1.Our bad example of design really throws a lot at you, which was the purpose of the design. You first have no real eye flow, things are not organized to help you with that. The font is too small, while also being the same color as the back ground so you lose readability of the letters. Even though you lose resolution through a simple drag and drop the graphics on the logo are not crisp. Plus you have an object that doesn’t seem to fit what you are doing the experiment on in the lower left corner. Too much purple also it just makes it look like a bunch of website links that have been looked at. The glow on the title make sense and fit but are again one of those things that are not needed. Oh one last thing, there is too much capitalization on everything.
In the second good example you have good color choices. The blue is light enough that you don’t overpower the black lettering on the font. There is also the good use of the background art. What it does is it created eye flow within the text. It catches your eye to show you where the part of the presentation are. All the text is upper and lower case so you actually can read what is going on. Also there is no over text in the presentation. That makes you lose attention if the presentation is text heavy. The emphasis in this is also on the graph and results. Within the graph you don’t have any over info. There are no excess legends. There is also colors that are complimentary so you don’t look at them as foreign, blue and red work due to who you are presenting the information.
2.The Tufte report starts out with a simple Idea. Why are presentation being given at a level that isn’t to the level of the audience? The origin is an IBM meeting where the presentation is stopped and asked let’s talk about what we actually do here not what we sort of do. This was a shock because well to the people there this was how they told information in this setting.
The next point he makes is that PowerPoint is a tool for certain people. That the bottom percentage of people who can’t make a presentation have a way to communicate if they are not good speakers. Then you have another sub group who knows how to manipulate PowerPoint so it doesn’t look like power point. Then you have the majority who just fall into the traps that the medium has.
Tufte then starts into his basic argument. PowerPoint only seems strong when in fact it is very weak. Also he points out later a very good tool to lie with to the audience. He starts to point out well you can write out a report that gives the actual info you are looking for not the bullets and graphs that can only confuse you or look pretty and take up your time.
It then comes to him pointing out well there is like a standard format people follow. A little info is given then next slide. Then you have a buildup of what is going to happen then another line, followed by another line. All this happening on separate slides as a way to confuse or manipulate the person being presented that they are seeing a lot of content. Then within this people will do things like animation or weird font choices to seem different.
Next we come to my favorite part. How PowerPoint is being used in schools as a substitute for actual reports. How kids are being shown do this, write that and have a couple words on a page with some clip are to show a presentation. This point is that maybe we shouldn’t do this and focus on other methods like actually engaging the students and how they should convey information.
We now had Tufte’s big evidence of power points weakness. It was the report to NASA following the 2003 Columbia flight disaster. He came from two angles on this one. First showing how PowerPoint was the cause, then Tufte showed the follow up of how it was pointed out that they were manipulated by a power point presentation to achieve the wrong outcome and not come up with any actual answers but more of a way of doing things. He points out that PowerPoint in this case was used by Boeing to confuse and not actually solve the problem. He pointed out that there was the Phluff in it being big bullets points, sub bullets, and then sub sub bullet points and the confusing language to throw off what could actually happen if the shuttle comes back to earth. Then he points to the next big problem that happened there was no standard in what was being written in units used. In this case there was three different types of units used, In this case implying that either this was put together by three different people of that they were pushed around by the limitations of the program and then just left with it in the presentation.
We then have the follow up to the first Columbia report and see the fix actions. It is here that the questions are asked, why did you let them only use PowerPoint? Why was there no reports written and actually looked at? Then came the question of why was PowerPoint only used for the actual approval process? That instead of showing how they were going from A to B in a report they were just saying well get here in a few vague bullet points.
Next there is how the information is presented. You have everything being cut down. He used the Gettysburg address as an example how you lose the magnitude when you only use a few lines or a graphic that doesn’t fit. His next example is the cancer survival rates chart and how if you used what is built in that you will get confusing graphs that lose all the info and only lead to more confusion.
The Harvard School of Public Health slide shows a lot of these limitations. They had only one bullet per page. Only a few words per page and then if there any graphs or numbers they have to be in this format of a simple matrix. Then there was the choices of colors that are hard to read and read against and also choices of making sure that information on the slides like unneeded almost advertisements.
Tufte closes with some answers. Those answers are if you can, don’t use PowerPoint. Use an actual presentation with a report to show you information. Also lack of information is what PowerPoint Strives for, don’t do this. You writing for your audience and you will have to actually show your knowledge if you have to give out handouts instead of hiding behind the limitations of power points.