AI Cleaned Up My Messy Ideas with Slick Visuals
- Kevin Not-A-Robot
- Mar 19
- 3 min read
034 - A REVIEW of AI data and infographic visual generator, Napkin
The Pitch
Napkin turns your text into visuals, so sharing your ideas is quick and effective.
Suppose you've ever worked in a position where you created pitch or presentation decks. In that case, you know the struggles of creating visuals that simplify and illustrate your talking points. Generative AI has removed the tedium and sometimes creative block that happens while working on a deck. I just wished it had come sooner during my career in advertising, where I constantly worked on presentation and pitch decks!
The Experience
Getting Started With Napkin
Napkin is in beta and only available for desktop web browsers as of this review. Signing up is your standard process and quick. Requiring only your email and nothing else.
Once logged in, you are greeted with two options, create a draft with AI or start a blank document. Having both options is great, but the real benefit of using Napkin is starting things off with a draft using their generative AI.
By choosing "draft with AI," you simply enter a prompt on whatever topic you want to create a presentation. As with all AI prompting, the more detailed and clear your prompt, the better results you'll get from that first draft.
Assessing Napkin's Usability
Navigating Napkin is a textbook example of keeping things minimal at best. Most features are accessible from contextual navigation buttons that do a solid job of reducing needless UI clutter.
Tucked away in a collapsable side tray, you'll find access to all your previous working "napkins" and the option to create a new one. On permanent display is access to your graphic styles, share, document settings, and profile.
The text and imagery within your document (what they refer to as a napkin) can be modified, including fonts, colors, size, etc. Options to do so are displayed contextually as you hover over or select elements in the napkin.
Its minimal UI approach nicely frees up the viewing areas, allowing you to focus on the contents of your napkin. It also makes it clear and easy to adjust and change elements throughout.
Napkin's Features
Napkin's standout feature is its ability to turn anything you've written into nice vector-based visual diagrams. Napkin can also write for you, but I'll get to that in a bit.
The app pulls from a library of pre-generated visuals. It populates them with relevant information based on your napkin's topic. Although the visuals are from a stock library, you can adjust their aspects, such as colors, fonts, and rendering style. That flexibility helps. Each of your visuals can be downloaded and used in other applications.
For my review, I used the app to create a mind map for an educational math game. Napkin developed a good outline detailing audience demographics, math subjects, and gameplay features—everything one would need to know before developing a game.
From here, I used their AI model to convert the text blocks into visuals that told a more engaging story about the idea in each section of the outline.
These were impressive, but I would like to see more options for the visuals. Although you can change some aspects, the visual style is similar across your options, which can make things a little tricky if your presentation has a more unique design direction.
The Verdict
Why Should You Care
As I mentioned at the start, if you find yourself at the helm of creating presentation decks (a deck master), then Napkin is an instrumental tool in getting your thoughts down on each deck slide.
For anyone else, the app can elevate your game when conveying or illustrating ideas quickly and visually, so it is worth a try. And it's free!
Learning Curve:
Very Easy
Easy
Moderate
Difficult
Very Difficult
Napkin Facts:
Free to sign up
Currently in beta as of review
Upload your own images to your Napkins
Export Napkin generated visuals to PNG, SVG and PDF