No, we didn’t do Obama’s slides—Wait! he used slides?

Yesterday was the day I’ve dreaded now for a long time. Politicians using slides. It’s been tough enough to sit through executives’ abuse of PowerPoint, I loathed the day the politicians would try to visually express what they were saying.

Last night if you watched the State of the Union through whitehouse.gov, there was an “enhanced version” of his speech that incorporated graphic “slides” to the right of the stream. Obama, being the clear communicator that he is, had marvelous and relevant graphics. Visually, they weren’t a disruption and added meaning to the speech. It was a marvelous use of the medium.

And most of the people commenting on Twitter really liked the enhanced version:

@claresayas loving the accompanying slides to the #SOTU . oh you fancy, @BarackObama ! “The future is ours to win.”

@netshirley supporting slides shown at #SOTU live stream http://bit.ly/dZcPsZ HIGHLY recommend!!

@curtian4 whitehouse #sotu live video is a good 5 seconds ahead of networks & it’s interactive. It has keynote slides mapped to speech. Cool!

@samps Damn, this is a slick PowerPoint deck. #sotu (Ima get to work on them quals talk slides.)

But the GOP didn’t fair so well with their slide debut. In Michele Bachmann’s speech she used two charts:

The Twitterverse wasn’t as kind to her:

@andremichael: rep. michele bachmann is scary! AND SHE’S GOT POWERPOINT SLIDES.

@ QueenofSpain oooh she has CHARTS! Well SHIT! She MUST NOT BE CRAZY IF SHE HAS CHARTS! #sotu

@akmcquade I liked Bachman’s rotating powerpoint slides. My senior thesis defense included something similar, set to U2 music. #sotu #nationalparks

To make matters worse for her, the teleprompter placement was poor and the speech wasn’t spectacular:

@thomsinger Um, I feel like Michele Bachmann is talking to someone standing off to the right side of the room. #Cnn #sotu

@sethmeyers21: I hope whoever is standing over my left shoulder is enjoying Bachmann’s speech. As that’s who I think she’s looking at.

Obama and his team have set the communication bar high. Anyone contending HAS to be a great communicator, or the contrast is just too great and you’ll look like a bozo. GOP is going to have to value communications and the investment it takes to do it right. Take note of this video showing the amount of energy that goes into making Obama’s speeches. He does rounds and rounds of edits.

So, this morning I woke up feeling hopeful that not all politicians will abuse the medium, but please wield it wisely.

http://blog.jochmann.me Jakob

It seems that the president has taken care to employ professionals. Do you think that there are emerging “schools of thought”? I mean those that do have merit to them in presentation design. Not the ugly bar chart variant.

The rise of infographics and data visualization to become recognized as a design field of their own might have an influence on presentation design as well. Looks like you have a great army that is forming to combat the dark hordes of bullet points ;-)
http://AdvanceYourSlides.com Nick Smith

If I had to guess, I’d say that while you didn’t create Mr. Obama’s visuals, the person or people who did has probably been influenced by you, your team, and your writings. Thanks so much for all you do to raise people’s awareness that there is an alternative to bad presentations.
http://dawes.wordpress.com Andrew Dawes

There was a mistake in one of the economy slides. The size of the circles used to represent our GDP vs. China’s drastically over-represented our advantage over China. This is the classic info-graphic mistake of using the radius of a circle to represent a quantity… it is the area of the circle that we judge visually.

Otherwise, I agree, great slides, and good effect.
Midori

The graphics were great — the speech not so much. “Winning the Future” is the title of a 2005 book by Newt Gingrich. The president’s writers weren’t particularly original. Maybe a little more editing was in order.
@SlideRemarks

Not to turn this into a political discussion vs. a presentation discussion, but Ms. Bachmann wasn’t the official GOP response to the SOTU–that would be Paul Ryan. LOTS of people (including other congress members) can give a video response on their own. But Ryan isn’t as good of a presenter as Obama either.
Dan Dawson

I saw a post by a math teacher who did a review about the errors in President Obama’s slides, and how he might turn them in to a math problem for a class:

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=9258
http://www.duarte.com/ Nancy Duarte

Loved this Dan. Just twittered it.
http://www.duarte.com/ Nancy Duarte

Yeah, my hubby caught that GOP error after the blog post went live. Thanks!
Peter Heintz

A few misses here and there, but overall a textbook example of a good presentation :)

/ Peter
Patrick

As I understand it, her speech was supposed to be a webcast ONLY to the Tea Party Website. She was looking into the Webcam, as she should. CNN (or whoever broadcast it for television) was given a secondary camera position.
http://www.knowledgevision.com/blog Michael Kolowich

I think the GOP missed an opportunity to use a modern online presentation tool to turn the tables on the Enhanced State of the Union Address. They could have used a tool like to build slides and footnotes into an online rebuttal/response presentation that’s synchronized with the president’s State of the Union video. It would have been VERY effective and interesting to see the contrast between Obama’s slides and numbers…and the other point of view.
http://twitter.com/rejoicebeloved Rejoice Beloved

Reagan. Now he was a great communicator.

It is interesting that the facts are overlooked on Bachmann’s slide for the sake of aesthetics. The facts can tell me more about something significant that I need to know than any marvelous and relevant graphics anyone else can design. Just the facts. Just the facts will do for attention grabbing. I do notice there is a slant here in the op/ed of responses from both sides. I wonder if you were able to find any positive responses to Bachmann? Any negative responses to Obama? I’m sure.

Thanks Nancy for the “I Have a Dream” speech analysis in your other post. I linked it to my blog.
http://www.duarte.com/team/nancy Nancy Duarte

Reagan is a GREAT communicator. We’ll pay him homage on Friday (what would be his 100th birthday). I tried to keep the politics neutral and chose to comment on the slides-only. I want nothing more than to see the GOP have an articulate, clear spokesperson. He speech was a shambles which fed the dislike. It was a shame because she did get the opportunity to rebuttal.
http://www.duarte.com/team/nancy Nancy Duarte

Good to know, that’s a problem in having 2 different camera audiences.
http://www.facebook.com/mauconline Ade

Nice to know that politicians are taking their campaigns to greater heights & taking advantages of all tools available to them to communicate better