Switzerland's anti-PowerPoint party | FP Passport
blog.foreignpolicy.comThe Swiss are a bit overly legalistic (indeed, I learned from a friend, a Swiss citizen, that it is illegal to vacuum your apartment on Sundays), but I am willing to join this political movement to ban Powerpoint:
The party is called the APPP. Yes, the Anti-PowerPoint Party. It’s an organization that has, at its core, the firm belief that the Microsoft presentation software is a waste of fine Swiss resources.
Indeed, it believes that PowerPoint costs Switzerland 2.1 billion Swiss Francs (about $2.5 billion) every year. You will, no doubt, be desperate to learn of its mathematical model. Well, it says 11 percent of Swiss people have to attend PowerPoint presentations on average twice a week. At each of these presentations is a minimum of 10 people.
We can all do the math, and it’s sad.
Edward Tufte is well-known for his The Cognitive Style Of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, so perhaps it’s an anti-corruption party:
1+1=3 or more.
All designers in general: read this.
This book relates to user-interface design just as composition relates to illustration. If the rule of thirds adheres to negative space, the rule of 1+1=3 or more (by Josef Albers) equates to informational space. There’s simply more to clean, content-rich design than black-and-white, constructivist/minimalism.
I’m not much of a reader, but lately, Tufte hasn’t disappointed. I’ve made every mistake he’s pointed in the years as an image maker, and the feeling of being an idiot is in many ways refreshing.
Big thanks to my supervisor for lending me these books!
Shelf
She turned to the books on his shelf, which floated along the full length of the wall. They were arranged in height order and divided by Hiroshi Sasagawa Animal Index cards, from pig to giraffe. There were some notable volumes, in Marvin’s mind at least: some he bought for the content, some for the cover, some for their pure pretension, and some he read again and again, blogging all the dog-eared pages. Others he got half way through to find the cover he so loved for its ambiguity and ethereal beauty reveal itself to be utterly definitive of the major theme of the piece. Big ideas in small strokes: Marvin longed for such clarity.
He had all available works by Edward Tufte, Jan Tschichold, and Jost Hoculi; biographies of Matthew Carter, Eric Gill and Joshua Davis; a well-thumbed ‘79 Short Essays on Design’ by Michael Bierut, especially the Garamond chapter; the Vegan’s Bible; ‘The End of Print’ by David Carson, a fifth edition; every Tamiya catalogue ever printed; a full collection of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (including the three issues from 2010) and a hard cover copy of Paul Smith’s ‘You Can Find Inspiration in Everything’.
To Chrys, it was just a neat, sparse room, impeccably curated. Individually rigorous in execution and intent. Curated was definitely the word. An educated eye and a cold shoulder. Some items were cheap, some wildly expensive, some absolutely irreplaceable. She ran her finger along the spines of the books and felt a tingle in her own. The last book was held in place by an ocelot bookend with a slot holding a blurry black and white photo of Marvin’s dad. Her finger traced the tail of the animal, hovered and failed to settle again. Marvin watched intently. Eighty three chemicals were in his bloodstream; eighty of them natural, two were helping him to talk and thirty-eight were making him feel quite sick. If this reached forty-two, he would be.
Edward Tufte’s “Slopegraphs”
charliepark.orgWhat’s interesting is that over 20 years before sparklines came on the scene, Tufte developed a different type of data visualization that didn’t fare nearly as well. To date, in fact, I’ve only been able to find three examples of it, and even they aren’t completely in line with his vision.
