For 25 years I’ve watched the same pattern: almost everyone in the office uses PowerPoint. Almost no one enjoys making slides with it.
Slide design eats hours. Aligning grids, checking colors, reinventing components. The result still doesn’t look like what McKinsey produces from the same material. The knowledge isn’t in the tool. It’s in the theory behind it: Tufte, design systems, brand tokens, hierarchy, whitespace.
A few colleagues have been asking me for years: “How do you actually build this?” The honest answer is undramatic. Read a lot, tried a lot, threw a lot away. Over two decades, an intuition builds up that’s hard to hand over. It lives in the practice, not in the book.
So I finally cast it in code. Feinschliff (German for fine polish). A brand-pluggable design system for Claude Code. You write a DESIGN.md or supply HTML, the plugin builds a brand-compliant .pptx from it. Topical images come in automatically from Unsplash. That used to be one of the most annoying steps.
One DSL grammar, three output modalities. /deck renders slides as .pptx. /excalidraw builds architecture diagrams as an editable .excalidraw file plus PNG. /svg writes data visualizations and infographics that don’t fit Excalidraw. All three resolve colors and typography through the same tokens.json. Switch the brand pack, all three outputs switch with it.
Each brand ships 30+ baked single-slide templates: KPI grid, 2×2 matrix, waterfall, executive summary, and the rest of the familiar grammar. The renderer fills them and addresses placeholders by idx. Doesn’t sound exciting. Holds in production.
Twelve brand packs come in the box, including Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox, Solarized, and the Feinschliff variants. A fourteen-class verify pass (five visual, nine rhetorical) checks every deck before it ships. A slide ships only when all fourteen are green.
/plugin marketplace add marsmike/feinschliff
/deck "Q1 update: 12 launches, 3 customers, $4.2M ARR"
A few minutes later: slides with the design principles already baked in. McKinsey-grade, without the McKinsey effort. The launch deck for this article was rendered by the plugin itself. The tool made its own opening act.
In Smalltalk we started encapsulating knowledge as components 30 years ago. This is the same principle. Only now the LLM does the application.
Open source, MIT: github.com/marsmike/feinschliff. Two more plugins are in development: Imagine for image generation through the Feinschliff brand layer, and Remotion for programmatic video, the same pipeline applied to motion. Both follow the same brand-pluggable model. Star it if it helps.