Welcome to Graphic Design and Presentation, Part I. 1
Our goal in this presentation is to teach you how to avoid Powerpoint Poisoning. 2
Broadly, there are two purposes of graphics. The first is analytic, to take data and do something to it that allows us to create information out of raw data. The second is presentation, which involves communicating ideas to others. In this first module, we re going to focus almost exclusively on communication. We ll talk more about analytic graphing in another module. 3
There are a number of resources available to you outside this presentation, of course. These are a few URLs that can lead you to some resources. Feel free to let me know of some other resources you find handy, and let me know if any of these links ever break. 4
There are a number of good books that can help you learn to do better charting, and in future modules we ll go into more detail on some of the readings. But to start with, Steven Kosslyn s Elements of Graph Design is an excellent choice. Ed Tufte is perhaps the leading scholar today thinking hard about principles of graphic design relevant to the kind of charting we do. I don t always agree with Tufte, and I ll say a lot more about his ideas including some of his views that Powerpoint itself is, well, something we d be better off without. I have learned to embrace Powerpoint. It s here, and I think we re going to need to get used to it. Getting rid of it is not an option for most of us. We want to learn to use it better. 5
The first principle and the one that will bail you out of most problems is to use a style that s clean, simple and high-contrast. There s two ways to be high-contrast. One is to have black or a very, very dark text laid on a white or other very simple light background. The other is to go the other direction and to have, say, a white font on a very, very dark background. I ll look at an example of the latter a little later in the presentation, but for most lighting conditions and for most purposes, it s much better to go with something as simple as black on white. 6
Here are four styles that I ve actually taken from Microsoft ss defaults in the previous version of Powerpoint. To Microsoft s credit, they are getting better with each passing version. Nevertheless, their default styles are often confusing and not recommended. Here s one of the most egregious examples from Powerpoint 2003. What were they thinking? How could you possibly find a font color that s going to show up well on a red, a white and a black background simultaneously? Bizarre. 7
The best we can say for this format is it s better than the previous slide. 8
As someone who grew up in the 50s and 60s, this green-on-green design at least has the virtue of making me think of the Formica kitchens I saw in my childhood. Other than that, there s not much to be said for it. 9
I ll Ill tell you a little story about this design off-line. It involves a former faculty member, and I don t wanttobeto sued for libel. 10
So, if you didn t think this design looked very good a few minutes ago, certainly after the last four slides it looks better to you. Let me show you a little bit about the evolution of my own thinking on my standard designs over the past decade or so. 11
For quite a while, I used a style like the following, which isn t a bad one it s fairly clean, it has a little bit of blue highlighting which may solve the boredom problem if you find black on white too straightforward, and I was also enamored of times roman fonts at the time. I ll say a little bit more about fonts later. 12
For a few years, I started using a design that is based on a common style used around the school that had the advantage of bringing a little red in we are Badgers and I also put a small real estate and UW logo in the bottom left corner. I did find that with classroom products, where I m constantly putting in addition to text, data charts and graphics, drawing supply and demand curves and the like, having the logo on every slide got in the way. 13
And so now I ve really just gotten about as simple as one can I ve Ive dropped the logo. After all, if you look at 50 of my slides in a lecture, you re probably not in need of 50 reminders that you re here at UW. And hit s hard to think of a simpler design than this Calibri font, which is a sans serif font, and a black text on a white background. 14
Here s an example of a slide that you probably want to know in time for my urban midterm. 15
However, when I m giving a presentation outside, you want to adopt a slightly more formal look and perhaps do a little bit of branding on the slide. 16
Here s the style that I m currently using for outside presentations. I took this particular slide from a presentation I gave to the South Central Wisconsin Realtors recently. I wanted to put some red in the slide to brand it, but I wanted to keep most of the material in the simple black-on-white and simple Calibri font that I use elsewhere. So I ve adopted this style where we have a little bit of red framing at the top and bottom of the slide and I ve also got the W logo, as you can see. 17
