Town Decks

Town Decks turn a conversation into a presentation you and your assistant build together.

Anything you’ve already been working through with your Townie — a thread, an email chain, a recording, a doc, research it just did — can become a deck. You ask for it, your assistant writes the whole thing, and from then on the deck is a shared workspace: you edit slides by hand, and you keep asking your assistant for changes in the chat right next to it.

That’s the part that makes decks different from a one-shot “generate a presentation” tool. A Town deck is a living, dynamic little web page — buttons people can click, links that go places, charts and animations that move — and it stays editable after the assistant is done, just as the assistant stays useful after you’ve started editing.

Create a deck

Decks are created through your assistant, so you can start one from wherever you’re already working:

• Ask in any thread — “turn this into a deck”, “make a deck out of this research”, “build a pitch deck from this email thread”. Your assistant already has the thread’s context, so it doesn’t need you to re-explain anything.
• From the New button — pick Deck and describe what you want. This drops a Create Town Deck chip into the composer so your assistant knows a deck is the output.
• From your home screen — use the Create a deck suggestion in the chat bar.

If your request is vague, your assistant will ask a question or two first — who the deck is for, roughly how long, what the key points are — then build it. If you’d rather it just take a swing, say so and it will.

Your assistant can also do the research and gather the material as part of the same request, and generate images for slides that need a visual.

Pick a style

Before generating a new deck, your assistant shows you a style picker. Each style is a complete look and a layout system — it decides slide structure, image treatment, and text density, not just colors and fonts.

One thing worth knowing as you choose: some styles are responsive and some are fixed 16:9. Responsive decks are flowing web pages — they resize and reflow to whatever screen they’re read on, which is great for decks people will read on their own. Fixed 16:9 decks are composed on a classic presentation canvas and hold their layout exactly, which is what you want when you’ll present on a projector or share something that should look pixel-perfect. The picker tells you which is which on each style.

You can browse the full gallery from the picker to see a live preview of each style before you commit. Once you’ve created a custom theme (below), it appears in this same picker too.

The Town style features your Townie

Pick the Town style and your deck comes out on brand — and the title slide features your Townie, the same character you chose for your assistant.

Just ask your assistant to “Create a Town deck” and select the style Town. If you haven’t picked a Townie yet, the deck uses one of the stock Town characters instead. Town-styled decks sign off with a second Townie on the closing slide.

Or describe your own style

You aren’t limited to the built-in styles. Instead of picking one, describe what you want — “a retro 80s neon look”, “something like a Japanese woodblock print”, “match our brand: navy and cream, serif headlines” — and your assistant builds a custom style from your description, including illustrations in that style if the look calls for it. It’ll confirm its interpretation before generating.

Each deck has one look, set when it’s created. If you want a different style later, ask your assistant to restyle the deck — it keeps your content and rebuilds the look.

Custom themes: put your brand on every deck

If you want your decks on brand, create a custom theme — this is what we recommend teams do when they’re getting started with Decks, usually right when they make their first deck.

From the theme picker, choose Create custom theme:

1. Paste your website. Town reads it and finds your brand — your colors, your fonts, your look. You’ll see the colors it found as editable swatches, so you can correct or replace any of them before building.
2. Add your own assets to sharpen it — upload your logo, brand images, and font files, and pick which font leads headings versus body text. Your uploads always win over anything found on the site. No website? Your colors, logo, and fonts alone are enough to build from.
3. Choose your look. Town shows you a gallery of polished deck styles already rendered in your brand — live previews you can click through slide by slide. It recommends the best fit, and you can pick any of them. Some are fixed 16:9 presentation styles, others are responsive Town classics recolored for your brand; each preview says which.

The theme takes a couple of minutes to build (you’ll get an email when it’s ready), and it comes with a sample deck showing every layout. From then on, whenever you or anyone you’ve shared it with creates a deck, the theme is right there in the style picker.

Two things people find handy:

• Editing the theme’s sample deck updates the theme. The sample deck is the theme’s master copy — tweak a color or move a logo there, and future decks built in that theme pick up your change.
• Themes can be personal or shared with your team, so one person can set the brand up and everyone benefits.

Templates: reuse a deck you’ve perfected

A custom theme answers “what should our decks look like?” A template answers “what should this kind of deck contain?” Create a template when you’ve built a deck you’ll duplicate on a recurring basis:

• a sales first-call deck
• an investor pitch deck
• a weekly metrics reporting deck
• a client kickoff or QBR deck

Any deck you find yourself copying is a template candidate. Save the deck as a template (personal, or shared with your team), and it appears under Content library → Decks → Templates. To use one, just ask your assistant — “make this week’s metrics deck from our reporting template” — and it starts from the template’s exact slides and layout, swapping in the new content instead of designing from scratch. That’s what keeps the fifth week’s deck looking like the first.

