Graphic Design Elements

All the bells and whistles in all the graphics programs available for business presentations boil down to just four basic design elements:

• Pictorial. Photographs, sketches , maps, icons, logos, screen shots, or clip art.

• Relational. Tables, matrices, hierarchies, and organizational charts . (Think of a relational chart as an image that captures a set of relationships, connections, or links in visual form.)

• Text. Text comes in two flavors: bullets and sentences.

• Numeric. Numbers expressed in bar charts, pie charts, area charts, line charts, histograms, and other more specialized types of graphs.

When you choose either pictorial or relational, you achieve Less Is More by default. A picture is worth a thousand words. And a table or chart, by definition, organizes multiple diverse elements, turning more into less. So both pictorial and relational graphics instantly fulfill Mies van der Rohe's principle.

However, a lot of business information can't be captured in a picture or a table. As a result, most presentations bulk up with text and numeric graphics. This is where the trouble begins. In the first place, presenters wind up using more, not less, on the screen, thereby losing effectiveness. What's worse , they fall prey to the Presentation-as-Document Syndrome.

A presentation is a presentation and only a presentation. The primary role of graphics is to support the presenter and to give the presenter the opportunity to add value above and beyond what is projected on the screen.

Graphics also help the audience remember your content. Remember the Chinese proverb: "I see and I remember."

In the next chapter, you'll learn how to create effective text graphics; and in the one after that, you'll learn how to create effective numeric graphics. The emphasis in both of these chapters will be on how to achieve Less Is More, thereby conveying your visual information in a clear, crisp, and powerful form.