I recently had an opportunity to preview the next iteration of Visme, the powerful, flexible business graphics application that will be released on February 24th. Although the company has been pretty quiet for the last several years, there has been a lot going on behind the scenes to rebuild and expand its extensive toolset.
Here’s what I learned about Visme 4.0, which the company is calling Visme Unleashed:
The developer’s business goal has always been to create an all-in-one content creation tool that empowers people to create beautiful content, easily. As part of this mission, it aims to centralize production of all of an organization’s visual assets, It does this by providing users with highly flexible templates and simple drag and drop functionality.
In Visme 4.0, the developer’s major focus is to enable users to create interactive graphics and videos, because increasingly, that’s what’s needed to gain the engagement of audiences today. It’s design goals for version 4.0 included:
- Enabling users to create vivid, brand-focused designs
- Greater interactivity and animations
- Improved flexibility and automation to enable users to create a greater variety of content types (over 50 in all)
- Improved collaboration and media management
- The ability to share and download assets in popular formats – including editable PowerPoint slides
The new Visme editor
Visme Unleashed gives users more text formatting options than ever before, including simple and advanced animations. The changes to it are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. One of the biggest changes is that you can add and modify the elements of your creations within a new, integrated editor, which appears to the left of the workspace.
Animations add memorability to your designs
The new editor will also provide users with access to new types of animated graphics that you can incorporate into your creations, including characters, illustrations, gestures and special effects. These graphics are already pre-animated with small movements. You don’t have to do anything to them but add them to your graphic creation.
Graphics will be available in three styles: isometric, outline and flat, giving you even greater design flexibility. All of these designs are exclusive to Visme, which means these elements won’t look like you grabbed them off of a stock image site.
Visme 4.0 will be available with basic animations, but the developer also plans to introduce a set of advanced, timeline-based animation tools in the near future.
I created a web graphic in Visme that was based on one of its many templates. In a matter of minutes, I selected and added an animation to it, which you can see below:
Made withVisme
Expanded chart capabilities
Version 4.0 of Visme will contain completely revamped chart capabilities. In the past, a lot of the formatting commands for creating charts was accomplished with pop-up windows. In the new version, you can modify your chart designs using the application’s integrated editor. Watch for additional chart types, which will be added to Visme in the near future.
The developer showed some new interactive data capabilities that were quite impressive. Imagine mousing over one slice of a pie or radar chart. As you do so, the data that supports it appears alongside it. Very cool!
Inspired by the demonstration of these new capabilities, I created one of my own, which you can see below. Mouse over each of the buttons to view the region’s corresponding data.
Made withVisme Presentation Maker
Adding videos to your graphic creations
In the new version of Visme, you will be able to search from a vast library of video clips, drag and drop them onto the stage where you are designing your visuals, and have them play from within your finished piece, not as a pop-up. This will make possible more interactive infographics and data charts. Very cool!
Creating videos in Visme
Version 4.0 of Visme will enable users to create graphic videos, for use in presentations, as animated GIFs, for social graphics and other limited-size applications. Icons and gestures that appear within Visme’s templated animations will be editable, so you can adjust their colors, the pace of the animation and how many times it loops.
Vastly expanded presentation themes
Currently, Visme enables its users to create slide presentations and download them in a view-only PowerPoint format. Visme 4.0 will enable the download of editable PowerPoint files – a first for this powerful tool.
Visme 4.0 will include new simple and modern slide templates that may not sound all that significant at first. Until you realize that each team will contain over 300 slide types across 20 categories, enough to meet the needs of most users. Many of them contain pre-made animation elements. Imagine being able to select from over 20 introduction slides, multiple agenda slide formats and much more.
Why does this matter? Instead of designing your own slides from scratch, you can select from a pre-made slide that closely meets your needs and modify it as needed, instead of having to start from scratch.
Conclusion
It’s very encouraging to see a developer so aggressively embracing the needs of today’s knowledge workers. Visme’s powerful easy-to-use toolset not only benefits marketers who must create visual content, but anyone who needs to share or present their ideas visually.
Visme’s new interactive and animation capabilities will give users the ability to add more pizzazz to visual data, presentations and graphics without the need for a graphic arts degree. If you want your ideas to stand out, a tool like Visme can definitely help.
If you’re already using Visme, you’ll be very excited by all of its new and improved capabilities. If you haven’t then you need to try it out. I think you’ll be impressed by what you see!
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