Wjall

for making visual sense of your walls of research

Minimal presentations made from what you're already collecting and organizing. Point Wjall at an are.na channel and it plays as a slideshow, reading the channel fresh each time it opens. Add or rearrange blocks on are.na and the show follows. Nothing to rebuild in Keynote, Figma or InDesign.

What are you making?

Paste the channel's link or just its name. Public and closed channels work. Private channels don't yet: they need an are.na login, which Wjall can't do so far.

Adjust
Order
Who moves it forward?
Text and captions

Good slideshow habits

Wjall is built to push you toward them.

  • Show us images. The pictures carry the talk.
  • Text is for you. A word or a line to move you forward and remind you what to talk about.
  • The slides aren't the script. If people are reading your presentation, they aren't listening to it.

Arranging a channel

The show runs in the channel's order on are.na, top-left first. Drag blocks to reorder. The pattern is text, image, text, image. Three kinds of slide come out of it:

  • Text, then an image: the text sits over that image.
  • An image with no text before it: the image alone.
  • Text with no image after it: the text alone. Use it for a title, a section break or a closing question.

A last line starting with a dash (— Galen Cranz) becomes the attribution. Image titles show as captions, unless they're just filenames. Sub-channels are skipped.

Small authoring tips

  • Captions come from block titles. Give an image a title on are.na and it shows in the bottom-left corner. Filenames are hidden.
  • Block descriptions are saved for speaker notes, but don't show anywhere yet.
  • Long quotes over tall images cover most of the picture. Keep text short in general, but especially over portrait photos.
  • If a slide needs a lot of text, give it a slide of its own. Put it after an image and before the next text-and-image pair: image, long text, text, image. Then it will just be text.

During the show

→ or space
next slide
←
previous slide
f
full screen (Esc leaves it)
Home / End
first or last slide

Clickers work too. Click or tap the right side of the screen to go forward, the left side to go back. On a timer, space pauses instead. Move the mouse to see the slide count and these keys in the bottom-left corner.