Category Archives: Information Design

Buying Presentation Graphics

Last week, Duarte Design, launched Duarte Diagrammer, an online store offering pre-made presentation diagrams and graphics. All graphics are downloadable as PPT files, whereupon they can be edited, recolored and further customized. Duarte is certainly not the first to this game, but I do like their iTunes-like pricing (everything is 99 cents) and the categorization that attempts to help the user identify exactly the type of diagram they need. Many of the diagrams will be familiar to readers of Nancy’s excellent book, Slide:ology, which includes a healthy section on various diagrams and process graphics.

It should be no secret by now that I’m all for shortcuts for presentation design—such as reusing elements from previous presentation, using PPT’s tools instead of Photoshop and even “stealing”. But, I have another dirty secret, and that is that on occasion I actually buy other people’s work in the form of pre-made graphics.

Get Out the Credit Card

Because I have the skills to create many graphics myself, most often I do fire up the sketch pad or Illustrator or PPT and start building needed graphics from scratch. (Sometimes, I will also make use of pre-made vector stock files.)

But every so often, I have a need for a presentation graphic that someone has already spent a lot of time and thought creating. So I get out my credit card.

A recent client insisted that their product line be shown as a hierarchical pyramid. Okay. I wanted to give them a 3D pyramid, but I couldn’t find anything with the right number of levels in my past work or on any professional stock site (like Shutterstock or Getty.) But I did find a perfect set of 40 PowerPoint-ready pyramids at PresentationLoad.com. So, $29 and 3 minutes later, I had my pyramid and continued working on the content. Sure, I could have spent an hour or two perfecting the perspective myself in Illustrator, then importing into PowerPoint, but it just wasn’t worth the time. Take a look—you can buy the same pyramid right here. 

What’s Your Time Worth?

My friend Mike Parkinson runs a great site called BizGraphicsOnDemand.com, and puts it to me this way a few years ago:

“What’s your time worth? Isn’t spending a few bucks on a pre-made graphic better than spending hours designing it yourself when the result will be the same or probably even better?”

He’s right. I’ve bought a few things from him over the years. Mike’s site also has really nice categorization, and if you’re interested in really learning how to create and choose the right business graphics, I suggest Mike’s seminars, book and other resources which you learn about at his other site, BillionDollarGraphics.com.

Graphics, Not Templates

The above are just a few that sites provide quality elements for your presentations, but there are many more you can find that will sell you whole template designs. The reason I’m not recommending those sites is because I’m a firm believer that you don’t actually need templates for presentations. If you missed it, I discussed that in a guest post at Indezine.com. But since a graphic itself very often is the focus of a slide, by all means take advantage of those who have tread before you…

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Categories: Design, Information Design, PowerPoint, Simplicity, Visual Thinking.

Data-Ink and The Dangers of Chart Junk in Information Design

I wrote the following for an internal Edelman blog and thought I’d post it here as well…

“Data-Ink Ratio” is a principle originated and championed by Edward Tufte, the godfather of modern information design. Tufte has been both lauded and vilified for his insistence on minimalism, a philosophy that is at the heart of Data-Ink Ratio.

In short, Data-Ink is the amount of ink (or pixels) devoted to actually communicating information. Any graphics, decorations or text that don’t explicitly communicate one’s story are considered extraneous and unhelpful. So, expressed as a ratio of Data-Ink to total ink, one would want a number as close to “1” as possible. A low Data-Ink ratio of .1 would mean that for every one pixel that communicates your message, nine pixels are wasting space and your audience’s attention.
 
Here’s a simple visual explanation of all that previous ink I just used:
 
The one on the right communicates the same information and does it with less distraction once the gridlines, background and redundant labeling are removed. Here is the leftover “fat,” also termed “Chart Junk” by Tufte, that has been trimmed away:

The Dangers of Decoration

Here are two infographics that I feel are simply overdesigned and filled with chart junk. Yes, they’re clever, but does the design aid or hinder a quick reading of the information?
 
 
 
(Credit: Mint.com)
 
Here’s another infographic that has a very simple message, but one that takes longer to process because of the added graphic design. What’s the Data-Ink ratio here? 
 
(Credit: Mashable.com)
 
Finally, I saw this very basic infographic the other day. While I take exception with how some of this data is being manipulated and framed, graphically I think it works quite well. Certainly, I was able to understand the message in mere seconds. High Data-Ink ratio saves the day here!
 (Credit: ThinkProgress.org) 
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Categories: Design, Information Design, Showing Data, Simplicity, Visual Thinking.

