Beautiful graphics – Evils of Powerpoint

Thinking the other day about how so many meetings were dominated by poor quality presentations reminded me of the work of Edward Tufte, who has written some marvellous books on the presentation of information.

These books which are beautifully produced are extremely informative.

His website is well worth a visit, if only to admire the contents.

One of my favourites has always been his reproduction of Minard’s

map of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812.

Professor Tufte has produced an excellent mongraph on – The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, from which the illustration below is taken.

Tufte satirizes the totalitarian impact of presentation slideware.

The monograph is now in it’s second edition and is well worth getting hold of.

Prof. Tuft wrote an article in 2003 for Wired, from which the concluding paragraphs are reproduced below:-

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple.

The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.