Don’t Show Data. Show the MEANING of Your Data.

The visual display of data can be an art form, and the field of infographics has really started taking off the last few years. But you don’t need to have a graphics or information design degree to improve the storytelling of your own data. 

The goal of a chart or graph is simple: Don’t just show the data itself; show the MEANING of the data. The two below slides show the exact same data, but neither have any message. 

So, let’s give this data some context and meaning (and in the process take out a lot of the PowerPointyness.) 

Without adding or removing any of the data, the story starts to take shape visually. Obviously, we are showing that the US is by far the most obese country in the world at 31% of its population. This might very well do for this fictional presentation, but we can take it even further if we like…

Again, we haven’t changed the data at all, we’ve just given it MEANING. Also note that removing 3D, tick marks, needless axes and colors has actually focused the audience more on the important information.

The consulting firm McKinsey has an internal rule that any chart placed in a presentation or report must contain the meaning of the chart at the top left of it (i.e. “West coast sales lag the rest of the country.”) 

Still, while it is most often best to explain the meaning of on screen data like McKinsey does, there are times in guided presentations where it can actually be stronger to have a slide that requires explanation. But if you’re going to do this, then it’s often best to severely limit the data that you do show…

Regardless of how you present, try your best to show the visual story of the data and not just the data itself.

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Categories: Design, Showing Data.

Pecha Kucha: 20 Slides, 20 Seconds Each

 

Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chit chat” or “chatter”) is a presentation format created in 2003 by two Tokyo-based architects, and it couldn’t be simpler: Presenters use 20 slides, each of which is automatically timed to advance after 20 seconds, making every presentation 6 minutes, 40 seconds. No more, no less.

Pecha Kucha Nights are now held regularly in over 260 cities worldwide, and I attended my first one this past weekend at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt. Although a Pecha Kucha need not be themed, this one was a fundraiser for Haiti, part of a series of Pecha Kuchas that in total hope to raise $1 million for the relief effort. Saturday’s event raised over $10,000. The event’s speakers were mostly architects, some discussing Haiti specifically, some discussing their own work and some talking about art and architecture in general. My favorite was probably Sam Jacobs of FAT Architecture who spoke about architectural disasters and the amazing things that happen when you “combine ingenuity and failure.”

Pecha Kucha was initially begun partly to showcase the work of architects and designers. It is often difficult for these folks to disseminate their projects and ideas, and apparentlty architects tend to ramble, so the time cap is perfect. It subsequently took on a life of its own. In some cities like Tokyo, Pecha Kucha Nights are held in cool club-like spaces making the whole affair a rather hip event.

I’m coming to absolutely love strict time constraints and rules for presentations. (The TED conference is notorious for their time rules.) While I’m generally agnostic about the number of slides one uses in a presentation, I would love to see a CEO demand a Pecha Kucha-like structure for all internal presentations. Imagine how much clearer and direct people would need to be in presenting their ideas. And maybe the greatest thing about a slide existing for only 20 seconds is that text must be kept to an absolute minimum if used at all. It forces visual thinking.

If you’re interested in finding a Pecha Kucha night near you, take a look at their website.

Some more pics from Saturday’s Haiti event…


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Categories: Presenting Live.

SWITCH by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Like Made to Stick, The Heath brothers’ latest feels very much like a Malcolm Gladwell book—full of well-told anecdotes that demonstrate each chapter’s message. They also again include numerous “clinics” which are real or fictional situations posed to the reader as problems needing to be solved through the book’s offered techniques.

Switch is written with sticky stories, but it’s focus is change—specifically change in organizations and groups. Thousands of books have written about how to affect change in business and at times this one feels like it’s bobbing in that sea. But instead of a 12 part system with biz school case studies, Chip and Dan view change as a process broken down into 3 parts:

  1. Direct the Rider
  2. Motivate the Elephant
  3. Shape the Path

It sounds a little hokey, but it never feels like it. The representative stories all serve to exemplify solutions under each of the 3 parts: find the bright spots [in a problem], script the critical moves [for the players], point to the destination, shrink the change, grow your people, build habits, rally the herd, etc. 