Presidential Presentation

If you were in control, how would you present the world’s most important information? Written document? Speech? Video? Stone tablets? …PowerPoint?

Earlier this month the CIA declassified seven video intelligence briefings created for Ronald Reagan which got me thinking about Presidential presentation.

Arguably, some of the most vital contemporary information comes either from or to the President of the United States. And it’s interesting to note the various methods Presidents have used to communicate.

Speech

At the end of the day, the most lasting and world-changing presentations tend to be the unadorned live speech. Lincoln redefined America with 272 spoken words at Gettysburg. FDR calmed and connected with the nation through his radio fireside chats. Kennedy inspired millions with idealistic speech such as the Man on the Moon speech to Congress. And Reagan mourned for the country with his Challenger disaster address.  

PowerPoint?

While we have had a Presidential candidate present with PowerPoint (not a rousing success) and we’ve seen gubernatorial PowerPoint, we haven’t yet had a full-fledged slide presentation by a President.

Obama has come very close though with his State of the Union speeches. If you were in the House chamber, you would see no slides on screens, but the White House releases portrait-sized “slides” to accompany the speeches. These graphics served both as a documentary complement and as visual speaker support when combined with the video in an “Enhanced State of the Union” version. I have to say that if you haven’t seen the enhanced version online, it’s quite smart. And the graphics (slides) are incredibly well done.

Written Document

While the Founding Fathers may have produced this country’s most effective piece of communication via written document, it may be true that more vital information flows to the President on the printed page than flows out.

Every day the President receives a top secret presentation of international intelligence called the President’s Daily Brief (PDB). The most famous and controversial of these was the one from August 6, 2001 which contained the written heading, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” 

Could there be a better format than written memo for the PDB? Maybe, maybe not.

But that brings us back to Reagan…

Video?

Though some may believe that Reagan requested all of his PDBs in video format, it’s certainly more likely and realistic that the newly released video briefings were occasional supplements on specific larger topics. Even today, producing a 10 minute informational video piece is not an easy or quick task. But one would hope that a video PDB were it produced today, would feel a bit more mature than Reagan’s which, quite frankly, seem more appropriate for a 5th grade social studies class than the Oval Office. Take a look…

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Categories: Information Design, PowerPoint, Presenting Live, Printed Information, Video.

Is Clip Art Ever Okay?

To paraphrase my friend Scott Schwertly from his book How to Be a Presentation God…

If you’re comfortable walking into a
client meeting with a clip-on tie, 

then by all means go ahead and use clip art.

While the umbrella of “clip art” can include tasteful and professional images or graphics, in general it defines cheesy, stereotypical and juvenile artwork. Of course, no one wants to be perceived by an audience or client as cheesy, but with clip art there’s a greater danger lurking than simply being tagged as a goofball:

Clip art can undermine your entire credibility and legitimacy of message, because it screams: “Don’t take what I have to say seriously.”

Example? A recent (non-classified) US Army presentation entitled, “Strategic Choices — Adapt to Win.” This one deck may actually break every single rule of good presentation design (bad fonts, colors, low resolution imagery, lack of balance, death by bullet points, little white space, nonsensical charts, and the list goes on and on…) Truly, I think someone could write a PhD dissertation on ineffective communication in this document, but for me the most disturbing part of it was the very serious subject matter at the heart of this that was being treated with cutesy cartoons and tons of clip art. 

The above is far from the worst slide, but I think it’s emblematic of the whole deck, with its cartoons, lightning bolts (?) and heavily beveled arrows. Does the graphic treatment match the importance and gravity of supporting and supplying our military? I’m not saying the design should be austere or solemn—just not comical.

And speaking of comical, here are a few more slides in all their comic sans glory. Download the whole deck here.

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Categories: Design, Imagery, Information Design, PowerPoint, Showing Data, Simplicity.

I Like Ellipses…

Call me crazy, but there’s something I just don’t like about colons.

While grammatically correct, they feel more the domain of printed documents. With presentation, I try to avoid using colons at the end of a paragraph, header or single line of text. 

Instead, I like using ellipses which seem more conversational and which draw the eye to the next line or position on the page…

See what I mean?

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Categories: Information Design, Printed Information, Simplicity, Visual Thinking.
visual training presentation