Kashi’s Slideument – Whole Grain Confusion
Kashi designed a beautiful document, but confusingly presented it as a slideshow
I received a monthly e-mail newsletter from SlideRocket, an online presentation service. Featured under their Presentation Showcase was a SlideRocket presentation created by Kashi, the San Diego based whole foods company. I clicked on the link and was taken to a beautifully designed, visually appealing presentation… I mean document. No, they were definitely slides… but, they’re in portrait orientation… wait a minute!! (You can view the presentation here.)
I was greatly confused. I liked what I was seeing, but felt weird clicking through slides that looked like 8.5×11″ pages. I quickly realized that I was looking at the ultimate incarnation of what Presentation Zen‘s Garr Reynolds calls a “slideument.” As Garr explains,
“Slides are slides. Documents are documents. They aren’t the same thing. Attempts to merge them result in what I call the ‘slideument’ (slide + document = slideument).”
Slideuments are a symptom of ignorance and, to a degree, laziness. Conference organizers tend to require their speakers to submit their presentation slides to be used as handouts or to otherwise be distributed to attendees. More and more, college professors distribute their lecture slides to their students as a form of notes – all but obliterating the need for students to pay attention in class and take notes. This creates a design dilemma, because well designed slides do not function well as a document. What these organizers and professors don’t understand is that the purpose of slides is completely different from the purpose of a document. Paraphrasing from Edward Tufte, slides have a low density of information while documents have a high density of information. In other words, slides are a visual supplement to the main medium of information (the lecturer) while documents are the main medium of information. Instead of combining the two into a slideument, they should be creating two separate versions of the document – one for reading, the other for presenting.
Kashi’s Yearbook celebrating their “25 Years of Passion for Positive Eating” was an incredibly well designed document full of great information divided into 7 sections. It was information dense. Presenting it page by page in a slideshow, however, added no functionality. If anything, it lessened the effectiveness of the document by constraining the viewable size of the document and forcing the reader to move in a linear fashion. If the document had also been redesigned specifically to be presented as slides, it would have been much more effective.
In an upcoming post, I will present some solutions to the slideument conundrum. I will share examples of how to fill the needs of conference organizers and teachers by utilizing notes and/or creating two documents.
Update: After some more consideration, and comments from readers, I’ve written a follow up post clarifying the problems with this presentation and suggesting a new term for the Kashi dilemma – docuslides.
July 21st, 2010 at 11:58 am
This document from Kashi doesn’t bother me that much–assuming that it’s meant to be used as a document and not as a set of slides to accompany a talk. I think what Garr Reynolds means by a “slideument” is a set of slides that contain enough information to stand alone from a talk, but are used as slides for a talk anyway.
The Kashi document looks like they used PowerPoint to design a document, and, while there are other design programs that are better suited to this kind of task, PowerPoint can be used to create decent looking documents. Lots of academics use PowerPoint to design posters to share their research, and it works well for that purpose.
July 21st, 2010 at 2:40 pm
This approach of slides are slides and documents are documents and never the two shall meet is becoming a bit passe as technology and user demands evolve. Documents as we know them are dead. Dead because the line is already blurred, dead because the printed document is becoming history (“Amazon Sells More E-Books Than Hardcovers | Wired.com”) and dead because people expect information to be dynamic, current and engaging, qualities that most documents do not embody.
We should congratulate Kashi for embracing an innovative medium that clearly tells their story in a logical and linear flow. Call it by whatever name takes your fancy, Kashi now has a set of dynamic slides / pages that tells it’s story in a beautifully presented and interactive medium. This presentation can be easily shared, embedded, measured collaborated on and re-purposed as needed.
Presentations are being used in many new and wonderful ways to create Resumes, Books, Movies and even web sites (http://junkdrawermedia.com). How will you reinvent your presentations?
July 22nd, 2010 at 9:46 am
Nat, thank you for your comment.
I will respectfully disagree and still think that this was an ineffective use of a good tool. The important point I am trying to make is that Kashi repurposed a tool for no purpose. There was no added function to presenting this document in a SlideRocket presentation over simply providing a PDF, which can just as easily be shared, embedded, and – utilizing other appropriate (and free) tools – measured, collaborated on, and re-purposed.
It was not a dynamic set of slides, but rather static pages identical to what would be available in a PDF. Maybe if they had included embedded videos, photo slideshows, etc. it would make sense to use SlideRocket. The JunkDrawerMedia site you pointed to is a great example of when it makes sense to create dynamic slides.
I may drive a nail with a rock if I’m in a bind, but if I’m building a house, I’m going to buy a hammer.
July 22nd, 2010 at 10:14 am
Hey Derek,
I’m sure you’re right that Garr was referring to slides with too much text content, probably like this presentation on how to use PowerPoint to teach (Direct Download of Zip file) from EllenFinkelstein.com. Kashi’s document is just an extreme example of that.
I’m not just harping on PowerPoint or SlideRocket, which are great tools in the right use case. It’s a matter of using the right tool for the job. The professors and grad students I work with have also used PowerPoint to ‘design’ research posters. After struggling with the technical challenges of using presentation software for the wrong use, I just created a template for them in Pages, a page layout program, which they loved! It makes just as little sense to create a brochure in Word or keep a To Do list in Photoshop.
July 29th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
I’m not entirely certain I agree with your perspective on this. When I last uploaded a slideshow to SlideShare, I quickly realized that it doesn’t stand alone; readers would not be able to follow the content if I left it the way it was for the presentation (lots of pictures, very little writing, with most of the information coming verbally).
I could have done a voice over, but I elected to edit the slides to add in more text, making them more self-explanatory. In a few places, I put prose text in a speech bubble, to indicate that it is what I would have said.
If I understand your perspective correctly, you would say that I should have just produced a blog post or paper on the same topic, rather than trying to create a slideshow that could stand alone.
Is that right?
July 31st, 2010 at 8:41 am
Hey Miriam, thanks for your comment. What you’ve mentioned is one possible exception I didn’t take time to discuss. A lot of times I would say, yeah stick with the blog post. But, there certainly are cases where a presentation is intended to stand on it’s own – particularly on the web – and must include enough detail to be understood. I’ve created a presentation like this myself recently: Burn Your PowerPoints. A narration, text bubbles, or text narration work well, as long as they’re distributed amongst the slides. So I don’t think we disagree.
My real problem the Kashi document was that it was not created to be presented as slides, but created as a document and then just inserted into slides. I think I clarified this in a follow up post.
August 4th, 2010 at 7:38 am
[...] A couple of weeks ago I got involved in a debate with Nathan Cashion of Brain Slides about a really impressive presentation created by one of SlideRocket’s customers, Kashi Foods. You can watch Kashi’s presentation and read Nathan’s post and related comments here. [...]