At the IA Support Group last night we reviewed the Tufte-Byrne-Norman Powerpoint debate. One good point that was brought up was the life of “decks” beyond presentation and documentation, that people in corporate cultures communicate with Powerpoint, using it as a mental shortcut instead of Word and emailing decks around. Tufte’s perfectionism is too slow to affect this. Could a good compromise simply be putting the simple, main idea in the slide, and the prose in the notes, distributing it in notes format? That’s the tact I plan to take with my upcoming presentations.

Update: Paul Gould at MAYA Design illustrates exactly what I’m talking about. Link courtesy Beth Mazur.