Why do Google map's labels seem so readable?

An interesting post on the 41Lattitude blog with a very detailed analysis of why the labels on maps by Google are so much more readable than those on maps by Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing.

The final fixes

The final version of most business presentations is created when the person-with-the-pen hits "save" after the wording is agreed in a slide-by-slide meeting.

If you are the person-with-the-pen, why not wait for everyone to leave the room and go over each slide one more time, but now focus on the visual fixes. Align boxes, sort out the fonts, round up those decimals and hit "save" again.

Twenty minutes of work with great impact. It might not be a big deal, but the brain is distracted/bothered by small layout errors in a slide. Like the urge most people have to straighten that curtain, "it's been bothering me all evening".

Free the world of trackers

Many business presentations are loaded with tracker elements:

• An agenda page with a highlighted bar that moves as we go from section to section
• A miniature version of a framework in the top right corner of a slide with a changing color highlight to remind people what we are talking about.

I find trackers great for big documents: it allows fast browsing if you need to refer back to material. In (shorter) presentations I try to avoid them:

• If you need trackers to keep people hooked to your story, your story is probably very boring. Maybe you can try to change the story?
• These top-right symbols add clutter to the slide design
• A big tracker agenda can come across daunting for an audience: "oh no, 5 sections before we get to the conclusion, let's check email on the Blackberry..."

I am all in favor of structure, just let it come natural via your story, without having to "rub it in". One elegant solution is the full page separator slide like the ones I used in the IDU Biometrics presentation. They can contain a few words about what comes next e.g., "technology", or better you can write a question that wakes up the audience and makes them curious to find out more what's next: "why is this such a great biometric?".

Designing a minimalist Twitter page

I gave my Twitter page an overhaul. Designing a Twitter page is tricky:

1. On small screens the side bar on the left gets eliminated
2. A twitter stream is a cacophony of links, icons, avatars, buttons

Here is the approach I took:

1. Minimize the use of distracting colors that only add to the chaos of avatars and links
2. Use a background image that gives a sense of open space, with a light source from the top, and minimal visual distractions
3. Invert the colors of the right side bar: really dark semitransparent background, with a white font (it will look a bit weird in the Twitter style editor). I find it very hard to get any color to look good here, because the semi-transparent setting will make any of your choices look pale.
4. The same is true for links, I struggle to find good link colors and as a result set them light grey. Most Twitter links are shortened URLs that people do not need to read anyway. The alternative would have been to pick a very bright one with high contrast, but that would only add to the cacophony of the page.

What do you think?

Back to simple

There are just so many advantages to making slides with very simple shapes:

• It focuses on what you want to say only
• They are easy and quick to make
• They look highly professional without a degree in graphics design and/or the full suit of Adobe software
• It easy to create a sense of motion
• There are no issues with images/illustrations that do not fit your color template

An example is this poster by Network Osaka (actually must better than a concept designed by me a year ago):

IDU Biometrics: 41 slides in 6 minutes

One of my presentations in the public domain. This time the setup was the global finals of the 2010 Global Security Challenge in London. Startups that had won the regional semifinals were granted 6 minutes to pitch their company in the field of IT security to a jury. I designed the presentation for IDU Biometrics within the following constraints:

• 6 minutes, no second more
• An audience that understands IT security, but has no idea what so ever about the company the moment the 6 minutes start, we begin at level 0
• A very tight startup budget: all designed in basic PowerPoint without sophisticated effects and/or illustrations, one file that forms the basis for the company presentation, a looping presentation inside the company booth at the exhibition that was held in the same venue, a video for online viewing, and a good introduction for a broader presentation for fund raising from venture capitalists.

Here is the video version of the presentation:

PowerPoint/Office 2011 for Mac - mixed reviews?

I considered upgrading my Mac Microsoft Office software (including PowerPoint) to the new Office 2011 release but hesitated after this review by David Pogue of the New York Times, and a few negative reviews on Amazon that seemed genuine. Have any of you tried it?

Dropbox' YCombinator fundraising application

This interesting file from 2007 made it to the top of Hacker News at some time during the day: the application of Dropbox for funding by YCombinator. The question/answer exchanges read like a high-paced due diligence interview by a potential investor. The answers are short and to the point, the questions are short and to the point. Learn from it and improve your own investor pitch.

So how many different types of slides are there?

