Corporate advertising on the back of a celebrity death? Check. But this Chevy tribute to Prince is undeniably beautiful from a graphic design perspective.

It is still true what they say: Nobody writes songs about Volvos.

You know I love great stories told without words. And this one from the always creative New Yorker hits it out of the ballpark.

Guy Kawasaki has long said that he would never invest in a business that couldn't make its case in 10 slides. While I'm no venture capitalist like Guy, I've seen plenty of pitch and investor decks that had no hope of getting investment—and one of the common themes was far too many slides. When you don't understand your business well enough to explain it simply, or if your business model is so complicated that it can't be explained simply, then why would an outside want to invest?Guy revisits his 10-slide maxim in the below Entrepreneur article.

One of the questions I hear most often following a corporate training is: “How do I get my boss on board? She still insists on endless bullet points."Believe me, it’s frustrating for me as well to train a whole team from a company to present more effectively only to have the CEO (who missed the training) insist everyone revert to death by bullet points because it’s all he understands.Managing up in any situation and convincing the boss to change course is a delicate art, but here are five strategies for doing exactly that when it comes to presenting with fewer words:

1. Show, Don’t Tell

People make bad presentations because they see bad presentations. From college and MBA programs through to entry-level positions and management positions, most people are simply never taught how to present information well. And so, corporate America emulates the presentations they see being created by clients, colleagues and superiors.To counteract this, use every opportunity to show the powers that be what good presentations look like. When I first read Nancy Duarte’s Resonate, I was thrilled to see an example of a presentation given by GE CMO Beth Comstock filled with beautiful large photos. I immediately copied the pages and sent them around to my then company’s team that worked with GE. “Show your clients how their boss is presenting,” I told my team.Collect good presentations every time you see them, and show everyone you can what good slide decks actually look like. Send PDFs, links to TED Talks, hard copies of agency pitch decks or sales presentations you come across.

2. Preach the Golden Rule of Presentation

Okay, “preaching” and managing up are not always compatible, but try to remind others of the Golden Rule of Presentation: Present Unto Others How You Wish to Be Presented To. If your CEO complains about being given bullet-point ridden decks, remind her that you can help create better slides for her to deliver to others.

3. Win Small Battles

A mistake many make is to try to change everything overnight. Instead of standing on your desk and shouting, “One message per slide or else!”, look for opportunities to make over a small internal deck or just a few slides from an upcoming big presentation. Don’t change all of your president’s pie charts into bar charts and remove his legends the night before a major pitch, but try it with a few charts in a smaller deck and gently show how much more readable the data can be.And understand that you will not win every battle. But be strong and you will start to win here and there. Remember, an aircraft carrier doesn’t turn on a dime...

4. Gather Your Tribe

In his wonderful book, Tribes, Seth Godin urges changing company culture not by altering how leadership thinks, but how your peers think and act. “Gather your tribe,” says Godin, and gain as many allies as possible in your organization. Eventually, this critical mass will influence leadership. And you won't feel like such an island.

5. Bring in an Outsider

It’s a sad fact that the longer you stay at an organization, the more resistant that organization may be to looking to you for change. I’ve been there. I’ve been hired to “change the thinking” and “remake” an offering only to find myself a few years later shut out when things needed to evolve further. We’ve all seen high-priced consultants brought in to tell a company what many insiders already knew.But if that’s what it takes, then go ahead and bring in a presentation or data visualization trainer. Sending people to outside training is good, but not nearly as good as physically getting someone in-house to advocate to as many people as possible.And, of course, If you feel your organization would benefit from an outside voice and training, drop me a line!Thanks to Tim K. for suggesting this topic.

There has been an increasing trend in companies these days of insisting presentations be limited to just a few slides. I'm hearing more and more from clients that bosses are demanding "5 slides only" or "10 slides maximum" for an internal presentation.So, what does this actually mean and how do you handle a situation like this?

Slide Number Agnostic

First of all, I have always been slide number agnostic. For an on-screen presentation, it makes no difference if you present 10 minutes worth of content with one slide or with 20 slides. In my trainings, I routinely use upwards of 100 slides per hour.But herein lies the clue for you when given a cap on number of slides. Anyone who asks you to limit your number of slides is actually asking you to limit and focus your content. Most people assume content is related to slide number the way that a newspaper article is related to word count. But it's just not true. It's quite possible to put 60 minutes of content onto 5 slides—and that's precisely what some people do...

