Visual Storytelling - T. Benjamin Larsen's Blog

JFK vs PP II

Time for a sequel

Some of you might remember my post Killer Looks where I sought to illustrate how bad visuals, or more specifically bad Power Point, can destroy even the greatest of speeches. My example seemed to work quite well and I received a fair amount of positive feedback. As the post was also one of the most popular posts I've made, a sequel was inevitable. The thing that irked me about the original was that while it demonstrated the point I was trying to make it was also rather contrived. The Power Point Presentation was designed to be bad and while I've experienced similar examples in real life it did tickle the "do-better"-itch.

The original "Boring Powerpoint" clip

The where- and whats

What if I tried to make a proper presentation to go with the same speech? Would it still detract from JFK's dynamic delivery? To make the experiment more comparable to presentations in the wild I decided not to pull out the big motion-graphics guns. Everything was created in Apple's Keynote which is part of the excellent iWork. The free images were downloaded from FreeFoto.com and npg.gov.

The Result

I find it hard to distance myself from my own work and the legendary status of President Kennedy's Inaugural Speech makes it even harder. I am confident that it works okay but Kennedy's charisma is so strong it will always be dificult to improve upon. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether this presentation detracts or ads to the speech...