Here’s another post from Kev, at "The Devil’s Personal Assistant" blog. He describes the creative process investment bankers go through in developing their ever so important powerpoint presentations….
I have described this before in different terms, but for the sake of newbies, basically, every time a banker gets near a powerpoint file, this mad, dangerous impulse called ‘I feel it within, I can make it sexy, and my VP will want to have babies with me’ takes hold of them, because as every economics graduate knows, powerpoint + banker = creative opportunity. Because you can draw pictures in Poweroint that look better than stick figures, for some reason they assume that their presentation must have what no presentations in the history of banking has ever had before or every will again if it knows what is good for it.
Because the the vocabulary of bankers in the design field is limited, they kind of…. well they just fiddle – and let that funky spontaneous thang out and let it loose, getting jiggy, real jiggy all over the slide, all over the presentation and all over the top. So, they just have to move every text box, adjust every colour of every pie chart slice, and increase and decrease randomly as many font sizes as possible on a page, to match the cryptic sense of sensual turner prize winning financial art their mind and body grasps at 4.00am before they slump half dead into a taxi.
Eventually however, after weeks of experimentation and letting the giant within out onto the presentation without, they realise that someone, somehwere has to sit in front of their presentaion and gather something coherent from it, so they panic, and send it to us and basically say – "before I was sexy, my work was sexy, my work was my art, and my art was my work, but now, please for the love of god, make it look the way every other presentation has looked since the first financial year in the first fiscal age of the first capitalist civilisation – so I get my promotion and the myopic bible-bashing board member doesn’t think satan has possessed his financial returns and made his pie charts gay with that awlful shade of pulsating pink.
Chuckles at the Bank Part 2 – The Devil’s Personal Assistant
