Unsplash partners with Paste by FiftyThree to reinvent presentations

In 2011, four former Microsoft teammates set out to reinvent creative tools that they felt had become bloated and difficult to use. Their company is FiftyThree, and their first product, Paper, did just that, completely redefining the processes of ideation, sketching, and digital communication.

Paper simultaneously raised the bar for what a quality mobile application could be, winning the 2012 iPad App of the Year, while proving that creative applications could be better on touch-enabled devices than their desktop counterparts.

Personally, Paper was one of the first mobile apps I remember strongly connecting with as a designer. The blend of natural and digital affordances in the UI was such a winning combination that it’s since been adopted by nearly every mainstream creative application.

A few months ago the same team revealed their newest project, Paste, a complete reimagining of presentation software for the modern norms of online communication and collaboration. Unlike heavyweight incumbents Powerpoint and Google Slides, the team has focused on simplicity, collaboration, and communication, eschewing the deep customization and subsequent complexity in favour of smart defaults that bring clarity and focus to the content.

One of the most powerful things about Paste is its ability to embed any type of content into slides quickly and easily.

Given that most modern communication requires assembling a collection of documents, images, text, embeds, and more, Paste has modernized presentation software by evolving beyond the static content that worked best when presenting via a traditional conference keynote.

As part of that effort, Paste has included the ability for presentations to natively incorporate beautiful background imagery, powered by the Unsplash community’s library of high-resolution photos.

As icing on the cake, when choosing to add a photo from Unsplash, Paste will automatically recognize the topic of your slide using a nifty natural language processing algorithm to pull out the keywords and automatically search Unsplash, so by default you’ll see a selection of photos related to your slide.

As we know from our own data studies, the use of high-resolution images in presentations is one of the most popular uses of Unsplash images given the importance of strong visuals when communicating. Given the team at FiftyThree’s track record for creating industry-changing applications, we’re excited for Unsplash to be a native part of Paste and the future of presentations.

If you’d like to partner with Unsplash’s API for your application, you can visit our API page or contact our Partnerships team.