Information by Bullet-Ridden Design
The pun on PowerPoint "slides" in this New York Times headline strikes me as too subtle: Level of Discourse Continues to Slide... but the article by John Schwartz argues persuasively against routine, lazy and poorly-designed layout of information. I had missed Edward Tufte's critique of NASA's shuttle-disaster slide show, but I'm glad the Times popped it into my news aggregator just when I was preparing for a conference on Visual Literacy.
No, I wasn't planning to do a PowerPoint presentation there... but the article is a good reminder to put more thought into information design in general -- including on-deadline newspapers and sleepy-latenight weblog entries typed into standard-layout page templates. (Mea culpa.)
Online newspapers are almost as guilty as this weblog of sticking to routine page designs, and for the same reason: an automated Content Management System makes "routine" easy and speeds workflow, but it also discourages creative departures. The online version of that Times story is an example. Take a look.
Am I the only reader who almost missed the informative graphic hidden behind the tease link, "MULTIMEDIA Graphic: Speaking in PowerPoint"? The link is in plain type to the right of the story where most Times pages put multimedia links (not that this static image is "multi" anything). The link lands between the always-routine "Article Tools" links, a Starbucks logo and the always-there "News Tracker" links.
When I visited the story, two AOL ads were the only strong visuals on a page about the power of design. Even the Times has to get revenue from the Web, so I won't begrudge it an ad or two -- but the duplication is silly, suggesting that some kind of automation was in charge.
With more human attention, Tufte's slide example could have some graphic representation on the main story page. At least it could be linked to a key point in the story's text -- perhaps the sentence that says, "PowerPoint-muffled messages have real consequences, perhaps even of life or death." (A little bold type can go a long way.)
In fact, that Times "copyright" graphic is actually a simplified version of Tufte's critique of NASA's PowerPoint festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism, a phrase the Times story quotes without linking to the details. Tufte's own version of the image and an online discussion at his site are bonuses the Times could have given its readers. Also, granted that this is story is a "Week in Review" piece and primarily about PowerPoint, but why not link to the Times excellent collection of previous shuttle stories? The Web can be deep as well as quick; it can add so much more than ink-free, paperless delivery -- if news organizations are willing.
10:48:08 PM 
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