morkdeck
Generate web slides from Comark
Star
Fork
Watch
morkdeck PRODUCT.md
4.5 kB · 50 lines
Markdown
at main

Product #

Register #

brand

Users #

morkdeck is for enthusiasts who want to give talks: people deep in a special interest — an obscure programming language, a niche of textile history, a half-built personal tool — who have something to share and don't want their thinking interrupted by slide tooling. They write in markdown because that's how they already think. The audience is heterogeneous (conferences, meetups, lectures, internal talks); the author is consistent — a writer first, presenter second.

Three concrete archetypes:

  • The enthusiast. Has been turning an idea over for months and has 40 minutes to share it. Their hours-to-deliverable budget is small; their standards for the deck looking considered are high.
  • The technical speaker. Conference talk, internal engineering deep-dive. Code listings and diagrams matter as much as prose. Wants the deck to read like a respectable engineering essay, not a framework demo.
  • The lecturer / essayist. Academic talk, long-form thinking projected on a screen. Body text matters. Footnotes, citations, and asides aren't second-class.

Product Purpose #

Compress the thoughts-to-presentation pipeline. The author writes markdown and gets a deck that looks like they spent a weekend on visual design — without spending a weekend on visual design. The defaults are the product. Token-level customization exists for the obsessed, but the unconfigured output should already be good enough to ship in front of a paying audience.

Success looks like: an author pastes their notes into a .md, runs deno task build, and the result reads as a coherent, opinionated, modern-editorial presentation. They don't have to think about layout, color, or typography unless they want to.

Brand Personality #

Editorial, literary, generous. Swiss-modernist confidence — the grid is doing the work, the type is doing the work, color punctuates rather than decorates. The deck should feel like a small press book: deliberate, restrained, with one or two moments of typographic boldness that earn their place. Not warm-and-fuzzy; not cold-and-corporate. A confident voice that respects the reader's intelligence.

Three words: editorial, literary, generous.

Anti-references #

Things the default deck should never resemble:

  • Reveal.js / Slidev defaults. The dev-framework slide aesthetic — blue-on-dark, slab serif on monospace, code blocks as hero. Saturated category reflex; anyone who has seen one tech talk has seen this.
  • PowerPoint / Google Slides templates. Bullet hellscapes, stock-template chrome, footers with logos and page numbers, clipart, "modern business" gradients.
  • SaaS-landing aesthetic. Gradient meshes, glassmorphic cards, big-number-small-label hero metrics, identical icon grids. The deck is not a marketing site.

Design Principles #

  1. The unconfigured output is the product. Strong defaults beat exposed knobs. Everything a token can describe should be a token, but the author should never need to touch one.
  2. Markdown structure IS layout. The author should not learn a layout DSL. A first-of-type h1, a two-column block, a quote, a code fence — these are the layout signals. The renderer reads intent from semantics.
  3. Typography carries the load. Recursive's variable axes (weight, slant, mono, casual) are first-class materials. Hierarchy from scale and weight, not from boxes and color. Body type set for reading, not for skimming.
  4. The grid is the design. Modernist confidence comes from disciplined layout. Multiple slide layouts are predictable variations of one grid system, not novelty templates. Asymmetry is allowed when it's load-bearing.
  5. Color as punctuation. Rose Pine is opinionated; treat it that way. Restrained color strategy — tinted neutrals carry the surface, accents appear when they mean something (a callout, a link, a syntax token). Never decorative.

Accessibility & Inclusion #

  • WCAG AA contrast on every text/background pairing in the default tokens. Audit Rose Pine subtle on base (current body color) — borderline, may need lift to meet AA at body sizes.
  • Keyboard navigation between slides (arrow keys, space). Toolbar reachable by keyboard.
  • Semantic HTML preserved through the Comark pipeline (real <h1>/<h2>, real <ol>/<ul>, real <blockquote>).
  • Reduced-motion not committed yet, but plan to honor prefers-reduced-motion when the toolbar / scroll-snap animations are touched.