So I was lucky enough to see Edward Tufte speak at the NYC Geosymposium last week. I have been a fan of his work and used his books as reference when designing applications over the past few years. The one thing that really struck me was his presentation was as captivating as any I have seen in the past and he didn’t use PowerPoint. I had forgotten his position on PowerPoint:

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.

Image via Mark Goetz

Some notes

Here are some of my notes from the presentation.

• Information overload is caused by redundant information
• Come to the information with a question you are looking to answer
• Model government should use for reporting information is that of non-fiction websites.
• The average table produced by a government has 12 numbers in it, a sports table on ESPN.com has 120 numbers
• 2 Industries call customers “Users”: Illegal Drugs and Software
• Do whatever it takes to explain something, never predispose the dataset or mode of display
• Once you identify a number as a goal or benchmark, that is when people start fudging data to meet that number
• Tables are just paragraphs of numbers