Once in a great while, I give a formal presentation to a large group and, depending on the context, I might want to design a more formal slide. And so the next slide I used when I gave a presentation to about 400 alums at a recent reunion. 18
Because I knew the presentation would be a controlled theater environment with good lighting, I went with white-on-a-dark background instead of my usual black-on-white. I put just a little bit of gold in to touch it up. And I used a dark red background. Dark red might be a risky choice for some audiences, since it s a bunch of Badgers at a reunion I think it helped draw them in. In retrospect, I might have put a small W or Graaskamp Center logo into the slide, but while I haven t shown it here, I had some logos and branding earlier in the initial cover slide and in early pictures I showed of some of our forbearers like Jim Graaskamp and Richard Ely. So, I felt that the branding had been done pretty well upfront and didn t add it slide by slide. 19
Now let s look at charting some simple data. Here we re not talking so much about analytics. We re just going to present data and communicate it. We re not really doing any charts of data from 50 states or 300 metropolitan areas or over 30 or 40 years. We ll tackle those kinds of problems in a future module. 20
Here is a very simple stylized kind of chart. Notice it shigh-contrast, black-text-on-white. I have brought in some color, but notice that the bars are both differently colored and crosshatched. The nice advantage of this is if they re reproduced in black and white and it s still very expensive to make color reproductions at current prices if they re reproduced in black and white you can clearly distinguish between office and retail. 21
What are some principles of doing these kinds of charts? First, avoid 3-D bars and other 3-D elements. I can advise you to do this because, like Jimmy Swaggart, I too have sinned. When I first obtained software something called Harvard Graphics, which was probably before you were born and I first had software that would do 3-D bar charts, I got up every day and went to work excited by the fact that I was going to do more 3-D charts. But after about a month of churning out chart after chart, I figured out that they were actually harder to read and interpret than the 2-D charts. And, again, once I got over the novelty, they were actually ugly. Another thing to avoid, which the Microsoft defaults try to lead you to, is to avoid boxes. Microsoft wants to draw a box around practically every element. But he good news is you can get rid of them. 22
Here s an example of a simple chart of cash flows. I took a Microsoft default chart and, really, did hardly anything else to it. So, ask yourself, what really looks best: this default 3-D bar chart with a gray background, or 23
this much, much cleaner, simpler design? As your friendly optometrist says to you, Tell me what s better: #1 or #2? #1 or #2? Now #2 could be improved, as well. I did this a while ago when I was still in my Times Roman font days. Still, take a look. The fonts are bigger, I lost the box, I don t have a lot of redundant boxes around text and other elements, and I also dropped the numbers that label the horizontal axis from the middle of the chart the zero line down to the bottom. 24
Tufte has given us the phrase chartjunk which is adding a lot of unnecessary elements to a chart. Dropping and stripping out a lot of the chartjunk keeps the information-to-ink ratio high. Another thing that I recommend is using clip art and images from the web sparingly. I use them more in class than I do in formal presentations, for example, and in class since I m often running through 30-40 slides, it breaks up the monotony a little bit. Also, I can bring in photos and other elements that connect the concepts I m showing to some real world example. If I m talking about the urban form of Cape Town, and I show you a picture of Cape Town in addition to the data, I think that helps fix the idea in your mind. Nevertheless, sometimes we find people using these kinds of elements more than they should, especially cute clip art. Again, it depends partly on your audience. I would be more likely to use a whimsical chart like the chart element like the Dilbert cartoon at the beginning of the presentation in a classroom or group of people that know me than I would if I were, say, testifying to the Senate Banking Committee. 25
