Clive Thompson Quotes

Information is expanding daily. How to get it out visually is important.

I feel that every day, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless; it literally pours in.

Vision isn't a template in PowerPoint.

If you like overheads, you'll love PowerPoint.

If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.

I think of myself as a translator. I just change the dry, unfeeling language of data into a visual language that allows for feeling.

We don't use PowerPoints.

Visualizing information is a form of knowledge compression.

PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation.

Some of the commercial work I do is helping people to improve their presentations and add some design thinking. There are so many amazing things in science, and such great data, which can often be locked away. It's in the minds of these amazing practitioners, who can't necessarily express what they want in a visual way.

Anybody can tell you what they think. But if you can illustrate what you think, you have a better chance of persuading people.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

I think any opportunity you can to employ some visual technique, go for it.

Bringing words to life, storyboards show you things that words can't.

Design is thinking made visual.

It [Powerpoint] is dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bulletizable.

I don't really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it's all about finances, on one side.

I just try to make comics for myself, try to give it some kind of unity throughout. That often involves tiny details. I'm never sure what's going to be obvious or what nobody will ever notice. I put stuff in my comics that I thought was blatantly obvious, and nobody noticed. And things that I think are buried in the background, everybody gets it. So I try to be consistently aware of every part of the frame.

I think, even a lot of people that make movies forget is that, in my mind, a movie should work with the sound off. You should be able to watch a movie without the sound and understand what's going on. That's your job, to build a series of chronological images that tell the story.

PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple.

A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

I’m trying to please myself; certainly that’s a big criterion... though in a sense, I don’t take images just for myself. I take images that I think other people will want to see. I don’t take pictures to put in a box and hide them. I want as many people to see them as possible.

Except in expert hands, stats can get in the way of story; an array of data that might better be presented in a table instead clogs up sentences.

Personally, I'm not very keen on the visualization of absolutely everything.