Supercommunicator

Finding the Right Medium to Deliver Your Content

Analytical design guru and author Edward Tufte hates PowerPoint. I mean he really hates PowerPoint. In his 30-page essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within,”¹⁵ he blasts the Microsoft presentation tool in a tone that makes it sound like an evil force sent by demons to derail all communication efforts on Earth. “PowerPoint creates a cognitive style that disrupts and trivializes evidence,”¹⁶ he writes, and that's just for starters. He goes on to trash its “obnoxious transitions and partitions,”¹⁷ the way its slide format is sequential, and the bullet-point culture it ...