Dear HPC Market, Stop the Ugly Slidedecks

“The reason people use a small font is two-fold: first, they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If thirty points is too dogmatic, I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.” —Guy Kawasaki

I’m in Denver now for the largest high-performance computing (HPC) tradeshow of the year, Supercomputing 2013. I’m both attending and giving a number of presentations.

Almost every single presentation in the HPC market is plagued by horribly broken slidedecks. They are ugly, impossible to understand, and lead to unrehearsed and dry presentations.

Here’s an exemplary slide from a presentation today:

That bad slide is just one of hundreds of ugly ones I’ve already seen this week. And SC13 hasn’t even officially begun yet.

In our market, NVIDIA stands above the crowd in the quality of its slides. They pay close attention to presentation format and it always feels good to watch their slides. I think we do a good job too. We care about these details.

AMD needs to toss out their slide templates and start over. They’re on my mind because I saw a ton of their slides earlier this week at APU 2013. AMD is not alone. Nearly the entire market has horrendous slides.

What are your tips for great slidedecks?