What a horrible, horrible headline. Mary's analysis is incredibly detailed, extrememly informative, and FREE. This link-bait headline chose to ignore all the content and focus exclusively on the fact that the plots are ugly. Strangely enough, I managed to get through the slideshow without falling asleep, and I even was able to read her (quite well laid out) graphs and understand her points.
The author even acknowledged this; the first paragraph does nothing but extoll the value of the analysis. The headline, though, is pure linkbait.
Even worse, replacing a bar chart, where height scales linearly with the metric and is easily comparable across bars, with a bubble plot, which is very hard to use to compare sizes (tiny changes in radius cause a huge change in volume, not so easy to see that), is simply bad design and obfuscates the point. Color me not impressed.
Shame on you, Bloomberg. You should be better than that.
IMO, the "redesigned" slides are more aesthetically pleasing but they lose a lot of information in the process.
The second slide already has lower contrast (less readable), and as you mention, the bubble plot has less information. I do like the 4th slide (55) redesign, and the one on education (25).
Removing pictures and logos also reduces information for me.
Overall, I overwhelmingly prefer the first set of slides over the second - the point should be information first, aesthetics second.
Yet another poseur "designer" who clearly hasn't read Edward Tufte's books, and has made crucial mistakes such as making the graphs less accurate than they were before and adding additional extraneous clutter (such as those extra icons) on top of the original information. Real design is supposed to make information more legible, not less, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how slick or "pretty" the end result appears to be.
Are the folks at NOAA non-poseurs? Is the height of design just to vomit all the information on a single canvas, because Tufte thinks "our eyes can handle it?"
Tufte is only one perspective? The point is that information is more important than presentation. Making something pretty should never reduce the accessibility of the information or take away information. Mary's slides are much more informative than the redone slides. If there's a perspective that stresses pretty over getting information that's an incorrect perspective.
Decluttering can increase access to information, but again it's all about getting people to get the information, not admire your ability to draw pretty icons and pick fancy colors.
I've been running into many designers who focus more on looking cool rather than information being used appropriately.
Meeker did a good job of cramming tons of info and data into a concise presentation. It's probably the most data dense presentation I've seen in a long time.
This seems like a case where De Cubber was just trying to change the presentation, rather than improve it. For example:
"Finally, he got rid of an unnecessary color block at the top and the firm’s logo at the bottom to eliminate clutter and create some breathing space."
Removing the firm logo from an analysis presentation is surreally stupid as the analysis is meant to create prestige for the firm.
In defense of the redesign, it has improved the data-ink ratio and removed annoying gradients/visual noise on several slides (looking particularly at the chart on slide 22 here).
Though Tufte would throw a fit at those circular charts.
Snail22 isn't complaining that the result's not perfect. It's that it's not even moving the right direction. The new "design" is strictly worse than the original.
I don't normally pick on the design of sites submitted, but people in glass houses...
As soon as I scroll down a little the header changes and the entire first paragraph disappears behind it. It's very jarring and it's actually making it difficult to read. I'm sure it seemed like a cool idea, but design has to play second fiddle to functionality: It doesn't matter how fancy the design is if the product cannot perform its function.
A similar poor choice between shiny visuals and functionality has torpedo'd their redesign of the slides. They aren't the prettiest but I can very easily read the original charts. The new design massively reduces the contrast between text and background and makes the axis labels much smaller and a lighter font weight to boot. The result is very difficult to read.
The scrolling bothered me too, but it's not technically their fault. I paused ad blocking, and sure enough there's supposed to be a banner before the headline. With ads displayed it works more or less seamlessly (though it still is a bit distracting).
It's interesting how superficial some of the presentation designers can get. You don't need beauty to present data clearly and make it actionable.
I'd be interested in seeing some cost/benefit analysis on spending money on improving these kinds of presentation. Do you actually get a return from beautification projects like this.
Of course, there is a difference between bad presentation and competent. But I don't think Meeker's presentation is bad. Businessweek is just trying to attract controversy by throwing out "a crime against good design."
I work in a scientific field and we frequently get pitches by design firms trying to win work by spending money rebuilding paper presentations, etc. I think there is room to fix broken presentations. But there is diminishing returns from trying to improve a perfectly competent presentation.
