The combined budget of the 16 United States intelligence agencies has remained classified since the Cold War. Until last week, that is: The classified budget was unearthed by an author and blogger named R.J. Hillhouse when she, wait for it… Right-clicked a graph in a PowerPoint presentation the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (”DNI”) posted on their public website.
This caused a considerable amount of buzz on the internet and generated an enormous number of LOLs at the expense of the DNI. But it wasn’t the fact that Terri Everett, who posted the slide show online, failed to take basic and easy steps to remove the classified data that struck me as extraordinary… It was how God-awful the presentation itself was.
I imagine the following are the types of slides that could give Edward Tufte aneurysms…
This slide is titled “Multiple Areas of Concern”. It would seem that topics such as terrorism, economics, and foreign policy are so concerning that they should all be lumped into one cluttered page and illustrated with standard clip art that does nothing whatsoever to enhance the understanding of these topics. I have to say that my favorite piece of clip art is the bundle of dynamite sticks commonly used by cartoon characters that is meant to represent terrorism, but the “Military” illustration, which appears to have been hand-drawn by someone’s 5-year-old is a close second.
As you can see, this slide is called “Megatrends.” That sounds really interesting, doesn’t it? Too bad the text is practically unreadable since they placed it over that nonsensical globe/grid graphic.
I have no idea what this graphic is supposed to illustrate or represent. That fact alone is enough to render this slide utterly useless. But even if, for the sake of argument, you understand what all those acronyms and abbreviations mean and the speaker does a really good job of explaining how they all relate to each other… What the hell is with the formatting? Why do the top words have drop-shadows and the bottom ones don’t? Why is the S at the end of “LOGISTICS” on a second line… When it could easily fit if one just tweaked the text box a little bit?
You might think that with those billions and billions and billions of dollars the DNI oversees, they could shift some toward, say… Hiring a couple of in-house designers? Putting on a class in basic information design? Yeah, you might think that, but it turns out you would be overwhelmingly and mind-blowingly incorrect.
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