E.T., phone home
Brian Storms Dear describes meeting Edward Tufte (E.T.), and this bit in particular really captures what bugs me about him. So lost in narcicisstic admiration for the brilliance of his own ideas, he can’t fathom that presenting information suboptimally— but in a way that people expect it— could actually be just fine.
I asked him, given how he’d spent much of this afternoon trashing PowerPoint, what did he think about VCs like Guy Kawasaki urging entrepreneurs to follow a strict 10-page PowerPoint format when pitching a startup idea? Given that he’d spent much of today’s seminar railing against the evils of PowerPoint, what advice did he have for entrepreneurs trying to communicate to VCs?
He looked up to me, annoyed. I’d asked a stupid question, I guess: wasn’t it obvious, his body language seemed to say, that the answer was to dump PowerPoint altogether? He shrugged, continuing to write autographs.
“Just give them something to read on a piece of paper,” he mumbled. “It has five times the resolution!” He went back to signing books.
I paused, wondering if he was going to say any more, but he wasn’t. So I said thank you and walked past the long line of autograph-seekers behind me, out of the huge ballroom, out of the hotel to the parking lot, and drove back to the office, to finish polishing up a PowerPoint presentation for three VC meetings over the next two days.
It reminds me of my impression of Jakob Nielsen, who I sort of met when he was speaking on a panel that a friend had put together at a Seybold Seminar. Kind of a blowhard who chased everyone in the place who had a microphone or camera. Not to say that both of them have not produced useful ideas. They’re just curious egotists who have built cult-like followings in esoteric quasi-academic fields of inquiry.
January 28th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
FYI my name is Brian Dear… “brianstorms” is a play on words, not my name
January 28th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
I sometimes wonder if Tufte will be remembered as a seminal figure for poiting out the importance of information design and possibly also for elucidating a few high-level principles of good design, but not for any of his specific recommnedations.
I read his stuff and my general thoughts are:
1) Wow, this is a tremendously important topic, why don’t people pay more attention to this stuff? - It absolutely effects how information is received and translated into action.
2) Wow, he’s right that graphs are often too cluttered, and used in cases where text is a more effective and/or accurate presentation.
3) Wow, he’s wrong about a host of specific issues. Powerpoint is abused, sure, but it can be effective. Graphs are used too often, sure, but they help people quickly grasp relationships that are often not imediately apparent from numeric data. Custom graphics, lovingly tailored to the specific infomration being presented are more effective than canned, standardized formats, sure, but life is short and besides there’s tremendous value in standardization sometimes - it helps people process information more quickly and reduces the chances for mis-interpretation by keeping people anchored in familiar formats that they have a long track record in interpreting. (On that front, Tufte’s ongoing spooge-fest about that 19th century map of Napolean’s conquests - “Best. Graph. Ever” - has certainly made many converts. I’ve heard a lot of Tufte-philes rave about how brilliant it is. But it takes them 10 minutes to explain it to someone who’s never seen it before, and that ought to tell them something.)
4) Wow he’s a tool.
January 29th, 2005 at 10:46 am
Oops– corrected above!
January 29th, 2005 at 10:56 am
I think Tufte’s strongest case against powerpoint isn’t really against powerpoint, it’s in its misapplication as a document format for things which aren’t even presentations. His strongest example is as a format for scientific reports or graphs. An example that I can think of from work just yesterday was a co-worker preparing a 3-slide powerpoint to describe a business process. It was unintelligable, but could have easily been a flowchart, or even a one-page outline.