An Inspired Pairing

I’ve been traveling a lot lately and that has given me the opportunity to knock of some of the books that have been sitting on my to-read list for too long.  Two of those books, which I read back-to-back go together like Gruyere and Chardonnay.  They are great individually, but a truly inspired pairing.

The first is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte.  This book has received gushing reviews since it was first published and deservedly so.  My favorite review quote was from the Boston Globe:  "A visual Strunk and White", referring to the classic on how to write clearly and concisely.  The Elements of Style, is self-consistent; it is clear and concise.  The same can be said of the The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.  It holds to its own principles in how it presents data. 

This book motivates me to be more contemplative of the charts and graphs I produce to convey information.  Example after example show ways the display of data can add to or take away from the message the data has for its readers.  Excel gives you some tools for aspiring to the former, but makes it oh-so-easy to achieve the latter.

The second book is Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds.  This book seeks to inspire us to deliver better presentations.  I’ve sat through hundreds of PP presentations.  Not many were memorable.  But some were, and those that were follow the guidelines in this book.  It’s about crafting your message, not making yourself obsolete by having the slides stand alone, simplifying and using space effectively.  It is a convicting book because boring presentations are the de facto result when we use built-in templates, cut-and-paste from Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and throw in some images we find from Google images.  We can do better, and we must do better.  We can serve our coworkers by better valuing their time, and making them delighted to have been at our presentations.

Each of these books is wonderful.  But having by serendipity read them back to back, I realize they are an inspired pairing.  The one guides us to presenting data in a way that is clear and compelling.  The other guides us in using that data in clear and compelling presentations.  If we take these lessons to heart and apply them in our creations, we may not save the world from death by PowerPoint, but we can avoid adding to carnage.