Let s talk a little more about fonts. If you don t know the jargon, there are two classes of fonts: serif and sans serif. If you speak French, you would know at least that the word sans means without. Serifs are the little thingies that are at various terminal points in the font. So, look at the T in Times Roman. The little elements that just drop down from the beginning and end of the vertical line crossing the T and the little element at the bottom of the T those are serifs. Sans serif without serifs are fonts that drop these elements and look much more like careful printing if you had better handwriting than I do. Generally, studies have shown that when you re reading text in a book or a magazine, because we ve learned where these serif elements are in various letters, they can actually aid recognition of the letter and actually speed our reading a little bit. On the other hand, when you re trying to read from a distance, a sans serif font like Arial or Calibri is easier to read. You ll notice that road signs are always done in sans serif fonts, which makes them easier to read from a distance an at speed. So, while I might consider using a serif font in a very formal presentation in a room with controlled lighting and knowing that people in the back of the room will have no trouble seeing, generally I ve become more enamored of sans-serif fonts. I like Calibri because it seems to be very readable and it has a little bit of a softer look than Arial which is a little sharper-edged. 26
Also, unless you re a graphic designer and know how to do this effectively, I suggest picking one font in a presentation and sticking to it. Sometimes, professional designers use one font for an overhead or a sometimes professional designers will use a large Arial font, for example, for headings and then a Times Roman or other serif font for the actual text. But, all in all, I generally try to avoid using this. I m not expert in mixing and matching fonts. If you are mixing and matching fonts, either because you know what to do or someone s s guided you, stick with two. I rarely see a use that would justify using more than two fonts. Occasionally in class, because I m grabbing a slide from a previous year, you ll find me mix fonts within a presentation. But I m making the switch, as I said, to Calibri. 27
Another thing that s not always well known about fonts is that you really need to use larger fonts in overheads in Powerpoint than you do in a printed report. Now, a lot of the charting I do that isn t straight text are charts that I m going to use in both printed reports and in Powerpoint. So, I tend to make them a little bit on the large size So, I tend to make them a little bit on the large side so they ll work better in the overheads; it doesn t harm the printed report at all. Over time, actually, I ve gotten to make more of the side elements like axis labels in data charts larger, so you ll see a tendency in my newer charts to have a bigger font than in some of my older ones. But I ve always increased the size over Microsoft s ridiculously small defaults. 28
Another thing that you might know is that Excel and Powerpoint share a charting engine. In other words, in principle you could do the same chart in Excel or in Powerpoint. In any event, Microsoft has provided us with a number of chart types, which just should never be used by business professionals: radar charts, cone charts and so on. If you re a graphic professional, there may be a chance to break this rule, but I recommend sticking to the basics. On the other hand, Microsoft has left out a lot of chart types that are very handy, such as box plots, side-by-side graphs and so on. And we ll have more to say about some of those in a future module. Unfortunately, most of the time, the best thing to do is to just get a better piece of software to do those charts. And, in fact, if you re a serious data user, there are a number of suggestions you could look into: S-Plus, SPSS or SigmaPlot are among the options software that do a much better job at data presentation, in particular. But since we re not doing much data presentation today, I ll have more to say about those in a future module. 29
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And I ll say more about X-Y plots in that future module, as well. 31
One of the little pleasures I allow myself is to take charts from my friends and make snide comments about them, first to their face and then to use them in a classroom situation. (Why do I have so few friends?) So, I m going to use, now present a number of charts, some from industry some from other sources, and do some quick fix-ups. 32
Here s a slide from a recent Real Estate Club presentation, and I may say, a terrific presentation overall. But again, the busy background, the gradients, the color scheme of light blue to dark blue makes it harder to read the white text, especially on the upper left corner where the contrast is not high enough. 33
Here s the same slide put in my minimalist Powerpoint style. It s a lot easier to read what the folks from Turner had to say. #1 or #2? 34
Here s another slide, a very important one, if you want to understand recent financial crisis. Again, the presentation was terrific, but the slides hurt. The fonts are absurdly small, especially when you re presenting to a large room full of people. 35
Simple solution: I simply broke this down into a couple of slides and simplified the background. I m not sure where those blue bullet points came from. Well, I ll leave them in just to see what you think of a little dash of color in my default style. 36
