Today's newsletter is below. Not a vintage issue TBH. I was excited when I was writing it in the cafe, scribbling in my notebook. It seemed interesting then. As it moved from notebook to Simplenote to Tinyletter it seemed to get more and more stilted. Ah well. It's OK.
Since it’s NaNoWriMo I too am not writing a novel. Instead I’ve been devoting a bit of time each day to getting down some more thoughts about PowerPoint, to see if there’s a book there.
Yesterday I was wondering why I like it so much. Apart from my contrariness and that professionally I’ve had to become reasonably facile with it, why do I find it so fascinating? One reason is that nothing so accessibly combines live performance, design, imagery and words. A really good PowerPoint presentation combines the visual and narrative assault of a movie with the unpredictable thrill of a gig. (I’m not talking about every presentation here, you understand, I’ve seen a couple this week that were definitely not Citizen Kane meets Live At Leeds.) Thinking about this always reminds me to try and watch Swimming To Cambodia again. I’ve not seen it for, maybe, 20 years, but in my head Spaulding Gray’s performances did a lot of what I imagine a great presentation does - did he ever use PowerPoint? I doubt it.
A great presentation combines some obvious things - performance and improvisation, great writing, good image making and/or selection, but also some subtleties. You’ve got to design a series of great posters, that’s what your slides are, and you can make different typographic decisions on every slide. Books don’t normally allow for that. You can say things with the development of your type, you can hide things in the backgrounds, you can bury tiny messages around the edges of your main point. You can incorporate music and video in all sorts of interesting ways. Then there are the little executional things that most people forget - what do you put on the end slide? (Often the one that stays up the longest while the Q&A drones on.)
So, speaking of Tiny Interesting Things About PowerPoint, have a look at this presentation by Bret Victor. The actual content is fascinating, but you’ll see that he’s through about one of the interesting little challenges of presentation design - how to communicate how far you’ve come and how far there is to go. He’s done it with little tabbed graphic chapter headings at the side of this slides. (There’s a good view at 11.07) I think that’s elegant and interesting.
Anyway.