9 Tips from Edward Tufte
Yesterday I had the good fortune to attend an Edward Tufte conference here in Denver.
Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale, is an expert in the art and science of presenting data and information. He’s the author of Beautiful Evidence, Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. He also wrote the now-classic anti-PowerPoint manifesto: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, which could also be titled “How PowerPoint Makes Us Stupid.” The New York Times calls him “the Leonardo da Vinci of data.”
Edward Tufte, known as the Leonardo da Vinci of data, thinks PowerPoint harms both the presenter and the audience. |
Although I knew he had fans in design circles, I was amazed to observe yesterday that people were treating him like he was Mick Jagger, lining up for his autograph during every break. The audience consisted of everyone from business school teachers to trial lawyers to young designers from Crispin Porter. Everyone in attendance shared the same desire: to be better at presenting their case. Or their company’s case. Or their client’s case.
Tufte makes his living by telling people how to give better presentations, so the bar was pretty high going into the day-long seminar. He sure delivered—all without using a single PowerPoint slide. (He did show a couple short videos.) Anyway, I was scribbling notes the entire time he talked. This morning I translated my notes from handwritten scrawl to type. Check out a few of my paraphrased notes (in the form of 9 tips) after the jump …
TUFTE NOTES
1. Content (not process or fashion) should drive your choices as a designer or presenter. Additionally, your material should evoke a content response, not a design response. In practice, this means that good design should be invisible. Design is meant to assist reasoning and understanding of the content. If it doesn’t do this, it hasn’t done its job.
2. PowerPoint slides are usually about PowerPoint itself, not the ostensible subject covered. If you must use PowerPoint, use it as a computer-based image projector. No bullets. No indents. No words. Just images.
3. Word doc handouts—with text and images and charts—make a better presentation medium than PowerPoint slides. One double-sided 11X17-inch piece of paper can hold as much information as 200-300 PowerPoint slides. The visual resolution of PowerPoint (very, very low) insults the ability of the human eye to see detail. The printed page, on the other hand, has a much higher resolution and can get much more information across. Plus, a person can speak/hear only 150 words per minute whereas a person can read 300 words per minute.
4. Here’s what to do if your audience is reading your material and not listening to you talk: Celebrate! Any time you can get people to read your content is time to rejoice. Don’t worry if they’re not following your every word. Presenting is not about control—it’s about transmitting information. “Let people use their own cognitive style,” says Tufte
5. People do not instantly become stupid when they sit down to hear your presentation. They can read charts and tables. They willingly read complex ones every day in the sports section. Most presentations are excruciating not because of information overload, but because of the slow, monotonous trickle of bulleted content.
6. In general, a good presentation does at least one of three things: (1) shows causality (how something happened), (2) shows contrast (how something is different from another thing), and/or (3) shows complexity (how many dimensions or variables a thing has). The key for the presenter is to use evidence—in the form of text, images, graphics, charts, etc.— to show causality, contrast and complexity.
7. Show up early to your presentation. This gives you time to solve unforeseen problems. It also conveys professionalism and humility.
8. Never apologize! It only attracts unnecessary attention to what you’re apologizing for.
9. End your presentation early. This generates good will.
