The problem
A pitch deck, an account plan or a research readout often needs a team or persona slide before anyone has supplied a headshot. The usual stand-ins don’t work:
- Gray silhouettes look unfinished.
- Stock photos look fake, don’t match each other, and suggest a real person who isn’t there.
- Initials alone are fine for a few people, and flat for a whole roster.
What you want is a friendly, consistent portrait that’s clearly a stand-in — and that stays the same every time the deck is rendered.
The idea
- The name picks the face.
`!{Ada Okafor}`turns the name into a set of traits — skin, hair, eyes, glasses and so on — the same way every time. So Ada looks the same in today’s PDF, next month’s export and a colleague’s copy. - Pin what matters. Write a trait and it wins:
`!{Ada Okafor, hair=coily, glasses=round}`. Everything you don’t write is still chosen by the name, so pinning one trait doesn’t reshuffle the rest. - Sixteen traits. Skin, hair, hair color, face, eyes, eye color, brows, nose, mouth, beard, glasses, earrings, clothing style and its color, and opt-in head coverings, such as a hijab or a turban, with their color.
- People keep their colors. Skin, hair and clothes stay the same in every theme, the way a photo does. Only the tile behind takes the deck’s palette.
- It mixes with real photos. On a team slide, one person can have a photo, the next an avatar, and the third their initials.
How to use it
Avatars are on in every deck. Write one in inline code:
Our sponsor `!{Ada Okafor}` clears blockers.Pin traits with key=value, then style the tile with words:
`!{Ada Okafor, hair=coily, skin=6}`
`!{Ada Okafor, glasses=round, c3, lg, rounded}`
`!{Amina Yusuf, headwear=hijab, headwear-color=plum}`| Word | Does |
|---|---|
c1 … c12 | The tile’s color, from the deck’s chart palette |
sm, md, lg, xl | Size, relative to the text |
circle, rounded, square | The tile’s shape |
framed, bare | A tile behind the portrait, or none |
label="…" | What a screen reader says (the name, by default) |
On a team slide, put the avatar on the line where a photo would go:
<!-- _class: team-profile -->
## The account team
- Ada Okafor
- `!{Ada Okafor, hair=coily, skin=6}`
- `Executive Sponsor`If you rename someone later and want to keep their face, the Studio’s inspector shows the full trait set an avatar was drawn with, ready to copy.
Where else it fits
Generated faces suit any material that needs people who are placeholders or fictional: user personas in research and product decks, team pages in a pitch before the headshots arrive, characters in training scenarios and case studies, and account maps in sales plans. The drawings are made in the deck itself, so they work offline and never call an outside service.
How Lattice uses it
No slide type requires the plugin. The team-profile slide is designed to use it: an avatar alone on the photo line becomes that person’s portrait, at the roster’s size and shape. Screen readers hear the person’s name once, not twice — the portrait is hidden from them when the name sits beside it.
What it doesn’t do
- It isn’t for real people who have a photo. Use the photo. Avatars are stand-ins, not likenesses of anyone.
- It doesn’t guess. A value that doesn’t exist, like
skin=9, leaves the span as code, and the deck linter lists the valid values. - A fixed set of parts. Sixteen traits, a handful of values each. No photo import, no custom drawings.
- PowerPoint gets a picture. The PowerPoint export is an image per slide.