The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
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The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
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Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
#2I've loaned my hardcopy of this classic to many people in my industry. Regrettably it has not had any impact and Powerpoint still runs rampant. I am not a Tufte fanboy but this article hits perfectly.
Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
#3I've loaned my hardcopy of this classic to many people in my industry. Regrettably it has not had any impact and Powerpoint still runs rampant. I am not a Tufte fanboy but this article hits perfectly.
When I was in my business development phase I was taught to make presentations for C-levels at Fortune 500 companies like this:
Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything.
Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that.
Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their intelligence.
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At times in life Powerpoint has really been my medium, it is much easier for me to put together presentations by putting together various graphics and symbols in PP than anything else, and I've tried.
Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
#4I've loaned my hardcopy of this classic to many people in my industry. Regrettably it has not had any impact and Powerpoint still runs rampant. I am not a Tufte fanboy but this article hits perfectly.
When I was in my business development phase I was taught to make presentations for C-levels at Fortune 500 companies like this: Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything. Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that. Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their…
My experience: The higher you go, the dumber they get.
Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in my business development phase I was taught to make presentations for C-levels at Fortune 500 companies like this: Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything. Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that. Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their…
My experience: The higher you go, the dumber they get.
I thought that too when I got started but I learned otherwise.
Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
#6Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
#7Nobody has the patience anymore to be presented to or read in any form other than bullet points and low information density charts.
I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images projected for a fraction of a second one after the other.
But no one has the patience for my storytelling style. Congratulations if you got this far, most people gave up if they didn’t grok my point in the first two sentences.
Yes slideware is ugly and low information and boring and insulting to the audience, but some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.
Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
#8I've loaned my hardcopy of this classic to many people in my industry. Regrettably it has not had any impact and Powerpoint still runs rampant. I am not a Tufte fanboy but this article hits perfectly.
When I was in my business development phase I was taught to make presentations for C-levels at Fortune 500 companies like this: Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything. Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that. Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their…
I’m a McKinsey consultant and this reads as kind of crazy. Nobody is ever doing anything with 50 distinct slides.
My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is getting your thesis up top. The title of a page needs to be the only thing people really need to read to understand what you’re trying to convey. The contents of the page are just the details of why you’re saying it.
Most people instinctively do this in reverse and have a page where they throw a visual onto the page and make the title of the page just an announcement of what the visual is; and then either verbally or with small text callouts explain why it matters.