20% - Presentation to class

A slide supposedly shown at a top secret military meeting, according to the New York Times. Now let's leave aside the rather uninteresting point that the US military thinks Iraq is moving away from peace and towards chaos (I mean, no shit), and talk about the real important issue here: how terrible is this slide design??? I mean waaaay too much text, hardly any whitespace, the chart is pushed over into a tiny awkward space on the side and is red-green coded so any colour-blind members of this meeting (which is likely all male, so has a pretty good chance of getting one of the 1/10 men who are colour blind) won't be able to read the chart properly . Oh god and the text is so thick and heavy and black against the white background you get all sorts of vibrations and other weird optical effects when you stair at it for any amount of time--which is not helped by the underlining of titles, which just makes the whole thing even noisier, without making the titles stand out any more...and they're using red-green for their little classification icons with no indication of whether they are supposed to coincide with the colour codings on the chart (does "routine" unorganized spontaneous mass civil conflict represent a step towards peace?? If not, why the fuck is it green?). That slide is just ug-ly.

Really, with idiots like whoever designed this slide in charge of the US operation in Iraq, is it any suprise they're screwing up so bad over there?

[/design pedant] ;)

ps. i gotta figure out how to change my blog template so I can post bigger pictures without running into my links bar...