thoughtcrumbs

"PowerPoint is a software you impose on people" - from Ian Parker's brilliant article on the ubiquitous monster in this week's New Yorker. (Sorry kiddies - article isn't available online - but since this week's focus is all things digital, you should run right out and pick one up anyway.) Not only has the program assisted the masses in organizing their presentations into neat bulleted chunks, Parker and others find that more and more it's altering the way people think. And not in a good way. Begone pronouns and phrases more than seven words long! The name "AutoContent Wizard" for the templates (with scarily meeting-ese prewritten content) was originally a joke - "a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers."

My experiences with PowerPoint are mixed - since it doesn't support animated gifs easily (a blessing in most circumstances), I've used Director instead for my thesis presentations lately (which were all about animated banner ads). Director is a pain - you have to deal with a lot of overhead yourself, and the finished product is generally indistinguishable from that which would've come from Microsoft.

One beautiful, mold-bending slide show I saw recently was by Geoffrey Hiller, who incorporated his stunning photographs into the background of each screen. Yeah, yeah, you say, that's been done before. But some gestalt mixture of emotive photos, subtle (not blue!) background colors, and nice navigation buttons really struck me. Unfortunately, much of the text was too small to read, but it made for a visually compelling talk.