If for no other reason, the stories make this an enjoyable read: the college student who rallied a whole island nation to save an endangered parrot (grow your people), an NGO worker who dramatically reduced malnutrition in Vietnamese children by first studying not the rule, but the exceptions to the rule (bright spots) and how a simple change of phrase on bathroom signs reduced a hotel’s laundry bill (rally the herd.)

 

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Categories: Visual Thinking.

Schemas for Accessibility and Simplicity



I’ve been thinking about and reading the Heath brothers again lately. Dan and Chip have just released a new book, Switch, which I fortunately was given an advance read of. (A short review is below.) You might recall that their book Made to Stick is in my top three of presentation books. One of the techniques promoted in Made to Stick is the use of a “schema” to simplify and make a concept accessible. A schema is a term from psychology, but for our purposes, think of a schema as simply an analogy.

The Heaths give a few examples of schemas such as Hollywood movie pitches…

  • Alien = Jaws on a spaceship
  • Speed = Die Hard on a bus  

And how do science teachers usually teach the construct of an atom, they ask? By using the schema of the orbits of planets in the solar system. Even though this analogy is not really accurate, it’s accurate enough to get the basic concept across. Similarly, even though there was no shark in Alien, saying “Jaws on a spaceship” is accurate enough to get across the feeling and style of the movie. 


You probably have to communicate difficult concepts all the time. Doing so effectively doesn’t always mean being literal and 100% accurate for your given audience. A graduate level physics professor should not describe the makeup of an atom as similar to planetary orbits. But that professor’s students probably first found their love of physics by imagining atoms orbiting a sun-like nucleus. Similarly, “Jaws on a spaceship” probably got the studio exec to the point of wanting to read the script which led to a green light.

My Recent Schema

At work, it’s a continual challenge convincing our account teams to let us design lengthy reports and documents in Adobe InDesign—the professional layout and desktop publishing program. They always want to use Microsoft Word which, while fine for certain projects, is the utterly wrong tool when you want a professional result. We’ve become quite adept at using Word to create professional-looking results, but it’s always a struggle, filled with headaches and too many overtime hours. (We recently gave a client two budgets: one for a document built in InDesign and a more expensive one for the same document done in Word as it would have meant more labor.)And so, I was working on a pro-con list to convince account teams to let us work in InDesign more. My title was originally…

“Pros & Cons of Using Microsoft Word vs. Adobe Indesign” 

 Then I tried this, hoping to persuade…

InDesign (Professional Design Results) 
vs. Microsoft Word (Buggy, Slow and Problematic)


Okay, no ambiguity there. Like a hammer to the head. I love being direct, but sometimes being direct with words doesn’t always mean the most effective framing. 

I googled and found a discussion thread on Word vs. InDesign in which one commenter spoke up for Word’s advantages. “Word is a bicycle and InDesign is an airplane. You don’t take an airplane to pick something up at the grocery store.” Bingo. And so I stole the schema and turned it into a visual title for my document…

 Sometimes being accurate enough is exactly what you need. And if you can turn an analogy into a visual…

 

 

 

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Categories: Visual Thinking.

You Don’t Need a Header Bar

Yes, I have a lot of pet peeves with regard to presentation design, but at the top of the list is header bars. Often–though not always–it is necessary and/or helpful to have a title to your slide (a “header”). But when it comes to designing a “look” or a template for a presentation, it is almost never a good thing to design your slides so that they require a header. We’ve all seen templates like these…

Designs with dedicated headers should be avoided because they…

  • Waste valuable screen real estate
  • Force the user to write headlines when they may not be necessary, leading to cluttered and over-written slides
  • Create an inorganic “PowerPoint-y” look

Even good presentation designers often fall into the header bar trap, and I place the blame largely on Microsoft. PowerPoint is the only program I can think of in which the default “empty” page tells the user what kind of information should be placed on the page. Open up a blank PPT doc and you are immediately told to insert a header and body copy. Microsoft Word doesn’t tell you what kind of words to put down; it just gives you a white page. Photoshop doesn’t give you a page at all, less they bias you against a teal or a zebra-striped canvas.

