They say a photo is worth a thousand words, and a good chart is worth a million numbers. There’s no denying the fact our brains are wired to understand visuals better and faster than numbers.

I ran across this super-creative visualization online last week and was blown away. The chart depicts US movie box office numbers for every opening weekend in 2008 (it’s still being updated over time).

This is a brilliant visualization because it does exactly what a great chart should do — it conveys an enormous amount of information, all of the relationships within a huge set of data, instantly.

Nothing about this chart is creative just for creativity’s sake. All of its features, from the colors to the shapes, make it more effective at telling its story.

Makes an ordinary bar chart seem kind of dull, doesn’t it?

Check it out here.

Visualization by Zach Beane (via swiss-miss)

The big debate

Which are better, light or dark slide backgrounds?

Surprisingly, designers are engaged in a heated debate over this question; each side claiming one style is easier to read than the other.

The difference in readability matters for texty mediums such as magazines and websites, but is comparatively irrelevant for your slides, as they only contain a few words each.

So, should you make your backgrounds light or dark? The answer depends on the context of your presentation and the tool you use to display it. In this entry, I offer some tips to help you decide which style will be most effective for your next presentation.

Lights + Projector = Dull visuals

Ever wonder why it’s always dark in a movie theater? Projectors can’t make the color black. A black pixel from a projector is really just a small shadow.

Projected images always look better with the lights off because any ambient light in the room fills in those shadows, reducing the contrast ratio between the light and dark pixels and making the dark colors in your slides look dull.

While we usually think of projectors when we think about presentations, people actually use a variety of tools to display their slideshows. Many modern boardrooms have replaced projectors with large, wall-mounted televisions. Traveling sales reps often present to clients from their laptop screens. I’ve even worked with clients who print their slides on heavy card-stock and flip through the cards manually as they deliver their speeches.

Going dark

Dark slide backgrounds look best on electronic displays (e.g. computer screens, televisions, etc).

If you’re using a dark background on a projector, you’ll need to make sure the room has good presentation lighting. That doesn’t mean turning all the lights off — nothing encourages nap time more than a meeting in the dark. Good presentation lighting just means there’s darkened area for the projector screen.

Dark slide backgrounds are also a strategic choice for long presentations, such as all-day seminars or workshops. When slides are too bright, I’ve heard audiences at these events complain they feel as though they’ve been staring at a lightbulb all day.

Going light

Light slide backgrounds are just the opposite.

First off, they’re much more versatile. Since light backgrounds are brighter, they look good coming from just about any quality display or projector, in any kind of room lighting. Additionally, they’re ideal for printed presentations since they tend to use a lot less ink.

Solid-white backgrounds make it super easy to add beautiful, dynamic images to your slides. A huge percentage of stock photos portray an object floating over a white background (these are called “isolated images”). A white slide background enables you to seamlessly incorporate these images into your presentation without wasting time in Photoshop cropping out the image backgrounds.

Ultimately there are no steadfast rules for which style to use, just a few flexible guidelines to help you make the best choice for your next presentation. Experiment with different styles, and as always, be creative with it.

I love the feeling a great, simple design evokes.

If you’ve picked up a magazine or watched prime-time television in the past few months, then you have seen the ads inviting you to visit WeCanSolveIt.org.

The We campaign is a recent project by Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate Protection. To paraphrase their mission statement, the campaign’s goal is to halt global warming by educating people around the world that the climate crisis is both urgent and solvable.

I absolutely love the logo for this campaign. The design is simple, but incredibly clever. As your mind works to figure it out the hidden meaning, the logo carries your brain through a fun little journey of realization.

You start by reading the word “we” in a plain green circle. Nothing fancy, but something doesn’t feel quite right. What’s with that little serif hanging off the edge of the “w”? That’s not supposed to be there. Odd… you know you’ve seen that somewhere before. Oh yeah, that little serif is normally on a lowercase “m”, not a “w”. In an instant you realize it’s not the word “we”, it’s the word “me” upside down! But wait — not quite exactly. The “e” is still right side up. What’s going on here?

You read on a little bit and find out what the logo is for — it’s a campaign to bring people together to solve the climate crisis. Suddenly you get it. The mental story your brain just experienced makes sense and you feel like you just solved a puzzle. Solving the climate crisis isn’t about one, it’s about many. It’s not about “me”, it’s about “we”. Neat.

That’s a fun logo and an example of great, simple design.

In addition to being well branded, the We campaign itself is a great thing. I highly recommend checking it out and signing up. http://www.wecansolveit.org/

If you’re interested in learning more about the process that went into developing the branding for this campaign, check out this article from the NY Times.

Picture Power

It’s no secret beautiful pictures can improve the impact of your slides, but a lot of people don’t know where to find them.

Clip Art looks like it still belongs in the early-1990s, and Google’s Image Search rarely yields the high quality images we’re looking for. Not to mention, there are legal issues with reusing copyrighted images found in the random tubes of the internet.

