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by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: Bliki: Infodeck
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Feed Description: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development
When I rant on at my colleagues about the evils of
Slideuments, I do hear a useful push-back. Many
people now like to communicate through slide decks that aren't meant
to be used for presentations, just to be read. People like me can
snark about managers these days being unable to read anything that
doesn't look like a bullet point, but there are advantage to these
infodecks.
You can use spatial layout to help explanation
They discourage long prose that people don't read
It's easy to include diagrams as primary elements in the
communication
All this can lead to a document that's more approachable and
easier to communicate information than a traditional prose text
would be.
If a deck is intended for reading and not for projection,
then I don't count it as a slideument. Slideuments are bad because
they try to do two different things, but an infodeck is there only
for reading, so can be done well. Often, of course, they aren't but
that's a problem in the execution rather than the fundamental concept.
Infodecks are an interesting form to me, if only because it
seems nobody takes them seriously. Most users look at them as something
they just knock up with PowerPoint, and writers with pretentions to
seriousness (such as myself) consider infodecks to be beneath us. I'm begining to
think we should take them more seriously. We should think and talk
more about how to make them effective as communciation vehicles.
One reason that these are likely to grow is that increasingly we
are communciating on computer devices and not using paper. Modern
computers have bright multi-color screens, and aren't worried about
conserving paper. So a colorful, diagram-heavy approach that uses
lots of virtual pages is an effective form of document - especially
as tablets become more prevalent.
So what makes a good infodeck? Here's a few of my preliminary
thoughts.
Although they are usually created with a presentation tool,
such as PowerPoint or Keynote, they don't have to be. A
page-layout style tool is often a better choice. An example of
this is the Mac's Pages application. It's page-layout mode works
very well for infodecks.
Landscape orientation is probably best, if only because they
are often read on laptops.
Although bullets are the most common forms of using text,
stretch out and write short paragraphs. That will convey more
information without being too much text. There's no need to limit
yourself to bullets if the deck isn't going to be projected.
Use diagrams as much as possible and make them the central
element of the page with text around them. If you can't think of
diagram try laying out the blocks of text with positioning and
connecting lines to suggest any interrelationships between them.
Use PDF to send info decks around to others. PDF is the best
document format for format-intensive documents like infodecks.
(ePub is better for prose documents.)
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