The analog deck method

Presentations,
made by hand.

No PowerPoint, no Canva, no AI. You design it on paper and share it live, in the room or on any video call.

If you can write, you can Handslide.
See why you don't need to draw.

Materiali sul tavolo: cartoncini colorati e pennarelli

Bozza di una slide disegnata a mano su carta

Partecipanti al lavoro durante il workshop Handslide

The method

The slide deck you know, on paper.

Handslide is a method for designing and delivering presentations entirely on paper. Covers, headings, bullet lists, highlights, reveals, transitions: everything you'd find in a digital deck, built piece by piece with your hands.

Point a phone at your desk from a tripod and it becomes a camera feed. You can present using a projector in a meeting room or on Zoom, Teams and Meet.

What paper does that software can't

A sheet of paper has a fixed size, no undo button and no template. Those limits change the way you build a presentation, and the way your audience takes it in.

The process

Design first, execute later.

Digital slides tempt you to write and design at the same time: you open a template and start filling boxes. Handslide keeps the two apart. First a rough draft on scrap paper, where you only work out what each slide says and in what order. Then the final version, where you only work on how it looks.

Your brain

Your hands think with you.

Writing by hand works your brain differently from typing. Neuroscience research shows it activates much wider brain networks, including those linked to memory and learning. Build your deck by hand and you get to know your content while you make it.

Your audience

People remember what they watch being made.

Pull away a flap to reveal the next point, crumple a page to kill a bad idea: people watch your hands instead of a screen. No animation preset gets you that kind of attention.

For people who need a room to actually listen.

Freelancers & professionals who present

In pitches and client calls, most decks look like they came from the same template. A handmade one gets remembered, and it shows how you work before you've said a word.

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Trainers, facilitators & learning designers

In the classroom, a handmade deck changes the energy. It feels more human, and participants often lean in and stay with you longer.

And if you work with teams, it goes further. Handslide gives them a simple way to do on a call what a quick sketch on a flipchart does in a room: make a complex problem visible, so everyone looks at the same thing and builds a shared understanding around it.

Teams & companies

For the meetings that have to land: a project kickoff, a strategy reveal, an all-hands, a pitch to leadership, an offsite. A handmade deck has something a projected one doesn't: choreography. Points appear when you reveal them and your hands set the pace. People put their phones down and follow the story.

How it works

Build your own template

In most presentation tools, the template does the work for you. Handslide gives you the same building blocks (titles, lists, reveals, emphasis) and you turn them into a visual system of your own, one you can reuse from deck to deck.

Structure
Cover, section breaks, closing slide.

Text hierarchy
Headings, body text, quotes, key numbers.

Lists & reveals
Paper flaps you remove as you speak.

Emphasis
Highlights, scale contrast, white space.

Visuals
Drawn, cut out, or collaged.

Live interaction
Post-its added in real time, physical transitions.

The set
The board, the frame, the objects on the table.

The rough draft
The step most people skip. It's where the deck actually gets designed.

You don't need to know how to draw

Handwriting is enough. Icons are optional: draw them, cut them out of a magazine or print them. Paper and a pen will get you through the whole method.

The setup

Analog to make. Digital to share.

A smartphone on a tripod looks down at your paper, and a webcam app turns it into an external camera for your computer. On a call, you share that camera. In a room, you project it.

Either way, what people see on screen is your hand, live, working on the page: lifting a flap, pointing at the word that matters. Paper and a real hand on a digital screen feel like a small bit of magic, and they make the whole presentation feel human.

Una presentatrice al tavolo con fogli e telefono su treppiede, la slide di carta proiettata alle spalle

Your kit: paper, markers, a phone, a tripod. That's it.

Behind Handslide

I'm Ivano Masiero, a learning designer, trainer and facilitator. I work with teams and organisations to design learning experiences that matter, weaving together Lean, Agile and Design Thinking. In 2020 I co-founded Kitto, a learning design studio.

Handslide started during the pandemic, when I had to rethink training for online sessions and didn't want «online» to mean a shared screen full of bullet points. I've been shaping it into a method ever since.

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