYG) no matter what. This means that you can actually do professional graphic design where text and images are placed in pixel perfect relationships rather than adjusting and rewrapping unpredictably.
This is much like designing a slide in a deck, except that because this is a web page the slide can be infinitely high and its height automatically adjusts as you drag things onto a canvas.
For the moment, instead of building a publishing back end (I may do at some point), you can export the pages as a zip with separate images or as a single file where images are directly encoded in the html.
To get this to work requires some tricky coordinate mapping as I am breaking the way that things have been designed for more than a decade and it is very much a beta. But I produce a lot of decks for my insights work and with SWYZIWYG I will eat my own dog food till it’s fit for human consumption. If you would like to try it, contact me for a password.