[mikehollinger]

You might want to read Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence.[1] He discusses stuff like what you brought up about readability and distracting from the message / point of the data.

If you've seen sparklines, [2] Tufte coined the term.

Whenever I do a UI review I end up paging through it just to see if there's something we're not thinking about, and its an interesting book to just open to a random page and read.

Plus he has an entire treatise on why PowerPoint is terrible.

[1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_be

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline

[jszymborski]

I'm a big fan of Tufte and he certainly informs a lot of my opinions on making tables and figures :)

[airstrike]

> Plus he has an entire treatise on why PowerPoint is terrible.

As someone trying to build a PowerPoint competitor, this is awesome. I'm going to start here and work my way through his whole corpus

[esafak]

See also https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

[itronitron]

According to everyone that has ever told me how to do powerpoint presentations, they need an intro slide that tells the audience what they are about to be told in the presentation they are about to be told, and a conclusion slide that tells the audience what they were told in the presentation they were told.

[TheCleric]

I don't think that's just powerpoint though. This is a common public speaking method: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/15/tell-em/

[mikehollinger]

> According to everyone that has ever told me how to do powerpoint presentations, they need an intro slide that tells the audience what they are about to be told in the presentation they are about to be told, and a conclusion slide that tells the audience what they were told in the presentation they were told.

Sorta? I guess that might be like driving. Hands on the wheel, gas on the right, etc. But what about driving in the rain (presenting to a cold prospect)? What about driving uphill (addressing a conflict)? What about driving offroad (explaining to an irate customer what happened?

There's storytelling and communication in each of those, but they're different.

See here[1]. It does have an outline, and it does have takeaways, but there's a a structure to the story in the presentation.

It opens with "3 parts" but immediately grabs your attention with item 0. I do that because I'm presenting to engineering students, and there's some CS/ECE folks in the audience and we count from zero. Plus its fun to shake people out of "here we go, another presentation" mode.

Each part has some interesting stories and plot points. The first explains moore's law, and advances in ML / DL. You can't tell from the charts, but there's a narrative that says 2011 to 2016, we saw this advance. There's a relentless march of technology. Isn't that interesting. Part two talks through real projects, and real outcomes, and the shift in value and complexity of delivery at scale vs "we got it working on a laptop." Part three looks at the future - and calls back to pt 1, and proposes a question - what rate do you think stuff'll advance? Here's my guess. Here's some resources. Keep the convo going. Thank you. etc.

It's an incredibly fun presentation to give, and people enjoy it as well. This doesn't have the basic structure you shared, but -- it kind of does. We come back to the "agenda" pages when transitioning between the 3 sections. It has a clear punch line. And it contextualizes what we're going to talk about.

It does this, though, without having a boatload of bullet points and outlines, and, looking at it with fresh eyes, probably makes no sense without a talk track, but people seem to like it and find it useful.

[1] https://ibm.box.com/v/ou-ai-session-2024