One in seven lacks access to clean  water.

Earth Month 2010 is a worthy cause and I feel guilty that I am distracted by the visualization. But I am, and I keep counting, six, seven blue icons, how many is one in seven, shouldn’t there be one black icon for every six blue icons, I am confused, maybe it is just me, everyone else gets this, I am sure, argh, stupid me, stupid t-shirt…

You don’t want this to happen in your audience. One in seven does not get your numbers. We are ten-finger animals. Anything beyond 2×10 needs time to sink in. Much more time than you think it does.

• So make your numbers easy to see, not just easy on the eye.
• Make them mean something.
• Eliminate built-in distractors.
• And talk us through. All of us.

Make sure your cause does not get lost in the translation of foggy visuals. And if in doubt forsake the pretty layout for a clear one. Especially when you are talking about people. People should be more than icons on a t-shirt.

If you are more interested in causes than looks: The campaign was run by Aveda and so it made me think after all. Hair salons must use an obscene amount of water. The campaign logo on the Aveda site is very clear, by the way.

One in seven lacks access to clean water.

The last time a fish inside or outside a fish bowl was funny was in 2005 when Barry Schwartz used a Peter Steiner cartoon to end his fabulous Paradox of Choice TED talk.

The ubiquitous bullet-timed goldfish jumping out of a glass bowl on istockphoto.com is not funny.

It is now spring 2010. The goldfish has reached the local stationery shop of Smallville in form of an unfunny greeting card.

I hereby declare it officially dead.

If you find one, please bury it deep. Consider burying it deeper.

Sometimes they come back.

So if you ever watch me do the following, please stand up and say: »Don’t.«

Imagine.

The speaker is speaking. »Next slide«, he says to his assistant. /Which is actually a don’t in itself, I find./

There it is. The next slide. A psychedelic blur of blues and greens. We stare at it. We are sure it is something wonderful. It must be. It is so… blue. And so very green. It holds all the secrets of the universe. We are holding our breath.

The speaker is not speaking now. He is waiting for the right moment. We, too, are waiting.

Alas, the speaker has forgotten us. He needs a drink.

We are still waiting. We wait. We wonder. The blues and greens begin to move before our eyes. We begin to move. We begin talking to our neighbors. We giggle. It helps with horror movies, maybe it will help us now. Maybe he was taking drugs when he did that, the person next to me says. I giggle. It does not help.

Finally the speaker puts away his bottle and moves on to talk about the universe and everything.  But the moment is lost, the magic is lost, the slide is lost on all of us, he has lost most of us.

So please think about your choreography. Be dramatic. By all means. Life is full of little dramas. Make your presentation life like. Build up tension. But don’t build up tension for a bottled water commercial. Five seconds. Are sometimes all that is needed to get it all wrong. It seemed longer, though. Much longer. But maybe it was just the blues and greens.