Over at A List Apart, I ran across an archived article by Dean Allen published back in November of 2001. Dean is an interesting character with a keen insight into how communication design works. His critique of Edward Tufte’s rant against PowerPoint is what first got me listening. He created Textpattern, a PHP-based content management system for websites. Anyway his thoughts titled Reading Design ring refreshingly true to someone who makes a living trying to wring clarity from OPP (Other People’s Powerpoint).

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, 24 self-covered pages to tide us over until Tufte’s next book, Beautiful Evidence, looks to be similarly unlikely to budge too many people from bad design habits, like the millions now working up presentations in PowerPoint (AutoContent is just too killer an app, and don’t forget WordArt). But, as a hilarious collection of pot-shots at the ludicrous meatgrinder of ideas that is PowerPoint, it is one satisfying read. The data is of course unimpeachable, and the examples are exactly right, but one wishes the key points were presented in a breezier style, like, oh, a bulleted list, with some lively colours and graphics. Ahem.  

Dean Allen pretty much echoes my thoughts on the design philosphy of Edward Tufte. Specifically, I agree that while Tufte is absolutely right about how to present data clearly in a bar chart, and he does a great job of elegant book design, when he rants about the horrors of Powerpoint, he misses a few essential points. Powerpoint can be employed extremely effectively to compliment a live presentation. Autocontent can be turned off. WordArt can be eschewed. Default templates, color schemes and fonts can be reconfigured and suddendly Powerpoint is not such a horrible tool. (One may still cringe at the application’s inability to properly kern text, though even this limitation has been mitigated on the Mac through OS-X’s Quartz text rendering.)

Lawrence Lessig’s presentation on the history and evolution of copyright law is an excellent example of simple but effective text used to support a speech. There are no fancy charts or clipart. The words on screen simply provide focus to what is being spoken, while judiciously chosen images –usually one per screen– effectively evoke what words cannot. This online version requires the Flash player… http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/