Sync those charts

The idea behind the chart in the Haaretz newspaper is a good one: breaking the GDP growth up in its components (click the image for a bigger picture). The charts are not aligned very well:

• The horizontal axis are not aligned
• The scale of the vertical axis is different for each chart

iPhone business idea

I stumbled across these web sites recently. Poolga let's you pick artistic wallpapers for your iPhone, Tseventy gives a collection of hand-picked photography that you can download to your iPhone. Strange that all images seem to be portrait though.

The iPhone opening screen is a waste of screen real estate. Why not have a new image everyday, a useful quote or an interesting stat, or a word of the day? We need a (presentation) designer and an iPhone app programmer to get together...

It reminds me a bit of the early 1990s when Internet-powered screen savers clogged up corporate networks (remember Pointcast?). Leaving network performance aside, it did not work for desktop screens because people are staring all day at these. The mobile screen in your pocket might just be suited though.

Book review - "Bibliographic"

I stumbled on this book: Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books in a Tel Aviv book store the other day. The vast majority of recent books on graphics design are meant to be "eye candy", sitting on coffee tables without being read in detail. What a joy it is therefore to go back to older titles.

This book lists 100 important books on graphics design and typography. Each book is discussed, put in its historical context, and highlighted with an image of the cover and  a few page spreads.

It is striking to see how only a few decades ago, graphics and type still looked so basic. But equally important is the realization how the current overdose of computer-generated images and decorations detracts from the basic purpose of a poster or a slide: convey a message. When people just had type and basic shapes as design tool, it forced them to make the most of them. I find myself in a similar situation, armed with PowerPoint, fonts, images but without the graphic artillery of sophisticated Adobe Illustrator designs. Looking some of the designs from the 30s or 60s convinces me that I can do without this back up.

Some books discussed in the book are still in print, and I have added a few to my wishlist:

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition by Edward Tufte (yes, I have not read this book yet)
• Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface by Lars Mueller (maybe time to stock up on the DVD
  as well)
  
• Meggs' History of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs
  

Here is an extensive book review with a full list of the book titles inside by Swipe in Toronto (it is these type of specialist stores that I miss now and then here in Tel Aviv). Any more suggestions on typography and graphics design classics?

All links to Amazon in this post are affiliate links.

Simple shapes, powerful message

This image tells 2 things:

1. Have the courage to deviate from standard visual cliches
2. Simple shapes can still convey a powerful message

The image was added by Robin Benson and taken from this book:  Graphic Design, Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design (affiliate link)

Gap width to 50%

Microsoft PowerPoint sets the standard gap width between columns or bars to 150%. Graphs look much better if you set it to 50%. Right click the columns/bars in your chart, select format data series and lower the gap width value.

Showing versus describing

Describing is an indirect way to convey a message:

• We have systems in 3 countries
• They are maintained on different time schedules
• Five different departments are interfering with maintenance

In short, it is a mess. The bullet point chart above does not convey the message very well. Why not show the mess and create a chart with boxes for each of the countries, the departments and connect them with arrows color-coded by time to show what's going on.

The chart will be busy, the chart will be dense, the chart might even be incomprehensible, but hey, you wanted to convince your audience that it is time to do something about this? No better way to do it.

Image credit: Mr. P

Do fonts display correctly?

I have changed the fonts on this blog to Helvetica Neue, they look great on every computer/browser that I have tried even if you do not have these fonts installed on your computer. Every, except for one computer/browser combination: my own Chrome browser on my own desktop (IE works fine)... Please let me know if you are experiencing garbled fonts on this site.

Graphics design overload?

I have been browsing through a number of books on contemporary graphics design recently and I must say: "more is better" seems to be the motto of many designs. Adobe Illustrator is powering complex gradients, elaborate ornaments and sophisticated hand-drawn effects. Maybe graphics design is ready for a "Zen revolution" similar to presentation design? (Or I simply have been reading the wrong books?).

stickyslides.com without the blogspot

I am embarking on a rebranding exercise of my presentation design business and in the process, I am also sorting out the various URLs of my online presence. I will continue to host Sticky Slides with Blogger/Google despite the slightly "amateurish" look and feel of the site:

• I do not want to disrupt existing RSS subscriptions
• There is actually something to an "amateurish" corner where we can discuss issues related to presentation design outside the context of a corporate brand

Having said that, I managed to get rid of the "blogspot" bit in the URL and the site can now be accessed both on stickyslides.blogspot.com and stickyslides.com, including links to older posts and images.

Original PPTX files from my posts

Now and people comment that they would like to receive the original PPTX files of the slides I discuss here on the blog. I am hesitant to put them up on a regular basis, but will respond to a request by email or in the comments.

Chart concept - negative lettering space

Here is a cute idea for a slide: negative lettering space. Computerarts.co.uk has a full tutorial how to create this effect here. It is easy to copy in PowerPoint: start with a word in a huge font on a page, set the font color light grey (or another color with a light contrast to your background), fill the page with the images you want, and as a final step delete the text or color it the same as your slide background.

Here is a search for earlier posts with a "can't see the forest through the tress" type of concept.

An emotion is worth a thousand pictures

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is a famous cliche, highlighting how inefficient reading text is as a means to transfer information.

1. Read/recognize words
2. Construct sentences
3. Extract meaning
4. Visualize image

Just looking at a picture directly would have saved a lot of time/brain power.

But this is just one level of efficiency/shortcut. Let me explain.

Locked up in your brain are millions of experiences and emotions that you have accumulated over the years. These stored experiences are of a totally different order of magnitude than a simple image. A good presentation slide manages to unlock these hidden experiences in a microsecond: a super brain short cut.

A crude comparison is to look at the basics of the transistor, an electronic component that was the basis of the rise of the portable radio and modern consumer electronics. A small current to the Basis terminal, unlocks a much larger current between the other 2 terminals (image via Wikipedia).

In his book Brain Rules, John Medina explains how smell is actually an even more powerful trigger of releasing experiences than visual stimulation. Besides the technical challenge of using smells in a presentation, it would also be impossible to use them: the smell that counts is the one you personally experienced when "recording" the emotion. They are different for every member in the audience.

I always like to contradict myself, so here we go. Hemingways' famous 6-word story:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

is actually an example of how a few words can actually trigger a complex chain of emotions in our brain. More 6-word stories here. But I think it is the exception to the rule.

Back to presentations, how to use this when designing slides? When looking for images, test (on your self) how good a job a candidate does in triggering a broader state of mind, beyond the plain descriptive features of the photo you have in front of you.