Edit by hand

Open a deck and you’re in the editor. You can:

• Rewrite any text — double-click a block and type.
• Format the text you selected — selecting text pops up a small toolbar: bold, italic, underline, size (S/M/L/XL), text color, highlight, block background, and a searchable font picker with 150+ typefaces, each rendered in its own face.
• Insert anything from one menu — the Insert menu adds:
  • Text boxes anywhere on a slide.
  • Buttons — real, clickable buttons you can link to anything. Because a deck is a live web page, people reading your shared deck can actually click them: link to your calendar, a signup page, a doc.
  • Images — upload one, paste one straight onto the slide, or generate one with AI from a description.
  • Shapes — rectangles, circles, arrows, stars and more, with fill color, transparency, borders, and draggable corner rounding.
  • Tables — editable in place, with paste-from-spreadsheet, Tab navigation between cells, and resizable columns.
  • Your Townie — drop your own character (or one of the official Townies) onto any slide.
• Ask for charts and animations — your assistant draws charts natively on the slide and can animate them (“an animated bar chart of Q3 revenue”, “a looping graphic here”), so they stay crisp at any size and move when presented.
• Move and resize blocks — drag by the handle, resize from the corner, with rulers, snap-to-grid, and alignment guides to line things up (toggle them in the View menu, where you can also drag out your own guidelines).
• Rename the deck — click its name in the top-left of the viewer and type. Enter saves, Escape cancels.
• Undo and redo — including jumping back to an earlier point in the deck’s history.
• Present — use the Present button in the top-right when you want to read or present without editing; Edit brings you back. Decks scroll vertically, like a page — swipe or scroll to move between slides, or jump with the slide sidebar.

Your edits save automatically as you make them.

Keep asking your assistant for changes

The deck view has a chat column next to the slides. Ask for changes the same way you’d ask a designer:

• “Tighten slide 3 — it’s too wordy.”
• “Add a slide on pricing after the overview.”
• “Swap the closing slide for a call to action.”
• “Make the numbers on the metrics slide bigger.”
• “Restyle this whole deck in our brand theme.”

You can keep multiple threads on the same deck, so a long revision conversation doesn’t have to share a thread with a quick one-off fix.

Your manual edits are safe. Before your assistant changes a deck, it re-reads the current version, so an AI update applies on top of your hand edits instead of overwriting them. If you were editing at the same moment the assistant was, it re-reads and re-applies rather than clobbering your work.

Share and export

Every deck lives in your Content library under Decks, alongside your documents and recordings.

• Share a link — use Share to create a link anyone can open, no Town account required. The link always shows the current version, so you don’t have to re-share after an update. And because the deck is a live web page, everything in it works for your reader — buttons, links, animations.
• See who’s viewing — shared decks come with viewer analytics, so you can see when your deck is being opened and how it’s being read. Great for knowing whether the pitch you sent actually got looked at.
• Download PDF — a print-ready PDF of the deck, straight from the Export menu.
• Download HTML — a copy you can keep and open in any browser.
• Export to Google Slides — see below. From Slides, you can also use Google’s own export for PowerPoint (PPTX).

Export to Google Slides

Under Export to Google Slides you’ll see your connected Google accounts; pick the one whose Drive should hold the presentation. Town creates a new, editable Google Slides presentation there and gives you a link to open it. Your Town deck is unchanged — the export is a copy, so later edits in Town don’t flow into the Slides file (export again for an updated copy).

A few things to expect:

• One Slides slide per deck slide, with real Slides text you can edit.
• The layout is approximate. Slides can’t reproduce everything a Town deck can draw, so anything without a Slides equivalent — inline vector graphics, CSS-drawn charts — comes across as a labelled placeholder. Town tells you when part of a deck didn’t translate exactly.
• Only Google accounts. Outlook accounts can’t receive a Slides export.
• Town needs Drive and Slides permission for that account. If it doesn’t have it yet, the account shows Enable → and takes you through granting it before the export runs.
• Save first. While a deck still has edits saving, the Slides options are unavailable, so the presentation always matches the saved deck.

You can also just ask your assistant — “export this deck to Google Slides” — and it produces the same presentation. One difference: the assistant exports whatever version of the deck is saved, and it won’t wait the way the menu does, so let your edits finish saving before you ask.

Good to know

• Decks are private to you until you share them.
• A deck is a single HTML file, which is why it looks and behaves the same everywhere it’s viewed — in Town, on a share link, or downloaded. Editing happens in Town; a downloaded copy is for viewing and presenting, and it still loads its fonts and a few assets from the web.
• Decks work on mobile, though editing is much easier on a larger screen.
• Because it’s your assistant building the deck, everything it can normally reach — your email, files, calendar, recordings, and web research — is available as source material.

Related

• Tasks — Hand off “build me a deck” as a task and follow it in the thread
• Profiles — Where your Townie (and the character on your Town-styled decks) comes from
• Recordings — Turn a recorded meeting into a deck
• Context & Memory — How your assistant knows what to put in the deck