Slide Decks

Every AI Fundamentals article gets a 16:9 slide deck that Kirupa records a live video over. His webcam sits in a rounded frame on the right side of every slide, and he clicks to the next slide as he talks. The rules on this page came from many rounds of his review on the first four decks, so treat each one as a requirement. The working checklist lives next to the code in tools/slides/README.md. This page explains the same rules with real slides, exported by PowerPoint, the app he records with.

Reference decks

These four decks passed review. Open the closest one in PowerPoint before you build another, and start from its deck script:

• 01 Tokens & Your Bill: NES blue, 45 slides. Article / Deck script
• 02 The Anatomy of a Chat Request: Game Boy green, 36 slides. Article / Deck script
• 03 What Exactly Is an LLM?: lavender, 87 slides. Article / Deck script
• 04 Context Window Limits: Atari sand, 53 slides. Article / Deck script

The toolkit

Each deck is a Python script, tools/slides/decks/<article>.py, that builds ai_fundamentals/slides/<article>.pptx with python-pptx. Every script uses one toolkit, deckkit.py. It draws the house style, picks the theme and smiley, and refuses to save a deck that breaks a rule a machine can check: content inside the webcam frame, text below 4.5:1 contrast, a list line that wraps, a smiley with a heart, or a sentence repeated in the next slide's notes. A deck that saves is ready for review, not finished. After the one-time setup in the README, work in this loop:

• Read the article from start to finish, including its figures.
• Copy the closest script in tools/slides/decks/ and write the new deck.
• Preview with tools/slides/render.sh and look at every contact sheet.
• Fix what you see, rebuild, and repeat.
• Export with tools/slides/pptcheck.sh, look at every PowerPoint contact sheet, and open a full-size PNG for anything doubtful. PowerPoint wraps text slightly differently than LibreOffice, so this step is not optional.

The look

Every slide is 16:9, with Departure Mono for every character and a solid background with no gradients. Pixel accents come from the KIRUPAicons Pixel 24 set, icon/pixel-twemoji-24/png. Use them generously but meaningfully: every icon matches what its row or slide is about. A bread icon belongs next to bread, not next to a pricing rule.

The webcam frame

Kirupa's live video sits in the rounded frame on the right. Nothing important goes inside it: no text, chart, callout, or part of a widget. save() fails if any content reaches into the frame. The only things allowed to overlap it are two decorative icons on its top and bottom corners. They straddle the corners, partly hidden by the video but still recognizable. The same layout in two decks shows the split:

Themes

Each deck wears one tasteful 8-bit palette: lavender, Game Boy green, Commodore 64, NES, terminal, or Atari. start_deck() picks it from the article's place in ai_fundamentals/articles.json, so neighboring decks never share a color family, and the reviewed decks are pinned in PINNED_THEME. Keep it classy, not in-your-face. Never use pink, and never put yellow on pink. A theme changes colors only; the layout, font, and icons stay the same.

The title slide

The intro slide has the AI FUNDAMENTALS tag, the title, a one-line subtitle, and Kirupa's name tag, aligned with the tag above it. The name tag starts with a happy Pixel smiley that changes from deck to deck and never has a heart, so no heart eyes and no hearts of any kind. The toolkit enforces both, and PINNED_SMILEY keeps the smiley Kirupa approved for each reviewed deck:

Legibility first

Legibility is P0. Creativity is welcome, but never at the cost of reading a word, number, or icon, and save() fails if any text has less than 4.5:1 contrast with what is behind it. Keep the text short: a slide supports what Kirupa says; it doesn't replace it. Titles stay on one line, and long ones shrink. List lines never wrap, so shorten the wording instead; list_slide() refuses lines that won't fit. Line spacing is 1.1: dense, but a highlighted line never touches the line above or below it.

