Powerpoint & Visual Literacy (A History of Content Part 1)

Ralph Kerle has a go at the Death by Powerpoint brigade. I don't think that Ralph & the anti-ppt mob are that far apart actually. The issue is less around powerpoint itself than the absence of visual design skills in the population at large (myself included).

The unholy triumvirate of Word, Excel & Powerpoint are to be found on every office desktop. Of the three, powerpoint is the least understood even if excel is the most feared.

Word has a lengthy prehistory. The first word processing programs in the 70s controlled actual electric typewriters. Physical spreadsheets have been used by accountants for centuries but the creation of VisiCalc was a major driver in the adoption of personal computers by business people (more on both of these in future posts).

Powerpoint is much younger than either of these. Presenter was developed by Forethought Inc for the Mac back in the late 80s, originally as a design tool for 35 mm slides. These would have been put together by professional designers as printing was still expensive. Powerpoint didn't come into its own until the spread of the Windows GUI interface & the the spread of LCD projectors.

Marshall McLuhan noted that we view new technologies thru the lens of older ones. For non-designers (i.e. most of us), powerpoint is just a snazzier version of Word in landscape not portrait. This is partly because our computers have been writing machines (hell, they even look like typewriters) rather than drawing machines. If we were able to make that mental shift (whether using tablet PCs, handhelds, whatever) then I suspect our use of powerpoint would be very different.

Beyond those ontological observations, here are some more practical comments on powerpoint:

Many use powerpoint as a word processing tool for the creation of reports. This is a really dumb idea (it was endemic at IBM during my time there). You have a word processor on your desktop - use it.

Few users have a clue about the basics of visual design (Exhibit 1: Slides filled to the brim with 6 pt text).

Even fewer have a clue about visual communication as an adjunct to a spoken presentation.

Many people hate public speaking. Writing your speaker notes on your powerpoint slides provides a nice, warm safety blanket, no matter how much it sucks from a design perspective.

Most speakers are too lazy to prepare a separate presentation & handout and most audiences are too lazy to request them.

To dam this endless stream of bad presentations, I would suggest that most business users of powerpoint need to understand "presentation" in the round:

Presenting with impact (words, images, voice & body)

Basic visual design

The techie bits with powerpoint (such as animation)

And fatwa on powerpoint as a report-writing tool wouldn't be a bad idea either.

(Is it just me or does the powerpoint logo look like pacman with 40-a-day ciggie habit?)