But back to the waste of space. Take a look at this Microsoft-design template that comes pre-installed with PPT.

If you used this template for each page, after you inserted your mandatory header, you would have only 51% of your entire page left for actual content. If you always used Microsoft’s recommended “click to add text” content area, you’d only have 38% usable space! Note that on this template, Microsoft has added in a further, unnecessary gray bounding box (your screen should be your bounding box…) that further reduces usable area after you account for needed padding on the edges–text will always need a cushion of negative space around it to be readable.

Yes, Microsoft does provide a header-less layout for this template design, but the natural instinct is to keep the background the same for all slides, which then leads to unnecessary and often visually redundant headlines. Last weekend I was at a wine seminar on a Spanish wine region called Ribera Del Duero. I’ve recreated one of the slides showing the growing region. Since we talked about no other geography other than Ribera, my reaction to the use of a header bar on this page was a resounding, “Duh.” The header bar design in the template forced the presenter to include a header even when it was painfully unnecessary, forcing the content smaller, and distracting from it.

Even if you reduce the size of a header bar design, you’re still bound for trouble. The above examples are large enough to account for 2 line headers (if you absolutely must have a 2 line header…), but if you try to minimize the header area as shown here, you’re just going to run into problems with that one slide that just must have 2 or 3 lines for some reason.

 

 

So, what’s the solution? Keep as open and blank a canvas as you possibly can that allows for a header or title to come and go as needed. And if you can find or create a design that doesn’t fore the use of headers, you’ll be on your way to making slide headers the exception rather than the rule. Which is a good thing…

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Categories: Design, PowerPoint, Reducing Text.

Icons

Photographs, text and data charts are not the only tools you can use to communicate information on screen. Iconography, used correctly, can often massively distill concepts so your audience’s brain immediately “gets it.” Most often, I use iconography for repetitive concepts that can be introduced and explained once, then reinforced each time simply by displaying the icon. 
Here are a few slides from a pitch deck that presented 4 research-driven stategies to a client. The bulk of this presentation revolved around these strategies, each slide falling under one of them. Originally, these 4 strategies were not even introduced all together on one slide, and once introduced on a single divider slide, were not referenced again within their section. It was very difficult to keep track of and remember the essence of this pitch. And so I asked my friend Tim (who designed much of this presentation) to create simple icons that were not only introduced at the top of the pitch and on section dividers, but provided running navigation at the bottom left of each slide to indicate which strategy we were on at any moment.

 Icons can also be photographic as in this example created by my friend Gideon.

And they’re not just for navigational or organizational purposes. They can stand on their own as complements to text. Take a look at a before and after with icons capabilities slide…

And a consistently designed icon library created as part of a template system…

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Categories: Design.

Book Review: The Non-Designers Presentation Book

I wish I had an equally high recommendation for Robin Williams’ The Non-Designers Presentation Book as I do for PresentationZen Design. While Robin has some useful things to add to the discussion, her latest book just serves as a reminder that talented designers are not necessarily good presentation designers. I’ve often seen great graphic designers suddenly lose all their design training when they open PowerPoint. Often, when art directing traditional print designers on presentation, I’ll just say “Imagine you’re designing a billboard…” (And sometimes it even works.)

Robin is an excellent design writer (I particularly like her Robin Williams Design Workshop), but though she gives presentations often herself apparently, I found the book to be a scattered and cursory collection of thoughts and principles, oversimplified and lacking in a true understanding of the power of communication through on screen presentation.