It's About Time Allotted

The first step in answering this challenge is to truly examine how much time you have to present. When preparing a presentation, overall time and time per slide are two of the most important metrics to consider. If you're given 5 minutes to present next year's sales strategy, that's a pretty good indication that this is not the place to discuss the work history of your 25 new sales reps and the 15-phase implementation plan for the new B2C website. Given 5 minutes, you can only address the big picture and the actionable takeaway, if any.

They Just Want the Big Picture

And that gets us to what most people are actually asking for when they ask for a cap on slides. They simply want the big picture and the takeaway. But for whatever reason, corporate America has failed time and again in adequately expressing and teaching people how to deliver this. Raise your hand if you've ever delivered more than you knew you were asked for. Why did you do it? Well, nobody has ever been fired for including too much...So, let's accept some collective blame here, and now understand why you are being limited to 5 slides only. It is a clumsy attempt to force people to not put needless details up on the screen.

So How Do You Handle the Slide Cap Request?

Clarify the presentation's objectives with whoever has requested the slide cap. Talk in terms of time allotted to present and ask what level of detail and takeaway is required. In most cases, people don't want all the detail behind the overall message. If it seems as though the requested information can fit into the allotted time, but is still more than what will comfortably fit on 5 slides with one message per slide, then ask for an exception and explain why. If the requested information is too much for your allotted time, then ask to provide additional content in a handout that will never be projected. Detailed tables and endless research notes have a place—just not on the screen in a live presentation. And keep in mind:

"5 Slides Only" = "Just Give Me the Big Picture"

A few of these are kind of stretch, but I've always been a fan of Nathan Yau.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new iPad app called Haiku Deck.

At the time, they had graciously created a quick deck for me based on my Twinkie theory of presentation. 

Now, they did one better, creating a Haiku Deck based on my 2 is the new 3 post.

If you haven't checked out Haiku Deck, swing by their site and download the app. It's a cool way of very quickly creating a simple text-lite presentation. It might even be a cool tool to use when training people to create more visual, less text-dependant presentations.

It's easy to be dismissive of new branding or a tweaked logo—so haters go ahead and hate—but I love Twitter's new logo.

It's a study in simplification all around. The best logo designers know it's not what you add, but what you take away.

Read about the design and thinking behind it here.

 

I used to be a big believer in the series of three. Everybody told me things are more memorable in triads: 3 Little Pigs. 3 Musketeers. 3 Stooges. "Stop. Drop. And Roll." 

The old rule of 3 is still valid—especially when comparing something like a 3-part strategy to a 10-point plan.

But if you know me, you know there's always a way to further simplify. And that's why I've become a huge believer in the series of 2. 

2 things are just much easier to remember than 3. And it is much easier to categorize things in an "either/or" construct.

For example, my department at Edelman does many things, but here's how I explain it to new employees:

1. We fish for people
2. We teach people to fish

On a more detailed level, we do quite a bit more, of course, but everything we do fits into one of the above two categories.

I recently restructured my presentation training from 3 parts to 2. Initially, the seminar bucketed everything into CONTENT, FORMAT & DELIVERY. But now, everything that I teach about effective presentation falls into one of two categories: 

The new 2-part construct still includes 3 hours of material, but now goes beyond mere categorization. If the attendees can't remember the dozens and dozens of techniques and tips at any moment, hopefully they will always remember the 2 overall goals when creating presentation materials: Everything in a presentation should strive for CLARITY and STICKINESS. And everything you put on a slide should address at least one of these 2 aims.

Audiences Remember More When Given Less

People always want something for their money. Therefore in business presentations, there is the constant urge to include more value by simply including more. And so you get lengthy and immediately forgettable bulleted lists in slides like this:

Traditional studies have shown that the brain can manage and remember up to 7 items at a time—this is one of the reasons phone numbers were initially capped at 7 digits. But studies on education have also shown that students learn more when presented with less. Think about that, because it's quite a radical idea. You will leave your audience with more by giving them less. And if we want to use the phone number example, note that the numbers are divided into TWO packages of numbers. You won't remember 3481372, but you will remember 348-1372. So, wouldn't this be much better if you're aiming for stickiness?

Steve Jobs Knew the Power of 2

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he found his old company selling dozens of different computer models. At a meeting attempting to sort the confused product line out, Jobs grabbed a marker and walked to the white board. He drew a simple 4 box grid: The columns were labeled "Consumer" and "Pro" and the rows were labeled "Notebook" and "Desktop." A consumer would only have a choice of 2 items at any given point in their decision-making. 15 years later, this is still essentially how Apple sells its computers. And if you've ever tried to choose a computer from Dell's mess of a website, you'll understand the power of Jobs's series of 2 selection scheme.

