Stalin’s Bullet List · 3 June 2003
Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that claimed to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues’ time. The side effects, and the resulting unsatisfactory cost/benefit ratio, would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.
—from Edward Tufte’s new leaflet, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, which just came in the mail.
Edward Tufte must be up there with David Foster Wallace and Stephen Hawking on the list of authors whose books are reflexively snapped up by their intended audience, yet rarely read. Most every corporate design shop in the English-speaking world keeps Tufte hardcovers on conspicuous display in studio and waiting area; mention of his name can divide a room of creative humans between those out-snorting each other with derision and those betraying the sort of baffled reverence given to an abrasively sarcastic deity.
It’s not that the books don’t try to be read: each is a virtuoso performance of modern book work, impeccably typeset and laid out, stubbornly free of compromise and concessions to the bottom line. I’ve never been fond of their shape, but that’s me. The arguments are strong and elegantly presented, with Tufte’s central, ongoing (and, here, vastly reduced) theme – that data deserves unencumbered presentation – ringing out in example after glowing example.
But as perfectly logical as his methods are, and as illuminating as his comparisons can be, Tufte’s advice usually has little relevance to a designer working in the arena of business, where the impulses of competition lead to work that first distinguishes the brand or the designer, and where the pressure and speed of money leave little room for the ‘design, think, design, think some more’ approach in which Tufte passionately believes, yet which ironically leaves open canyons of room for the BOGSAT (bunch of guys sitting around a table) approach that is the gravitational force of commercial design.
But the books are lovely to flip through while, oh, waiting for the steamer to adjust from espresso to milk setting.
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.
If I were to grouse, there’s Tufte’s usual tendency to downplay the significance of words and their meaning in design, preferring to evaluate data as something to be appreciated more on its visual gestures rather than the concurrent swirl of visual-textual meaning that must be parsed by those seeing information for the first time.
Get it. It’s only seven bucks. You have to love that he gives over the entire centre spread to Peter Norvig’s Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
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