What a horrible, horrible headline. Mary's analysis is incredibly detailed, extrememly informative, and FREE. This link-bait headline chose to ignore all the content and focus exclusively on the fact that the plots are ugly. Strangely enough, I managed to get through the slideshow without falling asleep, and I even was able to read her (quite well laid out) graphs and understand her points.<p>The author even acknowledged this; the first paragraph does nothing but extoll the value of the analysis. The headline, though, is pure linkbait.<p>Even worse, replacing a bar chart, where height scales linearly with the metric and is easily comparable across bars, with a bubble plot, which is very hard to use to compare sizes (tiny changes in radius cause a huge change in volume, not so easy to see that), is simply bad design and obfuscates the point. Color me not impressed.<p>Shame on you, Bloomberg. You should be better than that.
Yet another poseur "designer" who clearly hasn't read Edward Tufte's books, and has made crucial mistakes such as making the graphs less accurate than they were before and adding additional extraneous clutter (such as those extra icons) on top of the original information. Real design is supposed to make information more legible, not less, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how slick or "pretty" the end result appears to be.
I don't normally pick on the design of sites submitted, but people in glass houses...<p>As soon as I scroll down a little the header changes and the entire first paragraph disappears behind it. It's very jarring and it's actually making it difficult to read. I'm sure it seemed like a cool idea, but design has to play second fiddle to functionality: It doesn't matter how fancy the design is if the product cannot perform its function.<p>A similar poor choice between shiny visuals and functionality has torpedo'd their redesign of the slides. They aren't the prettiest but I can very easily read the original charts. The new design massively reduces the contrast between text and background and makes the axis labels much smaller and a lighter font weight to boot. The result is very difficult to read.
Cubbers slides are prettier. However i'm able to grasp content better from Meekers slides.<p>I guess the people (Meeker, NSA) who make these presentations just want to get the message across and care little about pretty slides.
So now we have to amateurish approaches to design.<p>One with the esthetic sensibility of a visually impaired 3 year old, and one that completely ignores the goals and requirements of both the publisher and their audience.<p>Both of them are equally unprofessional, but only the latter is unforgivably pointless and arrogant.
For me I'm distracted by the design - which is nice enough - but the key information doesn't jump out at me like with the originals.<p>Also, the use of green on green (or is it Teal?) isn't agreeing with my ageing eyesight.
Wow, so much hate here.<p>I like the re-design. Yes, he makes it readable by reducing some information. But it's a <i>lot</i> easier to read. Sometimes that's a good trade-off.
I don't understand how you can design something without even talking to any of the stakeholders. Does the new deck accomplish the goals better than the original? How would you know?<p>I'm not a fan of unsolicited redesigns. Design is easy when you have none of the constraints of a real project.
> <i>The Paris-based designer kept the “serious look and feel” and stuck with the shade of grayish green favored by Meeker, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But De Cubber introduced a dark background—white, he says, is harder to read on a big conference-room screen—and reduced the number of different colors to create visual consistency. Finally, he got rid of an unnecessary color block at the top and the firm’s logo at the bottom to eliminate clutter and create some breathing space.</i><p>I'm sorry, but isn't the usual advice that you use <i>dark</i> text on a <i>light</i> background, because in a presentation room with ambient light, the dark background may wash out?
I don't care if the slides are full of words as long as the presenter doesn't just read word from word. The art of public speaking is more important than slides. I pay attention to slides but I also pay attention to speakers.<p>Leonard Kleinrock, one of the important father of Internet, is not shame of his 1997 style powerpoints. They work. He is a very good public speaker. He can tell stories.<p><a href="http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/bibliography-presentations.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/bibliography-presentations.html</a>
I don't know why there's so much hate here, but I actually find the redesign much easier to comprehend quickly, without constant head-turning to read axis labels. The rephrasing of charts labels to, eg "Number of companies financed", in readable fonts makes things so much easier.<p>@EmilandDC, I really hope you do a complete redesign of the admittedly long presentation. I gave up a few slides in when I came across the original, but I am more likely to make it all the way through if I can read it in your presentation style.
Not bad. I like the way he streamlined the text.<p>Dark background... yes, that would be better for a conference room projection. But I prefer the white for my laptop view.