One slide, due tomorrow

You need one illustration for a slide by tomorrow morning, and there is no designer and no budget. You type a request into an image generator. Thirty seconds later you have something that looks professional. Then you look closer.

In a lab it's a postdoc preparing a group-meeting talk. She asked for a schematic of her assay: sample, lysis, ELISA, plate reader. The picture is beautiful. It has five steps instead of four, one label reads "ELISSA", and the arrow between the last two steps points backwards.

In a company it's a marketing assistant who needs a header image for the customer newsletter and a one-minute narrated clip for the website. The image is fine. The voice sounds good too, until she reads the small print of the free plan she used: no commercial use.

A generator is very good at how something looks and unreliable at exactly what it says. And the tool that made the file doesn't decide whether you may use it. This book shows you how to split the work so each part goes to the tool that does it well, and how to label the result. You are at Level 1 User: the asset is for your own talk or your own draft, so a failed attempt costs you only time.

After this you can

  • Pick the right kind of tool for an image, a voice-over, a short video or a transcript.
  • Write an image prompt with a subject, a style, a composition and exclusions, and fix a weak result by changing one element.
  • Keep exact text, labels and structure in an editor instead of asking the generator to draw them.
  • Check whether your plan allows your use, and add an AI label, alt text or captions to the finished file.

Before you start

  • Books: T01-L01 · From Idea to Working Result: The Four-Quadrant Method for the four-quadrant method this book applies to one media asset.
  • An image generator. This book uses Gemini with a free Google account. Its images are good, it handles styles well, and every image carries a watermark that tells people AI made it. If your organisation provides ChatGPT or Adobe Firefly, use that instead.
  • Clipchamp, Microsoft's free video editor, in the browser at app.clipchamp.com with a personal Microsoft account. It turns a script into a voice-over, adds captions and exports the clip, all in one place.
  • Your slide program: PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides.
  • About 45 minutes: 13 to read, about 30 to do.