CEOs Want Fewer Choices

Last year we created a "Walking Deck" (more on that in a future post) for one of our executives to present to a major pharma CEO. CEOs are notorious for wanting simplified messages presented to them. You do not want to walk into their office with 15 options. (You want to ask them to make the decision between spending $100 million or $10 million based on your analysis and recommendations.) So here's the first page agenda presented to this CEO. Of course, each item has sub-items, but it was important to umbrella the entire meeting into just 2 items. 

At the end of the day and over the course of the entire meeting, this CEO was only asked to make a decision on 2 things: Did he want to engage Edelman to:

1. Increase engagement and access 
2. Provide measurable results

The Paradox of Choice is a very real thing. So throw away your 22-point programs and embrace the Series of 2. Of course, true communication masters only present 1 thing...

Love him or hate him, register here for upcoming east and west coast Edward Tufte seminars.

Head over to PresentationExpressions to check out my guest post on content's relationship to design.

We know about the dreaded slide-ument. But I think I discovered a new form on a bike ride this weekend: the Billboard-ument. This isn't glance media...

InFocus, the projector people, is hosting a "What Not to Present" contest and is looking for the worst single presentation slide you've ever seen.

For more info and to enter via Twitter, go here. 

It didn't take long for me to decide what my entry should be. No, it's not the "How to Fix Afghanistan" monstrosity, or even one of Bill Gates' old cringe-inducing slides.

For me, the worst slide is one that has led to more bad "PowerPoints" and bad presentation design than any other: Microsoft's default template:

PowerPoint is the only software program that I know of that tells its user the type of content to insert in the default empty view. Word and Excel don't tell you what kind of text or numbers to start with—they just give you blank pages. Photoshop doesn't even specify the color of its blank page lest Adobe bias the user against using a hot pink background. But PowerPoint not so gently nudges you, exclaiming: Use a header and then bulleted text, dummy!

The reality is that PowerPoint is simply a container and a tool for almost any type of content, laid out in just about any way you like. If you wanted to, you could actually lay out the New York Times in PowerPoint. Sure, it would be difficult, but it's possible. (Bonus points for anyone who knew that PowerPoint actually allows for columned paragraphs...) 

But this unfortunate default view has created "PowerPointThink" and a mindset of overly wordy slides with redundant or non-essential header bars and far, far too many slide-uments and PowerPoint train wrecks. By the way, if you think a slide needs a header bar, read this.

Of course, with a simple click, you can start with a completely blank template and let the world of possibilities await you. But simple clicks are time-consuming in the grand scheme of business. And the result has been decades of Death by Powerpoint. 

I'm anxious to see to the submissions InFocus receives!

There's a new musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll called Wonderland, and Time Out NY's Adam Feldman has written a brilliantly concise and clever review in the form of a rewritten version of Jabberwocky. The first two stanzas:

’Tis Wildhorn, and the hapless cast
Does direly gambol on the stage.
All flimsy is the plot half-assed,
Not right for any age.

Beware of Wonderland, I warn!
The jokes that cloy, the scenes that flop!
Beware the humdrum words and scorn
The spurious, bland rock-pop!

As a former theatre director (who actually wrote an adaptation once of Alice in Wonderland which is actually getting a small new production in the coming months), I of course understand the pain of a bad review. But, as a writer and communicator, I love the conciseness and directness that the surprise poetic form gives the reader. I don't think it's too clever by half at all.

Of course, it will never match the most concise review of all time: the 2 word review of Spinal Tap's Shark Sandwich...

But my favorite review will always remain Frank Rich's immortal criticism of Broadway's greatest flop, Moose Murders... 

Last week I finally had the opportunity to attend a VizThink workshop. VizThink is an organization that advocates and teaches visual thinking.

This event, "The Power of Visual Communication" was hosted and run by Todd Cherches and Steve Cherches of BigBlueGumball, and it was a fun evening involving VizBiz Pictionary, VizProvisation and visual notetaking. Here are my visual notes taken while listening to MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech. (A presentation, by the way, that has a GREAT bumper sticker.)

Here are some more pics from the event courtesy of MJ Broadbent, Managing Director at VizThink.

And Amanda Lyons took live graphic notes from the event and has posted her work here. Thanks, Amanda!

