Worst PowerPoint slides

The winners of InFocus's Worst PPT Slide Contest are astonishing examples of unintentional obfuscation, baffling bullshit and design nightmares.

Worst PPT Slide Contest Winners (via Neatorama)

(Image: via @pinwale)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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IronEdithKidd

Chicken. Chicken, chicken, chicken: chicken.
kbmcg

Maybe these guys have already seen the ramiform.com website…
irksome

Bunny+hot dog=new meme.

I expect your results on my desk 5:00 o’clock.
awjtawjt

Does anybody have a link to the very earliest powerpoint color templates? I am googling and coming up short. I want a picture of that old “fireball” original color slide template.

Thanks!!!
mypalmike

These “worst” of PowerPoint seem entirely average. Either the search for badness wasn’t broad enough, or PowerPoint lends itself to mediocrity. I suspect a bit of both.
emo hex

Let us not forget to mention that any power point presentation is not worthy unless one uses as many different transition styles between slides, hell, if the’re there, use em!

I are graphic designer.
Anonymous

Somewhere, Edward Tufte is hitting his head against a wall.
penguinchris

This is a really weird contest if you think about it… it’s run by InFocus, who make projectors. Who was their target audience? I mean, who visits the InFocus website, or gets their newsletter, often enough to catch wind of such a contest? So there’s some specific self-selection there.

So, they clearly didn’t get very many entries – as others have noted some of these are just mediocre and not particularly interesting. And at least one of them – the one at the end – is a photo that’s circulated across the internet previously (a few months ago as I recall), and I’m guessing the person who submitted it here is not actually the person who took the photo, they just grabbed it off some other website.

The prize was InFocus projectors, which is a pretty good prize, and considering the small audience there was considerable incentive to just rip off the photo and send it in on a lark.

Finally, yeah, the rabbit and hot dog one is obviously fake. The funny thing about that, though, is that it’s actually the best slide on there – it keeps its information to a minimum and the graphics are clear and readable. This slide would be perfectly fine (though certainly not outstanding) for most presentation needs – just replace the rabbit and hot dog with appropriate graphics for whatever the presentation is about, or take them out altogether (or leave them in if your audience has a sense of humor).
GIFtheory

If I’d have known about the contest, I’d have submitted one of these slides. None of the other slides, to my knowledge, were so bad as to cause human deaths.
Rotwang

All this structuring and gravitating is making me a little seasick.
Jake0748

Haven’t read the article yet, but for some reason, I find this first slide to be very appealing. It made me grin.
imag

- The winner, the IT roadmap, really wouldn’t be that bad as a handout.

- That rabbit slide looks to me like it was invented for the contest. The “Weird assets” graph is just too satirical.

- The slide on the bottom of the context page with all the cheesy character assets is brutally bad. I can picture the person adding each one of those words and carefully picking fonts. I can also picture the poor person in the presentation who is so depressed by the slide that they just have to get a photo of it.
- Halloween Jack
  
  Yeah, the rabbit slide is probably bogus. Some of the others, like the big-block-o-text slides, are simply lazy and/or sloppy work. The awesome thing about that IT slide is that someone obviously put a huge amount of work into doing it.
gwailo_joe

Wow. . .those hurt my eyes.

But you can’t tell me the one with the rabbit and the hot dog is ‘unintentional’

Funny, yes. . .but bad on purpose. Some of those others: what were they thinking?
recordingautist

Edward Tufte just shit a brick.
dragonfrog

I strongly recommend everyone check out the Gettysburg Powerpoint presentation. It is of course not an accidental example of the genre, but it is brilliant.
Frank W

Peter Watt’s intentionally evil FizerPharm slide show sprang to mind.
Chloramphenicol

Hmmm… I kinda like the bunny on the slide. I might have to start sneaking that into work presentations (my employer has a very good sense of humor). In the Stewie Griffin mode of flight controls – ‘And the bunny is just a bunny. Enjoy!’.
- Purplecat
  
  Of course people like the slide with the rabbit. Everything’s better with bunnies ,after all.
Anonymous

Chicken chicken chicken?