Don’t duck!

Every now and then I talk about graphs in presentations so I’m going to 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 explode 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.