As you ve seen, I had to break this up into two slides, if I wanted to keep all the text. 37
Here s something that I am sorry to say came out of the Real Estate Club. The black box is very distracting. I m not sure what s up with that gradient background. I think we re supposed to be looking at the Bean from Millennium Park, but nevertheless I m trying to wonder whether that s the Bean or not and not focusing on the text. Personally, I would have totally redone this slide, but I thought just to give you a quick example of a 15- second fix up, before I showed this to students in class, I took this slide and just made 3 simple fix-ups. 38
The black box is very distracting. I m not sure what s up with that gradient background. I think we re supposed to be looking at the Bean from Millennium Park, but nevertheless I m trying to wonder whether that s the Bean or not and not focusing on the text. Personally, I would have totally redone this slide, but I thought just to give you a quick example of a 15-second fix up, before I showed this to students in class, I took this slide and just made 3 simple fix-ups. 39
I lost the background completely went with black-on-white. I changed the Times Roman font to Calibri sans serif font. And, for the moment, I kept the box, even though I m not a fan of boxes, but I thought the red box worked a little better in this slide than the black box did. 40 40
Here are some charts from some of my friends in industry. At least, they were my friends before I trashed their slides. 41
OMG. The fonts are too small. There are boxes you don t need. But, how in the world are you supposed to tell which bar represents which city, especially once you ve photocopied this or printed this in black and white which eventually will happen, that s inevitable with today s printing costs. 42
Here s the same chart. I redid this a while ago while I was still in my Times Roman period, but I think you can agree it s a lot easier to read than the previous chart. And you don t have to go back and forth from bars to the legend box to figure out which city is which because I ve put the city name right next to the data elements. I ve also made it a horizontal chart, which I think works much better in this case because it allows us to label with, quite naturally with long text, with long words like St. Petersburg. By the way, the data for this slide came from my friend Alain Bertaud, we ll talk about his work in class. Alain provided the data but did NOT do the first chart. Alain is an architect and planner, trained at L Ecole des Beaux Arts. I am quite sure he d chop off his hand before he d do a chart as dysfunctional as the first version of this slide. 43
Here s another chart. I m not going to modify it too much, but I m going to lose the gray and increase the font size and get rid of a few boxes. 44
Ahh, that s better. Notice also I could have kept the legend, but with only 3 elements, I thought it was better to just write the names of the cities right next to where the data started. It saves time and I think makes for a more effective chart. Question, should I have kept the markers on the lines as large as I did? Depends on the purpose, but if it gets reproduced in black and white, having the large markers makes it easier to follow the line. 45
Here are a few more examples. 46
I m Im not going to redo these. I ll just show them to you and talk you through them. Here s a quick chart from a fellow faculty member, and again, just lose the boxes, move the horizontal legend to the bottom and another thing I would do would be either eliminate or soften the horizontal gridlines. I d soften them by turning them from straight black lines to dotted lines with perhaps a gray line color that would make, leave the lines visible but not make the chart look like an escaped zebra. 47
Well, we don t need to say much about what we need to do to fix this chart. 48
Something else, and sometimes I m a little lax when I m putting something together quickly for class, whenever you present a chart, tell the reader what the source is of your data or information if you haven t obviously created it from scratch yourself. And what country is this, anyway? (I m guessing it s China or India ) But I think one thing they do right is this: DON T PUT A HORIZONTAL LABEL YEAR WHEN IT S COMPLETELY OBVIOUS! 49
Well, that concludes this presentation. Oh, I have one more thing to say: if there s one thing that annoys me, it s this slide at the end of a presentation. Bogus. It just doesn t look professional. You re going to thank someone from the podium or from the lectern or from the floor, and you re going to ask them if there are any questions, I don t think you have to remind yourself with a slide. If I don t have some other wrap-up photo or element, I simply end on a blank screen. Well, I hope you found this presentation useful, and before long, I hope you have a chance to look at follow-onon modules that teach you more about working with data in Powerpoint. 50
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