Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes - The Goodman ...

Unify elements to create a visual hierarchy.
Like a well-designed print advertisement or billboard, a PowerPoint slide should capture
attention like a stop sign and direct it like a road map. Too often, however, the slides in
nonprofit presentations are all over the road. They may appear at a glance to have the
minimum daily adult requirements – a title, bullet points, picture and caption – but the
overall design does not tell the viewer where to look first, second, third, etc. There is too
much visual clutter. And as a result, the eye wanders, then the mind wanders, then the
viewer wanders right out of the room.
“Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not necessarily the amount of information,”
says Edward Tufte in his seminar, “Presenting Data and Information.” In many cases, by
simply rearranging and visually prioritizing the same elements, a poorly designed slide can
be transformed into an eye-catching thing of beauty.
Environmental Defense, a national environmental organization,
used this slide (figure 21) to depict the ecological
damage caused by clearcutting forests in the Western Sierra
Mountains. The overall design of the slide is seemingly clean
and professional, but its visual power is undermined by two
problems: There are too many items competing for the eye’s
attention, and the most important item is not prioritized.
Like many organizations (nonprofit and otherwise), Environmental
Defense uses a standard template for all its
PowerPoint presentations. This template was one product of a
comprehensive branding effort, which is laudable for its
intent to unify the visual representations of the group’s work.
For PowerPoint, however, the template (like almost all such
templates I have seen) puts information on every slide that
adds very little to the presentation while denying space to
elements that legitimately require it.
Branding is important, but an organization can remain true
to its brand by using the designated color palette, font, and
basic design style without slavishly imposing unnecessary
graphics on every single PowerPoint slide. This was the basic
philosophy behind my redesign efforts (figure 22). First, by
eliminating the organization’s name, logo, and the blue bars
on the top and bottom of the slide, I created space so the most
important element – the picture of the clearcut mountainside
– could become the dominant visual. After that, I used
Environmental Defense’s prescribed color and font to present
the text in a box that is clearly secondary to the picture.
Finally, I animated the name of the mountain range, the date
of its clearcutting, and the three bullets so they would appear
only as the speaker reached each point.
FIGURE 21
FIGURE 22
pg. 61