Punch slides

A punch slide (punch()) puts one big idea on a bold, solid color with no icons. The text is as large as fits, broken into evenly filled lines. Never strand a short word like "the" or "sends" alone on a line, even if the font has to get smaller. If a punch slide looks empty, make the text bigger or say more. A text block that is the only thing on a slide is vertically centered on the webcam frame's midline:

Highlights

A highlight is a solid band behind the words (HL, or {"hl": ..., "color": ...} on punch slides). Only the final period of a standalone sentence stays outside it. Commas, periods, and other punctuation inside a highlighted run of phrases are highlighted too, so "patterns," is one highlight rather than "patterns" followed by a bare comma. Put the punctuation in the highlighted run and the toolkit does the rest. Padding spaces never get highlighted, and a highlighted phrase stays together on one line:

Icons and text

An icon and its text share one vertical center. Never let text ride high or low next to its icon. Check this by eye in the PowerPoint export, not just by measurement: text can look high even when its box is centered. Vertically stacked items need a visible gap between items that is clearly larger than the gap inside an item, such as a name and its description. Shrink the text before you crowd the items. Leave real breathing room under the title; the first row starts at TOP:

Two columns

Two side-by-side lists (two_columns()) give each column a strong header band and separate the columns with a vertical divider. The items are clearly smaller than the headers, so the categories read first. When the items are read aloud, the columns build like any other list:

Chat widgets

When the article shows an exchange, redraw it with a chat widget (widget()) that matches the article's figures: the same corner radius at the top and bottom, the bot's avatar left of its bubbles, the customer's avatar right of theirs, and the input row fully inside the widget. Pre-break bubble text into lines of about 28 characters. The running example, like Biscuit, the Crumb & Co. help desk bot, gets a meet slide and a widget early in the deck:

Charts

Charts redraw the article's data in the deck's colors. Number-heavy slides use the real numbers from the article. Labels sit outside the bars, legends are readable, and limit lines are labeled. Never label figures as made up or illustrative on a slide; the talk track can mention it when it matters:

Callouts

A callout, like "5× the price!" or "She's allergic!", arrives on its own copy of the slide at the moment the talk track reaches it. It is never on the slide from the start. It never covers the thing it points at, never reaches into the webcam frame, and never sits on top of chart bars or labels:

A multi-step process (cumulative()) starts with step 1 on its own slide, and each slide adds the next step. Everything already on the slide stays where it was:

Speaker notes

Every slide has speaker notes, written to be read straight through as one natural script in Kirupa's voice: friendly, casual, and concrete, with the running example carrying the story. Build slides continue the story. They never re-read the previous slide's notes, and save() fails if a sentence repeats on the very next slide. Never use a technical term as known. Introduce every concept in plain words before relying on it: token, system prompt, turn, tool, API, parameters, temperature, RAG, and so on. When a deck has several new ingredients, give a high-level overview slide before going into each one. Repetition is welcome for the one detail the video most wants remembered, as long as the notes say so, like "you'll hear me repeat it" on the punch slide above. Keep facts, numbers, names, and dates exactly as the article states them, and say "at the time of writing" where the article does.

Deck structure

This order works:

• The title slide.
• The running example: meet the bot, and show it in a chat widget when the article has an exchange.
• A punch slide with the one big idea.
• Concepts introduced in plain words, then built up step by step.
• Examples and visuals from the article, redrawn in the deck's style.
• What it means for what we build, as a spotlighted list.
• A closing punch slide that restates the key detail.
• Keep Learning, the call to action.

The last slides show kirupa.com, forum.kirupa.com, and @kirupa on Twitter in full, then spotlight each link in turn (keep_learning()). Don't end with a "Next up" slide, because the video order changes as content is added:

• Every contact sheet is reviewed, with full-size PNGs opened for anything doubtful.
• Nothing important is inside the webcam frame. Only the two corner icons overlap it.
• Every icon is centered on its text by eye and matches what its row is about.
• Punch slides are full, with evenly filled lines and no stranded short word.
• Highlights include inner punctuation and leave out a standalone sentence's final period.
• Each callout has its own slide and stays clear of its target, chart bars, labels, and the frame.
• Lists read aloud build one item per click, and processes build step by step.
• The notes read straight through, introduce every term in plain words, and never repeat the previous slide.
• Numbers match the article and are never labeled as made up or illustrative.
• The title slide has a happy smiley with no heart, and the deck ends with the call-to-action build.