About this article
Episode 2 of coiai's podcast, "coiai's Strategy Meeting."
This episode starts with replies to comments, then moves into something the hosts have been struggling with in recent work — putting together proposal-stage materials — centered on the problem of separating "presentation slides" from "document-style handouts."
*This article is a transcript based on the audio content, lightly edited for readability.
Listen here
Topics in this episode
- Replying to a comment: "I'd love to hear about recent work, as much as you can share"
- Lately it's a lot of "the work of landing work" — proposals, quotes, requirements docs
- The double-production problem: 4:3 (dense reference material) vs. 16:9 (presentation-style slides)
- The "four-panel comic strip" problem when printing slides on paper
- Typography: legibility vs. readability
- Wikipedia's wide layout is hard to read; academic papers' columns are easy to read
- The history of paper vs. the history of the web (a beauty that never settles, because it's variable)
- Next time: they'd like to cover Emil Ruder
- A podcast works well as "a place to dump your thoughts out loud, mess and all"
Full transcript
Opening / replying to comments
Hattori: Hi, I'm Hattori from coiai.
Hashimoto: I'm Hashimoto from coiai.
Last time we talked about outsourcing sales versus handling sales ourselves, and we got a comment, so let's reply to it and chat a bit.
Comment: "I'd love to hear about your recent work, as much as you're able to share."
What we can actually talk about is a bit tricky since there aren't many public projects yet… But lately we've been making a lot of proposal documents — basically doing "the work of landing work."
The dilemma: are presentation materials and document materials just different things?
What's been giving us trouble lately is being asked for both slides meant to be presented in person and document-style handouts.
When someone asks for a quote online, we usually send over 4:3 slides packed with the requirements and pricing.
But for a project involving an in-person presentation, we put together 16:9 slides — 20 to 30 slides, mostly images with short text — and handed those over, only to be told, "could we also get something a bit more document-like for reference?"
Hattori: Wait, if it's document-like, it's hard to talk through while presenting — so do we now have to make two separate things?
Hashimoto: Yeah, the amount of information tends to balloon, and it gets harder to tell at a glance what actually matters.
Printing on paper turns it into an ugly "four-panel comic" layout
When you print 4:3 slides on paper, sometimes it ends up laid out with four slides on one page, like a four-panel comic strip.
Hattori: That layout is just not pretty.
But one slide per sheet feels too sparse. Getting the information density right for an A4 page is genuinely difficult.
And if you build it as an A4 proposal document instead, it gets hard to read on a computer screen — that contradiction is the painful part.
Typography: legibility vs. readability
This leads into a discussion of typography.
- Readability: how hard something is to read because of the difficulty of the content itself (academic papers are hard to read for this reason)
- Legibility: how easy the layout and type are to see (if a line is too long, it becomes hard to read)
Hashimoto: If a line is too long, your eyes drift while reading and it's hard to track where the next line starts.
That's exactly why Wikipedia's wide desktop layout is hard to read.
Two-column layouts in academic papers score high on legibility.
Conclusion: paper and screens have different optimal formats, so you need a compromise
What reads well on paper and what reads well on a screen are different things.
Ideally you'd want three separate formats, but realistically that's just too much work.
Hashimoto: Do you lean one way, or try to find a middle ground?
Hattori: But there are still situations where you need to hand out paper — meetings with small regional businesses, for example.
The part that's hard: "paper gets thrown away"
Hattori isn't a huge fan of paper. Beyond the hassle of printing, there's something a bit sad about the paper just getting thrown out once the meeting is over.
Same with business cards — he'd rather have something be deleted digitally than have a physical card get thrown in the trash.
In the end, this pushes the decision toward optimizing for screens (4:3 slides) over paper.
The history of paper and the web: paper as a finished beauty, the web as a beauty that never settles
Paper has been refined over a long history as "a vessel for carrying text."
The web, on the other hand, has to work across variable devices — phone, tablet, PC — so it rarely settles into one fixed "finished form."
The conversation wanders off into portrait-oriented displays (like the Xerox Alto), the hypertext-like idea behind academic citations, and the ability to jump straight to a cited link in a PDF.
Looking ahead: Emil Ruder, and an episode where Hashimoto picks the topic
Hattori brings up Emil Ruder as a typographer he admires, and they agree to look into him and talk about it in a future episode.
They also want to try the reverse format sometime — an episode where Hashimoto picks the topic.
A podcast as "a place to dump your thoughts out"
Co-founder Takemura once said something like, "a podcast is great as a place to just dump what's in your head."
Talking is easier than writing — you can put it out there even when it's not polished.
It's interesting how points you never expected to make come out while you're talking.
Wrap-up
The double-production problem between presentation materials and document materials isn't just about the extra workload.
It's also a question of medium (paper vs. screen), readability (legibility vs. readability), and, honestly, aesthetics.
We'll keep searching for a compromise as the strategy meetings continue.