Partner Article

Don't duck!

With Simon Raybould of Curved Vision

Last time, I was talking about graphs in presentations and I said I’d spend some time talking about Ducks and Golden Ducks. No, not terms for cricket batsmen who fail to score but types of graph. Put simply, a duck is a graph or graphic which doesn’t contain any information. A Golden Duck is the same but worse - so much worse, in fact, that it manages to draw attention to itself and what it’s doing. It shouts at you that it’s a waste of space on the page, screen or whatever.

An example might help illustrate the point. If I told you 69% of our clients are female you’re perfectly capable of realizing that this means that approximately a third are male (assuming people are either male or female and not either/both!). It doesn’t take a pie-chart to illustrate the point - that would be a duck.

To make it a Golden Duck you can do fancy things to it such as turn it 3D, or exploding the pie - what’s the point of a pie chart with one slice half pulled out when there are only two slices?

Of course, I’m not anti-graphics in your presentation - far from it. I am, however, anti-graphic-for-the-sake-of-it!

Take a moment to look at your graphics - do they add something, or are they simply there to fill up the screen? Honestly? If it can be cut, cut, because anything that’s present-but-not-necessary gets in the way of your audience understanding what’s present-and-necessary.

As always, comments and questions to me at sme@curved-vision.co.uk.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .