Presentation Zen posted a blog earlier this week on Hillary Clinton’s campaign sending an elect ability PowerPoint to House Democrats.
I’m including links to this blog as well as a link to Rick Altman’s blog who developed a before and after version. There’s a good message here about appropriate use and design.
http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2008/05/hillary-campaig.html
For a before and after look at the same slides, see:
The original set of slides are a perfect example of how unattractive PowerPoint presentations tend to look most of the time. I truly believe that most people with negative connotations of the software, hate it for exactly the same reason… poor use and not because of their great aversion to Microsoft or PCs . PowerPoint is nowhere near the holy grail of slide shows but with the right skill sets, some creativity and a good eye it could be quite powerful.
Ugly. And there’s some good data in there for her. One big thing missing seems to be some are maps. Elections refer to so many geographic locations, what about a map of the “tough districts” to cognitive signal that we are talking about a geographic area?