My company recently overhauled our employee review process, and the most striking thing about the change is the main employee evaluation document: What was once 4-5 pages of multiple metrics and ratings is now one single, well-designed 8.5 x 11 sheet. Our HR department reduced the questions and metrics, but in doing so has made the process far more understandable, focused and effective for all. One now has an instant birds' eye view with one glance.

It's human nature when producing an important document to think that more text will equal greater import. But all you have to do is look at three of the most famous "one-pagers" from US history to see that one page can communicate things more world-changing than any of us will probably ever create. The Declaration of Independence is a masterpiece of conciseness. The Gettysburg Address even more so (written at a time when 2 hour speeches were standard). And Richard Nixon's resignation letter says exactly what it needs to, and not a single thing more.

People Are More Likely to Read and Use a One Pager

When I began my current job, I inherited a creative brief that was 3 pages long, with so many unnecessary questions that it was rarely filled out by account teams. In redesigning the brief, I insisted that it be no more than one page. The redesigned PDF form can now be filled out in a few minutes and gives a complete overview of a project with one glance—no flipping pages to have a question answered.

Even data dense documents can be reduced to one page. Thomson Reuters recently released a "one page" annual report. (Thanks to Ideatransplant for writing about this.) 

It's okay to broaden the definition of "one page" as Thomson Reuters does. The handout that Edward Tufte distributes at his seminars is a single, double-sided 11x17 sheet folded in half. I guess it's technically 4 pages, but it's still probably more effective than a 20 page booklet. (And probably more green and cost-effective).

Fix your Content to Fix Your Design to Fix Your Content

My screenwriting professor in college was a tyrant when it came to format. Standardization of font, spacing and margins is very important for film scripts for many reasons (one page needs to equal approximately one minute of screen time, for example.) But she was also insistent that no block of one character's dialogue could span more than one page. We would get downgraded if we ever used "cont'd" on the following page. "Fix your writing to fix the format," she'd say. It sounds crazy, but her reasoning quickly became clear. Long blocks of dialogue generally were an indication that we were not telling our story visually enough and were just overwriting our dialogue. To fix the formatting, we had to spend extra time examining every word and line, which always made our writing more efficient, direct and effective. I honestly can't remember a time when fixing the format did not result in better writing on the page. 

So, by fixing the content to fix the format, we ended up with stronger content.

Even in the context of a larger print document, it's good to aim for one page segments. I just made some additions to the reading list page of a workbook I created. It took 20 minutes to get it back to a single page, but I think it was worth it.

Supergraphics

When discussing the philosophy of less is more, I always feel the need to bring up "Supergraphics." These are a type of printed graphic which instead of reducing information, seeks to include as much relevant content as possible. Examples of supergraphics are train schedules or baseball box scores (or Tufte's favorite example, Minard's map of Napoleon's Russian campaign.) What makes supergraphics different from essential one pagers is that with the former, the reader is generally interested in only one piece of the information—the 5:56 train home, for example.

But whether you're interested in only a piece of information (train schedule) or the entirety of the information (employee review form), keeping to a single page drastically increases the effectiveness and the reader's ability to process the information. All you have to do is think to the last time you had to use one of those large folded train schedules with the weekend trains on the back. Not as easy to use as it could have been, right? 

Great, great article by Jeff Rosenblum in Ad Age.

"A presentation consisting of 50 slides of charts and graphs virtually never ends with a win..."

Maybe the worst thing a designer (or anyone charging for their work) can hear is, "Well, even I could have done that." The implication being, "Your effort isn't worth my money." I've heard that in the past about my own work, and I heard it again in a meeting last week in which I was defending another designer's work. And this attitude gets to the heart of one of corporate America's worst attitudes:

Nobody Wants to Pay for Simple.

If a company engages a consulting firm for millions of dollars, the board doesn't want a simple solution that they could have come up with themselves—or worse, that they already knew.

We all remember the military consultant's solution for Afghanistan, right? 

When it comes to design and presentation, I believe in simple and uncluttered (remember, it's information that we're communicating, and information is most often best communicated simply.) But, engaging the services of a presentation designer when he or she is charging by the hour or the day, can get expensive—especially if content is being simultaneously written and rewritten while the designer is on the clock. As a result, there often is an inclination to want a heavily designed, Photoshopped and complex presentation—something the paying client most certainly could not have done themselves. They want their money's worth in visual glitz, even if the visual glitz runs counter to good communication.

