The Scourge of Arial
Can you tell which is which?
I was reading this article by Mark Simonson where he writes a brief history of Helvetica and its Frankenstein-like relative, Arial. It's, in my opinion, a very interesting read, covering areas like font studios, companies' different strategies dealing with font licenses, and how a simple desire not to license the already well established Helvetica font led to Arial. If you've ever used a Microsoft product, it's a guarantee you've seen text in that font. While Apple licensed Helvetica (Apple's core pro customer base needs it), Microsoft decided to go with the cheaper knock-off. Arial has always looked a little odd to me and I could tell the difference between the two. I just never figured out why until I read this article.
Monotype, the creator of Arial, took the high road, and instead of copying Haas Foundry's Helvetica like many others were doing, they took a similar font that they owned and tweaked the proportions and weight to bring it in line with their competitor's font. What you have, then, with Arial is a font that has the same dimensions and weight to Helvetica, but is just different enough to not be an absolute rip-off to those knowledgeable enough to tell the difference.
Arial appears to be a loose adaptation of Monotype’s venerable Grotesque series, redrawn to match the proportions and weight of Helvetica. At a glance, it looks like Helvetica, but up close it’s different in dozens of seemingly arbitrary ways. Because it matched Helvetica’s proportions, it was possible to automatically substitute Arial when Helvetica was specified in a document printed on a PostScript clone output device. To the untrained eye, the difference was hard to spot. (See “How to Spot Arial”) After all, most people would have trouble telling the difference between a serif and a sans serif typeface. But to an experienced designer, it was like asking for Jimmy Stewart and getting Rich Little.
Reading The Information Design Handbook has gotten me thinking quite a bit lately about fonts and how to use them. This article, though, just spurred that interest on even further. The two have me constantly evaluating the one or two fonts per slide deck that I use and putting a lot more thought into my font choices. Issues such as whether it's a decorative font (e.g. Arial Narrow) or not, its x-height, its weight, and the size of counterforms are all things I think about now when I consider which font to use since each of those factor into the legibility of the text.
Those font characteristics are all things to take into consideration when you consider your audience. How far away are the Bob Uecker seats? How old is your audience? What's the lighting likely to be?
I won't get into the nitty gritty about all these characteristics. There's just not enough space and I'll leave it to the pros. However, I do think that Jenn & Ken Visocky O'Grady's The Information Design Handbook
By the way, the one on top is Helvetica. 
What I’d Like To See In Slide Design In 2009
Over on the Speaking about Presenting blog, Olivia Mitchell asked what everyone else would like to see this year in slide design. I've got a really long list of things I'd like to see this year, but I'll focus on the top 3 on my list:
Less Organizational Inertia
Quite often, one of the reasons why we get battered with walls of text, riddled with bullets, beat senseless with charts and diagrams is organizational culture. It's they way it's been done for years and the bad habits have permeated the organization to the point of it being very much part of its culture. Well, organizational culture is one thing. Organizational Inertia is another. This is where the culture of PowerPoint abuse goes beyond culture and becomes either law or accepted truth.
The former can be addressed because there's opportunity to sell the organization on a better way, especially since a case can be made for the positive effect on the bottom line. The later, accepted truth, is what drives the most intransigent forms of organizational inertia. Here, you're dealing with small minds. People too closed minded and set in their ways to consider oportunities for self improvement. Why strive for self improvement when there's nothing to improve, right? "It's worked this long (meaning, people haven't actually died from it), and it's what people expect, so why change it?" I've heard that enough to make my ears bleed.
There's no easy solution and each organization requires a different approach to countering organizational inertia, but the less of it I see in 2009, the happier I will be.
Simpler Diagrams
Working in the world of IT, I probably see more than my fair share of overly complex diagrams slapped on slides. Someone starts feeling a little industrious while slapping together their barrage of bullet points to create highly detailed diagrams. Many of these are created in Visio and pasted into slides. Many others are created within PowerPoint itself. The thought that does not appear to go into these diagrams concern the very people that need to interpret them.
