brisebois blog

The expression “Death by Powerpoint” often refers to this: slides showing the words that the presenter is saying.

These creative advertisements (and part 2) will help you think differently about the use of visuals.

POINT ONE: Presentations are about IDEAS, not TEXT.

POINT TWO: READING from SLIDES is a heinous crime.

POINT THREE: PEOPLE cannot COPE without some kind of visual STIMULATION.

Presenting the abstract pointillist powerpoint toolkit. 20 slides that can be used for any presentation. Cut, paste, copy, crop the slides to create an abstract of your ideas that you can then talk to and through.

(thanks)

Richard St. John polled a group of very smart people on what it takes to be successful. He presents his findings around 8 keywords (4 min.)

A contest. Also, a great way to think through your elevator speech.

A 20-minute video that will surely trigger a much-needed debate in your classroom.

geo.worldbank.org

A mashup of Google Maps with World Bank data that gives the reader a visual entry point to browse our projects, news, statistics and public information center by country.

Business Planet

It maps online databases of the World Bank Group that support private sector-led growth and financial market development in developing countries. It features more than 20 maps that cover over 190 economies across issues like How easy it is to do business, How often firms are expected to bribe tax inspectors, and much more.

Building a Better World

A way to track the UN’s Millenium Development Goals.

Choose between a number of indicators, select which countries you want to show and then see the development over time.

Watch this 20-minute presentation from its developer at the TED conference 2007:

Go to gapminder.org for more information and other databases.

Related posts:

Visual literacy

The guru of quantitative information display

Words and visuals: Why are you there?

“All the things Tufte says are absolutely true. People often make very bad use of PowerPoint.”

Mr. Gaskins [one of the creators of PowerPoint; see below] reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.” (…)

Now grade-school children turn in book reports via PowerPoint. The men call that an abomination. Children, they emphatically agree, need to think and write in complete paragraphs.

Still, the men don’t appreciate PowerPoint being blamed for crimes it didn’t commit. Mr. Gaskins studied a vast collection of presentations before designing the program. Bullet points, he says, existed long before PowerPoint. (…)

If they have a lament, it’s that complaints about PowerPoint are usually not about the software but about bad presentations. “It’s just like the printing press,” says Mr. Austin. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”

As Mr. Gaskins puts it: “If they do an inadequate job with PowerPoint, they would do just as bad using something else.” (WSJ)

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PowerPoint’s history

Robert Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student, conceived PowerPoint originally as an easy-to-use presentation program. He hired a software developer, Dennis Austin, in 1984 to build a prototype program that they called “Presenter,” later changing the name to PowerPoint for trademark reasons. PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh platform; later that year Gaskins’s company Forethought and the program were purchased by Microsoft for $14 million. The first Windows and DOS versions of PowerPoint followed in 1988. PowerPoint became a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite in 1990. According to Microsoft, more than 30 million presentations are made around the world with PowerPoint every day. (source and photo credit: UC Berkeley)

 

Related posts:

The guru of quantitative information display

Presentations and that creature called PowerPoint

Words and visuals: Why are you there?

How do you set people on fire?

It is as necessary to effective business communication as computer literacy is to effective business practice.

References:

The Virtual Literacy website is an e-learning tutorial on visualization for communication, engineering and business. You also want to explore the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) website.

Resources:

You cannot afford not to use the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods and this accompanying resource that documents each of the methods from the Periodic Table.

Related post: The guru of quantitative information display

His field is almost sui generis, containing bits and pieces of art direction, data-crunching, economics, historical research, and plain old expository writing. It’s often labeled “information architecture,” or “analytic design.” Tufte himself describes it many ways, but one is drawn from a classic piece of science writing: “escaping Flatland,” or using paper’s two dimensions to convey several more.

Tufte’s obsessions and coinages: Content-light splashy graphics, or “chartjunk,” are bad. Little repeated graphics displaying variations, or “small multiples,” are good. Microsoft’s PowerPoint software is an all-conquering monster of crumminess, a threat to life as we know it. Most of all, if you are making a presentation, you can probably say everything you need to on a single folded sheet of eleven-by-seventeen copy paper, and you ought to.

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent profile of Edward Tufte.

UPDATE 7-5-07: The Stanford Magazine also has a profile that nicely supplements the NYT’s.

Related: Presentations and that creature called PowerPoint