Visual Presentations: From Bullet Points to Story Telling
Most people’s use of Powerpoint is appalling. Times New Roman. Stock Powerpoint templates. Way too much text. Not sure of the next slide. Eek. Combine this with the fact that most people giving a Powerpoint presentation are actually trying to persuade their audience, and we quickly understand the oxymoron that is “Powerpoint persuasion.”
Edward Tufte – the father of visual representation of data – has a wonderful essay on the perils of Powerpoint. He writes, “the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.” Zing.
Into this morass of bad fonts and poor communication lands an emerging school of “visual thinking.” Dan Roam’s book The Back of a Napkin is a fabulous “how-to” guide for using diagrams and sketches to present ideas. It’s so basic – yet so profound.
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