By Steven S. Vrooman
You’ve seen it. You might even be required to do it in your
organization. It returns the word BRAND to its roots by tagging the flank of
every slide with a hot and painful sting. There it is, the logo stamped somewhere on eeeeevvvvvveeerrrrryyyyyy slide:
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| http://www.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/images/pp_4x3.jpg |
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| http://www.presentationteam.com/images/design/portfolio/powerpoint-design/quest-diagnostics.jpg |
Simplicity
Versus Complexity
In my book, I talk about the dilemma between SIMPLICITY and
COMPLEXITY. If it's not simple enough, I can’t follow and I give up. If it is
not complex enough, I’m bored and check out. Your presentations are seesaws
that balance these forces. So are your visual aid slides.
On the simplicity side is using an image. Here's Seth Godin:
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| http://john.do/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/seth-godin-pick-yourself-1-570x854.jpg |
Here's Edward Tufte:
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| http://ww2.hdnux.com/photos/17/40/33/4064961/3/628x471.jpg |
At Tufte’s seminars he tells the folks in the
crowd to just use Power Point as a slide projector.
This is
connected with idealized post-Neurath design like Cook and Shanowksy's Department of Transportation signage from 1974, the most enduring pieces of which are the restroom man and woman:
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| http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2a/63/4e/2a634e61ca89c1dafa22a3d93d3df4b6.jpg |
Or there is my version of a preview, replacing something like what you
see on top with what is on the bottom:
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http://www.powerpointninja.com/images/2009/05/bullet_highlight2.jpg
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On the complexity side are stories.
Visual stories like people
try with Prezi or with infographics. You follow a long story-like process that
reminds me of a comic book, like in this:
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| https://cooldailyinfographics.com/images/infographics/2013/03/how-to-assemble-your-zombie-first-aid-kit.jpg |
You also have someone like David Carson, who challenges
the audience to figure out the mystery of what is being advertised behind a
messy scrawl of surfer-style graphics.
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| http://zee.com.br/extranet/abduzeedo/posts/david_carson/img7.jpg |
When you design a slide you have to decide where you are
positioning your audience. Probably you will push them, at times, toward one
side of the seesaw, and then draw them back so that you can keep them shifting
and so that you can pull in everyone.
The
Logo
Now we come to the difficulty. The persistence of the
corporate logo on the bottom of the page. See?
In the slide that Tufte blames for the deaths of the Columbia
astronauts, you can see the corporate logo:
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| https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/graphics/newET_discoursegif.gif |
You might argue, from a simplicity perspective, that it is
an unnecessary distraction. Do you really want your audience staring at the
logo while they should be thinking of something else? The worst is the
presentation that both you and I have sat through, where someone high in the
organization delivers bad news to the rest of us, and there you sit, looking at
the logo or the topline splash graphics while you find out there will be
layoffs or a new insurance plan or something of the sort, as in this slide for what CBS calls Novartis' "Pink Slip Powerpoint":
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| http://i.bnet.com/blogs/1a-novartis-delivering-on-strategic-objectives.jpg |
Do you want your
audience rehearsing the connection between your logo and bad news?
From the complexity perspective, you might imagine it is
okay to have multiple foci on a slide. We can handle it. We will split our
attention. But then, doesn’t the same logo on every slide then just begin to
disappear? It becomes screen real estate we ignore because it stops interesting
us. So then we are training our audience to stop paying attention to pieces of
our slides, which is bad, and to the organization’s identity, which defeats the
purpose of putting it on there in the first place.
However you look at it, the constant presence of the logo is
a bad idea. Make it show up when needed and then put it away. As more
organizations demand that we use their official templates for our Power Points,
this failure to communicate will only increase.
