Overview

People are not listening to us, because they are spending so much time trying to understand these incredibly complex slides. ^[1]

Louis Caldera Secretary of the Army

On a regular basis, managers from the different national laboratories trek to Washington D.C. to present their work and to propose new research. During the 1970s and early 1980s, many managers, including those from Sandia National Laboratories, where I worked, held a cavalier attitude about making presentation slides for these meetings. In fact, many Sandia managers prided themselves on waiting until the plane ride to begin creating their slides, which they wrote by hand. In effect, these managers considered themselves researchers, not artists, and therefore did not have time to worry about such trivialities as the design of presentation slides.

One year, though, managers from a competing laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, broke from this tradition and quietly put much effort into the creation of their slides. Their reasoning was that the projected slides were important for the success of the presentations and that these presentations were important for the success of their proposals. After much deliberation, Lawrence Livermore came up with a specific format that they felt could best communicate technical information to a wide audience. ^[2] Beginning in the upper left corner of each slide, Lawrence Livermore inserted a short sentence headline, rather than a phrase headline, that stated the main point of the slide. The assertion made by this headline was then supported below by images (at least...