Text is inevitably too small. When pasting these big diagrams onto slides, quite often the diagram itself has to be shrunk to fit onto the slide. What results is text that is far too small to be read by most people. If they're sitting in the back of the room, you might as well forget it. Simplicity and information (not data) density are goals that would aid legibility. Edward Tufte's books are a great resource in this regard, especially Envisioning Information
Metaphors get lost on the audience. Quite often, visual metaphors in the diagrams, whether or not the creator realized they were creating them, don't jive with the expecations and understanding of the audience. Where I work, these kinds of slides are shown to audiences that are mixtures of technical and non-technical people. Within the group of technical people, you'll have varying degrees of expertise and specialties. Metaphors need to be kept simple and as universal as possible.
There's often just too much stuff. They're just too complex. Presenting your audience with very complex, even if just visually complex, diagrams steals their attention away from you. In The Information Design Handbook
An End To Slides As Handouts
All too often, slide decks are assembled with the intention that they also serve as handouts. Well designed slides are terrible handouts since they lack the on-slide text necessary to form an informative narrative. What the audience is left with is a presentation that is ineffective and handouts that have no value to the people they're passed on to or kept by because they still need explanation. You can never fit enough text on a slide to make them useful handouts. At the same time, you all too can easily have too much text on a slide, rendering them useless in a presentation.
There are many solutions to this approach, but one that I think helps by not only creating handouts (that are distributed after the presentation) but also helps you prepare your talk is to write out a narrative of your talk. Include the visuals. You're not going to write every last thing you're going to say. However, you'll have enough down on paper to be useful while giving yourself a chance to learn your presentation before you even start rehearsing it.
These are the top three things I'd like to see in slide design this year. Do you have any others? Have you run into the same issues I have? Feel free to comment below.
Improve Your Slide’s Charts
Types of slides that we often create are those that try to present data to our audience. All too often, this data is placed in a cluttered data table or worse, is presented in a narrative format. In most cases, a chart of some sort is the appropriate method of presenting data. However, there is an art to doing it right. A poorly formatted chart can be just as bad as that useless narrative on the screen.
In my experience, I've seen far more bad charts than effective ones. Often, the reason is expedience or because someone decided "hey, this looks cool!" An exotic sports car with a broken transmission may look very cool, but it's not going to get anywhere. Likewise, a poorly thought-out chart may look cool, but it's useless without an explanation.
We've got 3 seconds for that chart to convey its information in support of our story.
When creating a chart, the first thing we need to ask ourselves is, "what is the most important information?" The key words there are "most important" and "information." Information and data are not the same. Data are the raw numbers and figures. There's nothing more to them. Information is the message or story being told by the data. Data by itself will not translate into information. What we do to the data will provide us with information.
Secondly, we need to focus on which information is most important. Depending on how you present your data, the information will be different. I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "Lies, lies, and damned statistics." Well, it's true. How you manipulate or present data affects the message being presented. Let's look at two charts that contain the same data, but because of a different presentation, tell a different story.
Bad Pie Chart
For this example, I took the number of level 80 characters is one of my World of Warcraft guilds and created two different charts. The data is exactly the same in each. In the pie chart, the data is represented as percentages of the total while in the bar chart, the data is represented by the raw numbers. The message contained within both, while truthful, are misleading. In the pie chart, you have a large number of slices that well crammed into one chart minimizes the difference between them. Though you can interpret correctly that there are twice as many druids as there are warlocks, the visual and mental effort required to get there is more than is necessary. Without the labels, all we can do is guess at the relative values. In addition, since all we see are percentages (fractions of one whole pie), we lack any information about the size of the guild.
Keynote Bar Chart (before)
The bar chart tells a completely different story. Here, you've got a more apparent representation of the relative class populations. Is the chart poorly formatted? You bet. I'll get to that in a moment. However, in this example, it's immediately apparent that the warlock population is very small. A simple glance and the two bars tells that story in 3 seconds or less.
Bar Charts
Now, with that said, the relative populations of each of the classes is not what my most important information was. The information I wanted to convey was the population of death knights, added to World of Warcraft this past November, relative to to the other classes. The other bar chart example, this time from PowerPoint also fails to convey this information. In both the Keynote and PowerPoint examples, the chart settings were left mostly to their defaults. Below are the major problems with these charts:
PowerPoint Bar Chart (before)
- 3D In this example, PowerPoint's default is to present a 3D chart. The problem with 3D bar charts is that they lie to us. They give the bars more surface area than is necessary, and which is often out of proportion with reality, especially for the smaller bars. Take for example, the same chart displaying data for one of my other guilds. This chart has two bars with a value of 0, yet they have surface area. Thus, visually, these two bars appear to have value when in fact they don't.
- Inappropriate Title These charts are titled, "Classes - D'Gentlemen." Though it is true that these charts are displaying the number of level 80 characters in D'Gentlemen, sorted by class, that's not the most important information. What's most important is the number of death knights relative to the other classes.
PowerPoint Bar Chart #2
- Bar Colors Obscure the Message When displaying multiple data points, it's not necessary to always give them their own color. Remember, what's most important in these charts isn't each bar relative to the other 9. What's most important is the value of one specific bar relative to the other 9.
- Sort Order Obscures the Message When displaying multiple data points, be mindful of the sort order. Sorting them alphabetically doesn't always make sense. Reordering the bars by value (alphabetically as a secondary sort) drives home to the audience the relative population of death knights in a manner that takes very little visual effort. The eyes don't have to bounce all around the chart to put all the pieces together.
Keynote Bar Chart (after)
- Chart Junk Edward Tufte refers to the stuff on a chart that doesn't add value to the chart "chart junk." In this case, the border of the chart, the grid lines, legends, and the numbers down the left all contribute to a data:ink ratio that is out of whack. None of that contributes to the easy absorption of the data. Because of limitations of presentation slide software and the nature of the data, our best option here is to place the value of the data points right there on the bars.
PowerPoint Bar Chart (after)
Once we clean up the problem areas of these charts, we're presented with two completely different representations of the same exact data. However, this time, the information that is most important is what is conveyed to the audience. The title was changed to "Death Knights - D'Gentlemen," the data points were reordered and all of the bars, with the exception of "Death Knight," are the same color.
Pie Charts
Keynote Pie Chart (before)
Another popular chart type is the pie chart. One key thing to remember with these charts is the information conveyed is always the data point as a percentage of the whole. Even if the labels show raw numbers instead of percentages, the message that your audience receives is that of a percentage or fraction.
PowerPoint Pie Chart (before)
My two examples of the before versions of PowerPoint and Keynote slides are of the 3D variety. Though not the default, they are by far the most popular. These charts are intended to convey the population distribution among the different races in my World of Warcraft guild. Let's look at where these charts fail us:
- 3D It can't be said enough that 3D charts lie. In the Keynote example, the 10% slices look just a little bigger than they should, all because of the illusion of perspective. In the PowerPoint example, because the gray slice is just as tall as the green slice, the gray slice appears to be bigger. This is because with a 3D pie laid out as it is, our brain expects the gray slice to be shorter. The rules of perspective dictate that identical height objects at different distances appear to be different heights, with the one furthest away being the smaller. You also have the same problem you have with bar charts where smaller data points get extra surface area than they should get, proportionately.
Keynote Pie Chart (after)
- Texture and Colors The Keynote example is using its default fill texture. Marble doesn't add any value and instead distracts the eyes with a lot of visual noise. Many extraneous lines are added when only a few, those that separate the pie slices, are important. The PowerPoint slide uses colors that just don't contrast enough and lets slices "hide."
- Lack Of Values Leads To Guessing The lack of data values in the PowerPoint example leads to guessing about the relative sizes of the slices. The legends in both leave a lot to be desired, but Keynote can move that information to the slices without compromising too much (depending on the slice sizes). PowerPoint can move this information to the slices as well, but the size of the chart is sacrificed too much.
PowerPoint Pie Chart (after)
- Chart Junk The PowerPoint example contains the usual chart junk: chart borders and slice outlines.
I cleaned up the charts by flattening the charts, simplifying the colors & textures, using more dense and informational labels (where I could), and eliminating chart junk. The new slides should be more effective when presented to an audience.
Winners
We have someone in the office who has a quote posted in their cubicle that says, “Winners don’t do different things. They do things differently.” Apparently, this was written by Shiv Khera, a motivational speaker and author from India. Now, I thought about this for quite a while, trying to figure out just what this meant.
