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Driving scenario slides for design review

Design reviews — internal architecture reviews, milestone gates, customer-facing demos — almost always involve a slide that says “here is the scenario we are talking about.” That slide needs to convey, in two seconds:

  • The road layout (lanes, directions).
  • The participants (ego vehicle, other vehicles, pedestrians).
  • The key event (a merge, a cut-in, a perception gap).

Done badly, it’s a wall of rectangles that the audience squints at. Done well, it carries the rest of the slide.

What people usually default to (and why it hurts)

Section titled “What people usually default to (and why it hurts)”
  • PowerPoint shapes. No lane semantics. Updating one merge corner means redoing five things.
  • Simulator screenshots. Visually busy; the audience focuses on the simulator artifacts, not the scenario.
  • Stock vector icons. Generic; they don’t say “lane merge” — they say “two cars”.

The drawtonomy workflow for design-review slides

Section titled “The drawtonomy workflow for design-review slides”
  1. Start from the lane geometry. The Lane Tool turns a centerline click-sequence into a properly bounded lane. For intersections, the Intersection Templates drop a complete 4-way or T-junction in one click.
  2. Pick a participant set. Use the Vehicle and Pedestrian templates. Drawtonomy ships sedan, bus, truck, motorcycle, and walking-pedestrian shapes; you can also load custom SVG templates if your team uses a specific iconography.
  3. Tell the story with arrows. A single thick Path arrow per participant makes the intent obvious without cluttering the lane geometry.
  4. Lock the styling to your slide template. Drawtonomy’s color palette is centrally managed — set the lane fill to your slide background color, set the participant outlines to your accent color, and the figure looks native to your deck.
  5. Save as .drawtonomy.svg (drawtonomy’s native SVG format). Design-review feedback almost always asks for “the same figure but with X different” — a .drawtonomy.svg file reopens with every lane connection and participant intact, so revisions are an edit, not a redraw.
  6. Export PNG with a transparent background from the same scene and drop it into PowerPoint / Keynote / Google Slides. If your slide tool accepts SVG (Google Slides via insert image, Keynote’s vector paste), you can also use the .drawtonomy.svg file directly — it’s a valid SVG.

Patterns that work

Section titled “Patterns that work”
  • One scenario per slide. Don’t try to overlay two scenarios on the same lanes; viewers can’t disambiguate.
  • Direction of travel as a single arrow. Multiple parallel arrows imply “all of these vehicles are moving” — usually not what you want.
  • Highlight the failure mode with a contrasting color. If the design-review point is “the planner missed the cut-in vehicle”, make that vehicle a different color and leave the rest neutral.

What you save

Section titled “What you save”

The first scene takes about the same time as in PowerPoint. The next variant is faster — lane topology, participants, and styling are reusable, so reviewer change requests don’t trigger a full redraw. The mechanism that makes this work is the .drawtonomy.svg file: keep it as the source of truth in your slide repo, and every revision is an edit rather than a rebuild.

Section titled “Related reading”