Visual Aids

Presentations often rely heavily on graphs, diagrams, photographs, schematics and tables to present technical data. These are powerful visual tools which can turn masses of data into easily perceivable shapes. However they are often abused.

The main problem seems to be that the presenter knows what to look for in a graph or diagram but the audience often does not. Look at the picture on the left. At first glance it just looks like a mess of black and white blobs. However, on closer inspection, a Dalmatian dog can be seen. Once the dog has been “spotted” it is very difficult to imagine not being able to see it, or more to the point, it becomes very easy to ignore all of the distracting blobs in the background. This ability to perceive shapes (or wholes) from within a set of parts was studied in a field known as Gestalt Psychology.

In the same way that the dog in the picture can be pulled into the foreground of meaning from out of the background of blobs, so too can important details of graphs be made easily apparent to the audience by applying the rules of Gestalt Psychology. On top of this, distracting and unnecessary features can be removed from graphs to allow the viewer to more easily perceive just the key features. Below are two versions of the same graph but the one on the right has been stripped of the kind of design items that abound in presentations today. As a result it presents a clearer visual argument to the viewer.