It's no coincidence that some of the most effective and lasting works of art and design are remarkably simple. Take Milton Glaser's I Love NY logo. After the American Flag itself, it's probably the most iconic American branding ever created. But can't you just picture the meeting at which this was first unveiled... "That's it? I could have done that." Yes, Mr. New York Tourism board member, you could have.But you didn't. 

Or how about arguably the most famous music in the history of film—John Williams' theme for Jaws. It's only two frickin' notes. You can almost hear the studio executive screaming, "We're paying him how much? My kid's piano teacher could have composed that!" Well, yes, his kid's piano teacher could have composed that, perhaps. But the piano teacher would not have the skill and knowledge to know that less was more in this case, to know how to practice restraint and to be capable of much, much more complexity if the situation called for it.

There's an apocryphal story about a woman approaching Picasso in the park and asking him to draw a portrait of her. Picasso quickly sketches the woman and hands the portrait to her. "That will be $5,000," he says. The woman is indignant. "But it only took you 5 minutes!" To which Picasso replies, "No, madam. It took me all my life."

But even if you don't have a Picasso's lifetime of experience, it still does not mean that simpler is not better and ultimately more informed and effective. Take Maya Lin. She was an undergraduate architecture student in 1981 when she designed what I consider one of the most perfect pieces of art of the last century: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Unlike the above examples, the controversies over and objections to the memorial are well documented (and partially racist to boot), but from a purely artistic perspective, this too was something that "Even I could have done." But Lin was the one to actually do it, and to say, "It's okay, simple is appropriate." (Although there is actually more symbolism than meets the eye.) And to be fair to the selection committee, the Memorial design was the result of a blind and completely open competition, so the committee did choose her design over many others that were probably much more "complicated."

Any memorial design is fraught with the horrors of design and decision by committee, and so I'm amazed that Lin's work made it to fruition. As a counterexample, take the recently completed WWII Memorial on the Mall in DC. Many will disagree, but for me it is one of the most underwhelming monuments in Washington. There is so much embedded symbolism addressing so many interests that "simple" is the last word that comes to mind when viewing it—if one can view the entirety of it at all, except by helicopter. This is most certainly a monument that "I could not have done." But the lack of simplicity means that it will never stand on a par with the Washington, Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials.

What's the takeaway? Remember your ultimate goal—don't let your checkbook dictate the end product.

Sometimes it takes a designer to assure you that simple is good—as was probably the case with Milton Glaser's logo. And sometimes you don't need that designer at all. If your name is Gino and you're opening up a pizza shop, you don't need to pay a branding firm to tell you that "Gino's Pizza" is probably a good name (if that's the direction you want to go in.) Similarly, if you have the skills to find a powerful image and the discipline to use only a few words, you probably don't need a designer to put those together as an effective presentation slide. 

Believe it or not, I'm thrilled any time a client sends back to me a new version of a presentation with a half dozen newly added slides already designed according to my established look. Usually, they'll say, "I just followed what you already set up in the rest of the deck, but feel free to make it better since I'm not a designer..." I might be able to tweak things here or there, but 9 times out of 10, they've already done what I would have. In those cases, yes, you could have done that. And more importantly, you did.

I love quotes. Bartlett's Quotes used to be one of my favorite books in high school. And after all, "It's better to be quotable than it is to be honest." (Tom Stoppard.)

Quotes in a presentation, used judiciously, are a powerful technique as they ideally force the presenter to expound upon the point being made and not present a "see-say" slide. Additionally, the point you are trying to make has probably been made before far more succinctly and poetically and by someone far more famous than than you anyway. And finally, a quote if far more likely to stick in your audience's mind as a summation of your point or even your whole talk.

I've got three rules for quotes:

Short
Memorable
Appropriate imagery

1. SHORT
You want your quote to get to the point, to be quickly readable and to be memorable. Those things aren't going to be possible with anything longer than a few sentences at most. When it comes to quotes, the shorter the better, so find a way to trim. Use ellipses if you have to trim the fat.

Instead of this...

Try one of these...

2. MEMORABLE
If it's not memorable, maybe you should just paraphrase the thought in your own words. If you're trying to make the point that customers have been asking for more color choices for your widgets, you might be best served by using a slide that says "68% of customers expressed interest in additional color options" instead of putting up the text of a random customer email request. But if your company's biggest customer, Mary Jones, just called screaming...that could be a good quote slide...