If you’ve never heard the term, “Stock Photography” refers to photos that are not taken for a specific client, but instead are made available for use by any client for any purpose. “Royalty Free”, a phrase you’ll often hear around stock photos, just means the image can be used an unlimited amount of times in certain media without paying royalties to the photographer.

Historically, stock photo catalogs were only available to professional media and design firms. The images were priced out of reach of ordinary people.

Fortunately, the internet has leveled this playing field and in the past few years several stock photo resources have sprouted up aimed at both professionals and consumers alike.

Where to get ‘em?

By popular request, I’d like to share with you some of my favorite places to get good quality stock photos. (Note: When I use the word “quality” in this context, I’m referring to both the resolution and the overall attractiveness of the images.)

stock.xchng – (Free – Mixed Quality) When budget is an issue but you want good quality images, this is the place to go. Stock.xchng is, by far, the best free stock photo resource I know of. Their image tagging could be better, but on the whole their search tool works very well. Not all the images in their library are spectacular, but there are enough gems mixed in to make searching around worthwhile. There is also a for-pay sister version of the site (stock.xpert), which boasts higher quality photos (as well as illustrations) for very reasonable prices (about $1-$10 per image).

iStockphoto – (Inexpensive – High Quality) Out of all the stock photo resources on the web, this one is my favorite. iStockphoto has a gigantic library of photos to choose from (their library also includes illustrations and videos). The site enforces strict guidelines for the quality of images that can be submitted, so most of images come from professional photographers and designers. The entire library is very well tagged, so when you perform a search you almost always get the results you want on the first try. While the images aren’t free, they are very reasonably priced (about $1-$10 per picture). It’s a small price to pay for the impact and professionalism such high quality images will add to your presentation. Definitely check this one out.

Getty Images – (Expensive, Best Quality) Getty is the top dog when it comes to stock photography. It may be expensive, but when you have the budget or just need that one perfect picture, there’s no better place to go. Getty is the image resource for countless top-notch media and design firms around the world.

Of course, there are many more stock photo resources out there. These are just a few of my favorites that you may also find useful when making your next presentation. If you have a favorite photo resource I did not mention, go ahead and leave a note about it in the comments.

Let’s shift gears now and talk about design. Well-designed slides alone don’t make a presentation great, but they certainly don’t hurt either.

Little Designers

Design is a tricky topic to address because people tend to see design as a profession, something only “designers” do. In the same way that too many people think they can’t be creative, too many people think they can’t design things.

When we’re little kids we spend hours and hours painting pictures. We are born as little designers. We draw the things we see, the things we think about. We don’t worry about critics or cynics. We don’t care what others might think if we express ourselves, if we show our feelings. As little kids the world is full of new things. We notice a lot of little nuances, so many we can’t help but express the world we see. Yet somehow this creative drive gets sucked out of us as we grow up. We get used to the things in the world and start to feel self-conscious about expressing ourselves. We forget we were once little designers. We forget what we can do.

The first step to good design is good observation.

Slowing down just a little bit, paying attention to the world and noticing the nuances that make things interesting is the best design education you can get. Design is all over the place.

A Photography Lesson

There’s a great design tip photographers use that slide designers can learn from. It’s called the “Rule of Thirds.” (I’m normally not a big fan of “rules” in this context, so ignore what it’s called and think of it as a principle. “Rules” are hard boundaries of what you should and shouldn’t do. “Principles” are sails that guide you in the direction you’d like to go.)

You can set two photos of the same object side by side and see two very different images. Next time you see a photo you like, pause a moment and ask yourself why you like it.

The “Rule of Thirds” has to do with framing your shot, which is to say it has to do with where you line up the things in your photo.

Imagine drawing two vertical and two horizontal lines across your image, dividing it into thirds each way (like a grid with nine boxes). The idea is to line up the important elements of your photo (the horizon, the person’s eyes, etc) with these lines and their intersections, instead of lining them up with the exact center of the image as we’re inclined to do.

It isn’t exactly clear why (it has to do with the Golden Ratio), but images lined up on the thirds tend to look much more natural and appealing. Something about them is more interesting.

Applying it to Slide Design

Once you know about the Rule of Thirds you’ll see it being used all over the place. Magazines and other print media regularly use it for their layouts. Cinematographers line up movie scenes along the thirds all the time. Television directors do the same thing (notice where the news anchor sits and where the graphic lines up in the upper corner).

The Rule of Thirds can make your PowerPoint slides look a lot better too. Our first impulse is usually to place objects on the horizontal and vertical centers of our slide. Instead, next time you’re making a presentation try aligning your text boxes and images on the thirds. It will often lead to a less typical and more interesting looking slide that’s more appealing to an audience.

Using grid lines of any kind in your slide design also adds a consistency to your slides that makes the whole presentation look more polished and professional.

The Rule of Thirds is one of those great design tips that comes from nature, so it can be picked up intuitively. It resonates well with human perception and can make your slides look a lot more appealing. It’s a design tip that’s simple to implement and yields big results, so give it a try in your next presentation.