Okay, that sounds harsh. She does have a grasp of the basics, which always bear repeating:

  • Reduce, reduce, reduce your text
  • Don’t be afraid of spreading your information across many slides
  • Eliminate superfluous stuff
  • White space is okay
  • Use full screen imagery instead of wimpy small pictures
  • Distribute separate detailed handouts

And she also caught my eye with a couple of interesting thoughts such as:

  • Design your slides so that they make no sense on their own; make them require elaboration
  • Use animation to define sections of your presentation

But overall I just feel as though Robin is way too enamored with using funky fonts; using contrast on individual slides, but not enough overall in a presentation; allowing too much repetition; and just settling too often for slides that fix the big problems, but still are way too PowerPoint-y.

The average person will definitely learn something from this book, but your time and money are much better spent reading Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte.

Oh, and apparently the one rule Robin insists you must adhere to is: Never use Helvetica. Get ready for the Garr vs. Robin cage match…

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Categories: Books, Design.

Book Review: PresentationZen Design

Two new books all about presentation design for non-designers have just hit the scene. The first is Garr Reynold’s follow-up to his essential 2008 Presentation Zen,called PresentationZen Design. If you missed it, you can read my discussion of his first book here. 

Garr’s new one is a highly thought-out and impeccably researched guide to designing effective, clear and powerful on-screen presentations that look professionally designed (and written), but that can be created by the non-designer without fancy tools.

The themes here, obviously, are simplicity, directness and beauty. The book, like so much in this world should be, is divided into thirds:

1. COMPONENTS
In the first section, Garr introduces the mantra of “Think communication, not decoration” and discusses limited use of text and typography (suggesting a limited number of fonts that should be part of your presentation toolkit). He even gives a spirited defense of Helvetica (which I wholeheartedly agree with.) He follows this with a primer on color usage and theory, giving some practical tips for quickly and easily finding color schemes. Then it’s on to imagery, perhaps the most important aspect of presentation. Finally, he addresses how to simplify and present your data so that, as I always say, you present not data, but the meaning of your data.

2. PRINCIPLES
Here Garr dives into some larger, but simplified design theories, and applies them to presentation. Using negative space, creating focus and balance, and grids are all covered.

3. THE JOURNEY
Finally, Garr discusses a path for continuing to improve your presentations and skills. 

The book is absolutely littered with effective (and non-effective) slide examples, almost on every page. The last section also gives a half dozen more complete presentation samples. Presentation Zen had wonderful examples, but the new book takes a major step up in showing hundreds and hundreds of real-world slides and the reasons why they are infinitely more effective than just bullet points. 

PresentationZen Design is a more in depth book than Presentation Zen. But it belongs on the desk of anyone who fires up PowerPoint regularly. It also belongs on the desk of the professor who, Garr recounts, graded down his student for presenting an effective, complete academic presentation (with a detailed companion handout), because the student did not use bullet points and because it did not look “like a PowerPoint.”

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Categories: Books, Design.

Where to Find Logos

Recently I discussed solutions for finding imagery. Now let’s talk logos.

One of my personal pet peeves is seeing things like this…

There are at least 5 major things wrong with the above logo. Can you spot them?

I’m a bit of a stickler for using crisp, current logos. I kind of see it like making sure you spell your client’s name correctly. But it can be a real challenge, even for professional designers, to get your hands on real logo files. 

If you are working with a graphic designer, or if you’re handy with Adobe Illustrator, your first stop should be brandsoftheworld.com where you can find the vast majority of brand logos in vector format. You can also try EPSLogos.net, logotypes.ru and logotypes101.

Once you obtain the EPS logo file, you want to convert (or have your designer convert) it to either a .PNG or .WMF format. Why not a JPEG? a JPEG has a tendency to degrade in quality as a file is saved, resaved and compressed. Additionally, a JPEG cannot be transparent the way a .PNG can (and often should) be. Transparency means that a logo can be “cut out” and placed over any background, and you should always try to save logos with transparency to give you the most flexibility.