Obviously, the difference between the meaning of “different” and “differently” in the context of the quote was the essence of the meaning of this statement. It was after figuring out what that difference is that I realized that the quote is actually representative of the problem nowadays. In the context of the quote, “different” means something fundamentally different while “differently” means doing the same thing, just in a different manner. The reason this is a problem is that this advice encourages people to stick to the herd and that mere cosmetic changes are what will lead you to success.
I see this thinking at play all the time and it kills creativity while giving it lip service. It fosters closed minds and resistance to change. It feeds the fear and loathing of anything truly different. For example, when speccing out a workstation for print, design, and video work, the thought of some was, “Get a beefy Dell.” It was the fear and loathing of that which is truly different for them (the Mac) that closed their minds to the best tools and equipment for the job while leaving their minds “open” to mere variations of the same theme of what was currently on their desk.
I also see this in presentation slide design. We have people “simplifying” their slides by merely removing all of the background while keeping their walls of text and endless sea of bullet points.
Another way we can see just how Mr. Khera’s quote is off the mark is when presenting data to your audience. For this example, I took the Operating System usage statistics on my web site and whipped up the following.
The first slide is your typical chart throwing all of the data on the screen, giving each data point equal importance, whether it deserves it or not:
Sample Pie Chart #1
There are obvious problems with this slide. Each data point, by being placed in this chart are given equal importance. However, what’s important to me as the presenter is that the Mac has 12% usage share on my site. This is far more than most of those stuck in the Windows world would imagine. It’s a potentially powerful point that gets lost in all of the noise. You also have more data points than colors given how Windows and the Sony PSP share the yellow color. Granted, this is a limitation of Keynote, but it’s actually a good limitation. Too many data points dilutes your message. If you need more than 6 colors for your chart, you have far too much information in there.
So, using Shiv Khera’s approach to this slide, we have this:
This one isn't any better.
With this slide, I’m doing the same thing, just “differently.” I’ve added snazzy textures to the pie chart and made the pieces explode out to give them separation. However, do you think this actually helps the message? I’d say this is even worse. Here, you have an appealing, but distracting texture for the pie chart pieces and the orientation of the chart actually emphasizes the Windows slice while hiding the Macintosh slice. You could even swap the order of these two examples and you’d have the same problems as I listed above.
Now, let’s take a fundamentally different approach. One where I’m not doing the same thing, just differently, but rethinking the delivery process in its entirety.
A slide that gets the message across.
With this slide, I’ve completely cut through the noise and using only the statistic that really matters for the message. I have an image (a photo by Aaronage) of a Macintosh computer with the 12% in big, bold numbers. With this slide, there’s no question whatsoever what my message is.
Unfortunately, in my day to day life, I see more of the first two slides than I do of the last one. This is because too many people are afraid to be different and instead are just doing things differently.
Envisioning Information
I've recently finished reading Envisioning Information
Presentation Hell
One of my areas of personal improvement of late has been in the area of improving the way I give presentations. This was spurred on by being fed up with having to endure presentations such as the one below (go to the original at pcweenies.com).
Presentation Hell
This happens all too often and it happens everywhere. Nobody wants to watch someone else read from their slides. It detracts from the presentation and conveys to the audience the sense that either the presenter doesn't really know what they're talking about or they weren't considerate enough to prepare ahead of time. Besides, if the information is going to be read word for word, the presenter might as well just give hand-outs and not bother saying a word because the spoken presentation doesn't contribute to the audience's understanding of the material.
One book I would recommend to anyone that gives presentations with slides is Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds. In this book, the author promotes keeping the slides simple, yet powerful. Slides should help reinforce what the presenter is saying and not "be the presentation," if you will. If the audience is reading the slides or putting effort into interpreting a complex chart or graph, then they're not listening to the person speaking. If the audience isn't listening, they're not paying attention to the presentation.
Making slides that are simple, yet effective isn't easy. It's far easier (and lazier) to just slap a bunch of bullet points on the slides. However, bullet points are the easiest way to kill your presentation. I'm not saying there's never any value in them. They need to be used judiciously, intelligently, and sparingly.
This is something I will be blogging about a lot more as time goes on.