So now we have to amateurish approaches to design.
One with the esthetic sensibility of a visually impaired 3 year old, and one that completely ignores the goals and requirements of both the publisher and their audience.
Both of them are equally unprofessional, but only the latter is unforgivably pointless and arrogant.
I don't know. I find the originals easier to read. I don't think the new design understands the information and its meaning.
Take slide 15 for example, changing a histogram into a bubble chart. Aesthetically it looks nicer, but when you try to comprehend the data it's more difficult. For example, easily comparing side by side bars is easier than trying to determine the difference in bubble sizes. One of the main points of Meeker's slide is that there is $30B in opportunity in the difference between Internet and Mobile time spent vs. ad spend. This is completely gone visually in the redesign and now adds a sentence to describe in text "Underspending on Internet and Mobile"
I don't understand how you can design something without even talking to any of the stakeholders. Does the new deck accomplish the goals better than the original? How would you know?
I'm not a fan of unsolicited redesigns. Design is easy when you have none of the constraints of a real project.
I would love to discuss with Mary about it. But I'm pretty sure she has better things to do!
And I agree with you that I don't have all the constraints. But it looks that they just used some of the default Powerpoint charts and shapes, so I just thought I could give it a humble try.
I don't understand all these negative comments. I love the re-design, and I love the general idea of re-designs.
In high-school we used to have 'focus correction areas' where our teacher would put up one or two sentences (poorly written or not) and we would spend a couple of minutes fixing them. The lessons I learned in those sessions have stayed with me, even as I've forgotten rest of the material.
One of the reasons I love Stephen Few's books and website[1] is that he takes bad graphs and improves them. You can see the before and after on the same page.
The only critique I have is replacing bar charts with bubble charts. Comparing the radius or area of two circles is far more difficult than comparing heights of bars.
> The Paris-based designer kept the “serious look and feel” and stuck with the shade of grayish green favored by Meeker, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But De Cubber introduced a dark background—white, he says, is harder to read on a big conference-room screen—and reduced the number of different colors to create visual consistency. Finally, he got rid of an unnecessary color block at the top and the firm’s logo at the bottom to eliminate clutter and create some breathing space.
I'm sorry, but isn't the usual advice that you use dark text on a light background, because in a presentation room with ambient light, the dark background may wash out?
Who cares what it looks like on a big conference-room screen? 99% of viewers are looking at it on a desktop or laptop.
I've always wondered how you can apply the banal "story-telling" presentation advice to slide decks that share detailed information that requires discussion, analysis and thought. Now I know -- you can't.
Emiland has, in fairness, greatly improved the text. "77% less financing volume" is a far better annotation than "77% below". Meeker would be better advised to improve her writing skills. Her design skills are just fine.
"Who cares what it looks like on a big conference-room screen?"
It was written to be presented at the Code conference. I think it's rather silly to ignore the design constraints of its initial presentation mode just because it will later be viewed online.
I don't care if the slides are full of words as long as the presenter doesn't just read word from word. The art of public speaking is more important than slides. I pay attention to slides but I also pay attention to speakers.
Leonard Kleinrock, one of the important father of Internet, is not shame of his 1997 style powerpoints. They work. He is a very good public speaker. He can tell stories.
I don't know why there's so much hate here, but I actually find the redesign much easier to comprehend quickly, without constant head-turning to read axis labels. The rephrasing of charts labels to, eg "Number of companies financed", in readable fonts makes things so much easier.
@EmilandDC, I really hope you do a complete redesign of the admittedly long presentation. I gave up a few slides in when I came across the original, but I am more likely to make it all the way through if I can read it in your presentation style.
The author even acknowledged this; the first paragraph does nothing but extoll the value of the analysis. The headline, though, is pure linkbait.
Even worse, replacing a bar chart, where height scales linearly with the metric and is easily comparable across bars, with a bubble plot, which is very hard to use to compare sizes (tiny changes in radius cause a huge change in volume, not so easy to see that), is simply bad design and obfuscates the point. Color me not impressed.
Shame on you, Bloomberg. You should be better than that.