3. APPROPRIATE IMAGERY
Think about the image (or lack of image) that will best communicate the story and message of your quote. Often, I like to use a full screen image of the quoted as I think it helps make the quote more sticky, but usually only if the person is known to begin with. In these back to back slides, I told the story of one of the most famous campaign refrains in recent memory and how it came to be, so I wanted the known players shown to make the story as concrete as possible. Note that I felt only one of these required textual attribution...

But sometimes appropriate imagery is no imagery. With this quote from the same presentation, I felt that a photo would actually distract from the point being made...

There could very well be a picture of Einstein or something else that could work well here, but I don't think it's one of these below. See how the essence of the quote gets diminished by the introduction of photos? You might disagree, but I thought so...

And sometimes the best way to put a quote on the screen is not to put it on the screen. Consider using a black screen and forcing your audience to listen to and watch you.

Last month I heard a speaker who finished his talk (that had used just a single image on screen) with a quote from Isadora Duncan. Though he had written the whole speech, he paraphrased his words when he spoke. But when he arrived at the end, he took out a piece of paper and read the quote verbatim with nothing behind him. Since it was a longer quote, it was very effective not to have the words on the screen. However, if he did request a visual, I might have suggested keeping the words off the screen, but showing something like this or this...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuant63/3152875867/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what’s next or how.
The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
The artist never entirely knows. We guess.
We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."

Someone recently showed me a pitch proposing a 3-pronged digital communications strategy for a client. "It's too complicated, and we want to make it more understandable," they said. "Can you create a visual to make it simpler?"

The ask wasn't all that unusual, and I do this kind of thing all the time. But as we talked through the content, I found myself having a great deal of difficulty understanding what was even being proposed. It wasn't highly technical language or even overly big words. The reason the proposal was complicated was not because it lacked visuals, but because it was filled with business jargon. We've all seen and probably used terms like "incentivize," "align," "impactful," "benchmark," "engagement," "dimensionalize," "silo," "synergize," and the list could go on and on. That's jargon.

Presenting a story well means presenting it simply. And just as though your visuals should be direct and sparing, so should your language—both what's on the screen and what's in your speaker notes. There's something to be said for the expression, "Explain it to me like I'm a fourth grader."

Carmine Gallo discusses the use of "amazingly zippy words" and "jargon creep" in his excellent The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. You're probably sick of me continually holding Steve Jobs' keynotes as examples of good presenting, but there is simply no better high-profile presenter today than Apple's CEO. And he excels at simple, jargonless language. Here's a slide that Joe Businessman might have created for an Apple iPod release...

At first glance, many of you might be at a loss as to how to simplify this, and may even question that it uses jargon at all. Now take a look at the actual slide Steve presented...

It's not only simpler language, but every word speaks to what people actually care about. "Powerful search functionality" might sound impressive, but what does it actually mean? Nothing, until it's presented clearly: "Find your music even faster."

Compare Steve's slide with one from a Microsoft presentation. While there may not be any single complicated word, there are far, far too many on the screen, and the mesage is far from clear.

 The plain English movement is often seen as avoidance of technical language in the sciences, legal and governmental arenas. That's all important, of course, but just because you're not using Latin, doesn't mean that you can't make your on-screen text even simpler than it is. Next time you create a slide, find a child under ten to show it to. If he or she can understand what you're saying, you just might have something.

I also want to take the opportunity to point out a fantastic text analysis tool at a site calledUsingEnglish.com. You can paste in a block of text and get an instant analysis. The varied metrics will tell you just how complex your writing is. My favorite metric included is theGunning Fog Index which will give you a "fog" value for your writing. The higher the rating, the more complex your writing and the harder it will be for your audience to understand. Gallo has a nice language complexity comparison of speeches by Steve Jobs versus those by Bill Gates. For two selected speeches, Steve clocked in with a fog index of 5.5 while Bill topped out at 10.7. For the same speeches, Steve averaged 10.5 words per sentence, while Bill had 21.6, and Steve averaged 2.9% "hard words" while Bill used 5.11%.

Don't make it stupid. Make it simple..., stupid.

Oh, and just so you know that I don't think Steve always gets it right, take a look at this compilation of Apple Keynote bloopers. There's a sequence about 1:50 in which Steve shows exactly how bad jargon can get. But, of course, to his credit, he instantly recognize his mistake, makes an apology, makes a joke and translates the jargon. "We built in a technology in the Mac OSX mail called Adaptive Latent Semantic Analysis. Now what is this? I don't know, but it works!"