The .WMF format is even more preferable in many cases as it is a Windows vector format that can be inserted into Microsoft applications. A .WMF can be exported from Adobe Illustrator and results in an image file that is tiny in size, infinitely scalable and which will never degrade as a file is compressed and saved. Additionally, once brought into PowerPoint or Word, it can actually be recolored and manipulated just like any other shape created natively in those programs. The one negative to a .WMF is that the curves it creates can be a little rough, and this may be apparent if the logo is used at a large size on the page. 

So, what do you do if you don’t have access to professional designers or software? While you always want to visit the brand’s website to confirm their current logo, you want to avoid copying their logo from the page’s header where it probably has been placed over an awkward background and might have an unnecessary tagline. (Additionally, you could be bringing over to PPT link or other problematic html info that could cause issues in PPT.) Instead, head to Wikipedia where you often can find a .PNG logo for the brand to download to your desktop, then insert into your presentation.
  
If Wikipedia can’t help, your next best bet is a Google image search where you’ll most likely find a decent JPEG of the logo. But again, make sure the logo is current. Other options include scouring the brand’s site for a downloadable logo (try the “media” link) or finding an investor or other presentation from which you might be able to copy the logo. Finally, if you’re presenting to a company and have a contact, just ask them to send you one suitable for a presentation. Don’t be embarrassed.

Sometimes, a good version of a logo just isn’t possible to find (although I seem to have a knack for finding them by scouring for and then extracting from PDF documents). Pharmaceutical logos are notoriously hard to find, owing to fears of counterfeiting.

But just as someone’s name is most precious to them (see Dale Carnegie…), so too a company’s logo is something to be treated with care. Especially if you want their business.

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Categories: Imagery.

Book Review: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

 

I just finished a cool new book by Carmine Gallo called The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Though Jobs and his style are often discussed with regard to effective presentation practices, this is the first time anyone has done a true analysis and devoted so many pages to explaining exactly why Jobs is considered one of corporate America’s best speakers.

Echoing Jobs’ pervasive use of a series of 3, Gallo divides his book in thirds:

  1. Create the Story
  2. Deliver the Experience
  3. Refine & Rehearse

 

Repeatedly using the actual scripts from Jobs’ keynotes to prove his points, Gallo portrays the Apple CEO as exacting and at times devious in his use of simplicity. For example, by avoiding jargon, tech-speak and clutter, Jobs consistently manages to craft the story he wants the consumers and press to hear. Often, it seems as the press is simply photocopying Apple press releases (“The world’s thinnest notebook,” “Apple reinvents the phone,” “1,000 songs in your pocket,” etc.)

Jobs’ zen aesthetic is evident everywhere, from his attention to lighting and stagecraft, avoidance of complicated numbers and statistics and to his use of imagery and sparse use of words on screen. 

What you won’t see at an Apple Keynote are bullet points. What you will see are product demos, humor, guest speakers, props, stunts, surprises and a lot of theatricality. 

As Gallo explains in recounting Jobs’ famous job offer to then Pespi CEO John Scully (“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”), there is always a messianic zeal that pervades Jobs and his presentations. The author spends a whole chapter on the use of “Holy Shit” moments.

Finally, Gallo talks at length about Jobs’ rigorous preparation and rehearsal, things I imagine most people never imagined were involved in the seemingly casual Apple presentations.

The book is much more than hero worship (although there is a little of that). There are concrete techniques described and analyzed that almost anyone could make use of in their own pitches and presentations. It’s worth picking up.

Behind the Steve

A Real Behind the Scenes View
if you want to learn a little more about life behind the scenes of a Steve Jobs Keynote (and the exhaustive work that goes into it), Mike Evangelist, a former product lead for Apple, wrote a fascinating story for the Guardian called “Behind the Magic Curtain.”

And check out this secretly taken pic of Steve’s onstage notes from one of his Keynotes…

Finally, the wonder of the interwebs means that you can watch many of Jobs’ keynotes on YouTube… 

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Categories: Books, Presenting Live.
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