I was about to applaud this McDonald’s french fry box and the nutrition information design until I really started to look at it.
I eventually figured out that the gray shading represented percent of daily allowance, but what do the dotted lines signify? And what’s up with the iconography? Granted, I’d be hard pressed to come up with an icon for carbs, but maybe they should have taken the easy route the way they did with “Cal.”
Fortunately, the fries still tasted as awesome as ever.
That lovable curmudgeon of data is on tour again. Check out his upcoming seminars in Denver, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, Arlington, San Francisco and San Jose
And start thinking of a question to stump him with in the Q&A. Last time I went, I didn’t anticipate the following would leave him speechless, but it did: “Other than you, who do you consider to be a good speaker?”
I had some fun a few weeks ago designing the above for an Edelman executive to present at an internal meeting. Each presenter was allowed 5 minutes and one single slide. So how do you make 5 items of content distinct and memorable with one screen? Not with bullets, you don’t.
I threw out the idea of an old time show poster as a solution for fitting a lot of differing content onto a single page which made me think: could the vaudeville/music hall poster have been the original infographic?
In any case, it was apparently a hit.
My friends at Presentation-Process.com are having a Creative Diagram contest with some nice prizes. Enter by June 20th!
I love The NY Times and their graphics department, but I do have to agree with Gothamist on this one, that someone kind of fell down on the job on trying to describe the recent JP Morgan trade debacle.
Here’s The NY Times’s attempt at graphic simplification:
And then here’s Gothamist’s awesome and bitchy take down analysis of The NY Times.
I used to be a big believer in the series of three. Everybody told me things are more memorable in triads: 3 Little Pigs. 3 Musketeers. 3 Stooges. “Stop. Drop. And Roll.”
The old rule of 3 is still valid—especially when comparing something like a 3-part strategy to a 10-point plan.
But if you know me, you know there’s always a way to further simplify. And that’s why I’ve become a huge believer in the series of 2.
2 things are just much easier to remember than 3. And it is much easier to categorize things in an “either/or” construct.
For example, my department at Edelman does many things, but here’s how I explain it to new employees:
On a more detailed level, we do quite a bit more, of course, but everything we do fits into one of the above two categories.
I recently restructured my presentation training from 3 parts to 2. Initially, the seminar bucketed everything into CONTENT, FORMAT & DELIVERY. But now, everything that I teach about effective presentation falls into one of two categories:
The new 2-part construct still includes 3 hours of material, but now goes beyond mere categorization. If the attendees can’t remember the dozens and dozens of techniques and tips at any moment, hopefully they will always remember the 2 overall goals when creating presentation materials: Everything in a presentation should strive for CLARITY and STICKINESS. And everything you put on a slide should address at least one of these 2 aims.
People always want something for their money. Therefore in business presentations, there is the constant urge to include more value by simply including more. And so you get lengthy and immediately forgettable bulleted lists in slides like this:
Traditional studies have shown that the brain can manage and remember up to 7 items at a time—this is one of the reasons phone numbers were initially capped at 7 digits. But studies on education have also shown that students learn more when presented with less. Think about that, because it’s quite a radical idea. You will leave your audience with more by giving them less. And if we want to use the phone number example, note that the numbers are divided into TWO packages of numbers. You won’t remember 3481372, but you will remember 348-1372. So, wouldn’t this be much better if you’re aiming for stickiness?
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he found his old company selling dozens of different computer models. At a meeting attempting to sort the confused product line out, Jobs grabbed a marker and walked to the white board. He drew a simple 4 box grid: The columns were labeled “Consumer” and “Pro” and the rows were labeled “Notebook” and “Desktop.” A consumer would only have a choice of 2 items at any given point in their decision-making. 15 years later, this is still essentially how Apple sells its computers. And if you’ve ever tried to choose a computer from Dell’s mess of a website, you’ll understand the power of Jobs’s series of 2 selection scheme.
Last year we created a “Walking Deck” (more on that in a future post) for one of our executives to present to a major pharma CEO. CEOs are notorious for wanting simplified messages presented to them. You do not want to walk into their office with 15 options. (You want to ask them to make the decision between spending $100 million or $10 million based on your analysis and recommendations.) So here’s the first page agenda presented to this CEO. Of course, each item has sub-items, but it was important to umbrella the entire meeting into just 2 items.
At the end of the day and over the course of the entire meeting, this CEO was only asked to make a decision on 2 things: Did he want to engage Edelman to:
The Paradox of Choice is a very real thing. So throw away your 22-point programs and embrace the Series of 2. Of course, true communication masters only present 1 thing…
So my Mom sent me a bunch of old photos of me, and the above was mixed in. The best part was the note she had written on the back of it years ago:
I was probably in 2nd grade, and I only have a vague recollection of this, but I have to imagine this was for some sort of science fair. I wish the resolution was better so I could make out my hypothesis and conclusion, but I’m guessing I came to the very scientific verdict that processed snack cakes are bad for your health.
But look at my design chops! I chunked my content, I had good contrast, a simple and direct header, lots of negative space. And take a gander at those bar charts. Okay, too many colors, but there doesn’t seem to be all that much chart junk in them.
Go 2nd grade me!
So we were just given as a gift the most amazing blender I’ve ever seen. It’s called a Blendtec, and these guys are serious not just about blending, but industrial and product design. Seriously, take a look at the product video on their home page.
One of the things that sets this blender apart from others is that there are pre-programmed functions that combine different speeds with different times. In other words, the Blendtec people have decided that the best way to crush ice is to do it at a certain speed for 15 seconds, then a higher speed for 10 seconds, then back to the original speed for another 10 seconds. And this is what the pre-programmed “Crush Ice” setting does. Cool! But how do you describe this exactly to the consumer?
Another company would have explained the process in a table of numbers, no doubt. But Blendtec wisely explained it graphically:
I loved it, but…it still took me a few seconds to figure out exactly what was being communicated. What threw me were the heavy boxes. They were chartjunk. There was so much ink on the page, it was distracting, and since the boxes were different shades, I assumed that the shading carried some meaning. But the shading really doesn’t impart any information. It’s a red herring. I thought it deserved further simplification, and that I could do better. First I tried this…
It was better, I thought. The shadings were gone, and the story was actually a little clearer. But were any shadings necessary? Could more screen ink be removed…?
This was what I settled on…
Is this better? And by that, I mean clearer? Thoughts?
Okay, now it’s time for margharitas!
Hats off to Carolyn Federoff of the AFGE for a killer visual presentation of what “cutting” and even gutting the federal budget would really mean in order to balance the budget…well done!
