Some eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I played around with a new visualization tool in yesterday’s email.

It’s a free tool in beta right now called Napkin.ai.

(Note: I am not affiliated with Napkin - I just saw this YouTube video from Helena Liu about it last month.)

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The premise is simple:

• Drop-in your text
• Napkin provides 10-20 visual options depicting that text, nearly instantly
• Customize and edit as you wish
• Export as image

The visual in yesterday’s email (above) took me literally 10 seconds to generate, plus ~60 seconds to customize and export. Pretty cool.

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Wes's warning label:

Before going any further, I want to be clear that I believe tools like Napkin are a complement, not a substitute for the reflective process of synthesizing your expertise into a signature POV and 'intellectual headshot'. (See: 💡 GenAI - The tempting glue trap)

Similarly, a professional designer’s visuals will continue to provide you a more custom and higher-quality product over an AI-generated set.

That said, I think Napkin provides an easy-to-use option for AI-assisted framework whiteboarding and/or instant visuals in a pinch.

And as mentioned, it’s free (for now).

Functionality:

I’ve been playing around with it for a couple weeks, and honestly, it’s got an element of magic and delight to it:

• Frameworks/templates are auto-populated based on your pasted-in written content in seconds
• Icons are auto-selected based on your context, with the ability to swap them out as you wish
• ‘Draft with AI’ mode will even generate the source content itself, then make the visual from it (be careful - very hallucinatory)

Limitations:

That said, it certainly has its shortcomings:

• It populates the same stock templates each time regardless of your topic/content
• Some of the outputs are very much force-fits and/or nonsensical
• The designs look a bit elementary, early-00’s-ish

My take:

All told, give it a spin if you’re in a pinch for a one-off graphic to throw into a proposal.

Or even better, use it to play around with a draft visual of a signature framework or POV.

But be warned - if Napkin catches on, don’t be surprised when everyone’s visuals start to look eerily similar. 👯

In other words, keep your graphic designer close by.

💡

-Wes

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P.S. How's Q1 looking? Is 2025 the year to level up your services and raise your rates?
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