I think there are 4 different type of visuals,  Have I forgotten any? (The images below are taken - out of their context - from previous posts on this blog)

1. Big picture, big emotion slide. A huge image of a squeezed orange "the competition is killing us!", a big picture of an audience asleep "presentations are boring!", swimmer dives in the pool "let's go for it!" (lot's of cliches here, but I have seen many good ones as well). These slides are an emotional shortcut, they unlock an idea/feeling that is already present in everyone's brain quickly.
   
   
   
2. Location port, a big image of a place, a street, a country, a customer. Pretty much like a movie director opening a film to bring us to a different time, a different place. An image of the interior of a messy store is much more powerful than a list of bullets: isles are not straight, labeling is unclear, lighting is poor.
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Relationship slide. Shapes/boxes with text, arrows, to show how issues are related, impacting each other, are dependent on each other, sit in different places on the same map.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Data chart showing us a trend, or comparing numbers.
   
   
   

An incredibly dense relationship or data chart should actually be in the "location port" category, the U.S. army spaghetti chart is an example: it is not so much about understanding the chart in detail, rather the viewer understands immediately that "it's complex" (earlier post).

Common mistakes that people make today:

• Over-use the big picture slide, creating a machine gun fire of cliche images flying across the screen. Impressive pictures, but a hollow story
• Using bullets to describe what's should be inside a "location port" image
• Using bullets to describe forces/relationships/dependencies that can more easily be visualized in a relationship chart
• Making unfocused data charts showing information that is not essential to make the point that needs to be made

Image consistency

One of the things I find the most difficult in presentation design is to get a consistent look and feel across all slides in the deck. It is tempting to come up with the killer chart for each concept that you want to communicate. Each slide is great, but if you look at your slides in the slide sorter, nobody would guess they are taken from the same story.

So, we have to add one more constraint to the design process: consistency. Some visualization ideas might just not work given the overall context of the presentation, sorry.

In the design process, I always start with the most important slides that convey the heart of the message. Brainstorm, sketch these, and then freeze the look and feel of the entire presentation based on these few slides:

• Fonts
• Colors
• Position of titles
• Type of images (cartoon, nature, vintage, people, color)

Think of your presentation as a movie that runs in the background, it is set in a time, a place. You pick them all, but stay inside the world of your presentation. 

Image credit: Copeau,

Book review - "Resonate"

Anyone interested in presentation design will have heard about or bought Nancy Duarte's latest book: Resonate. I managed to read it over the weekend, here are my impressions.

While her previous book slide:ology was mostly about slide design, Resonate is about stories, stories that get your audience to change their perspective, and take action, do something, change something. It is actually the right order of learning how to become a good presentation designer: first acquire the skills to visualize a single concept in a chart, then focus on weaving those charts together to build a powerful story.

This is what I see happening around me. The current Slideshare presentation of the year competition shows that thousands of people have acquired the skill to make "stunning visuals" using images. But most story lines are still relatively simple: sequences of chars showing how big something is, or sequences of images that show emotions/feelings that we all recognize. Great movie directors or authors posses the art to take you along a more complex path  that will change you and the perspectives you have of the world. This is what Resonate is trying to get to.

Slide:ology is a reference book that I still use when designing slides, Resonate is different. It is a book with an idea, looking at the cover on the book shelf will remind you to check whether this is the best story line you could come up with

Large parts of the book are written using reverse engineering, analyzing great presentation and speeches and see why they had so much impact on their audiences. But on top of that, Nancy threw in her own presentation design experience, and embarked on a significant research effort in areas such as movie scrip writing and classic rhetoric. A few of the interesting points that were highlighted in the book (just random examples, not a MECE (what's this?) summary of the book's contents):

• Humility. The presentation is not about you, but about the audience, and audiences do not connect with arrogant speakers. Nancy is giving the example herself throughout the book, it is written in a very personal, understated style, admitting some personal mistakes, all of this given her impressive background in presentation design.
• Contrast keeps the audience interested: constantly move between the "what is now" to the "what could be". Change pace, change the type of slides, change, change, change to prevent boredom.
• Add emotion to the cold facts. Go back into your own memory to find your own stories to add a personal touch to your presentation
• Micro-segment the audience. Really understand who's in it. (I liked the observation that analytical audiences are suspicious).

Slide design you can learn/teach with a bunch of practical tricks to fix the basic mistakes. Story weaving is something different. Books such as Resonate remind us how important it is, and give use some idea where to get started, but story telling is impossible to "automate" using a prescribed process. It is an art.

All links to Amazon on this post are affiliate links.

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?).

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.