Diagrammer: Conversation with Nancy Duarte

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading...

Nancy Duarte has been a Principal of Duarte Design since 1990. Her firm is in the heart of the Silicon Valley and the client list is loaded with Fortune 500 companies. Her passion for business communications that are clear, meaningful and attractive has opened doors for her in a business world full of cluttered and complex visual communications.

In this conversation, Nancy discusses the new Diagrammer initiative.

Geetesh: Tell us about Diagrammer, how this initiative evolved, and how you were personally involved with this concept?

Nancy: Over the past few years whenever people told me they kept slide:ology on their desk like a reference book, I would ask them what section they referred to the most. They all said the diagram section. I hadn’t felt that the organization structure of the diagram section in slide:ology was exhaustive so I set out to review it and sweeten the taxonomy. We had several brainstorms at the shop and I reviewed hundreds of internal presentations. Once we had several hundred diagrams sketched, we realized that this could be an amazing tool. So we built the diagrams in PowerPoint and sell them. The new taxonomy is the navigation system.

Geetesh: How can everyday PowerPoint users benefit from using Diagrammer content in their slides?

Nancy: It’s 11pm, you’re in a hotel in Chicago with a big sales presentation in the morning and you need a slide of 3 things that converge, it’s quicker to use Diagrammer for $ 0.99 than draw a graphic from scratch. This tool saves time and money. It’s been fun to get reports from people who like to just spend time up there cruising through the site just for inspiration. We tried to come up with shapes and graphical expressions of concepts that you can’t create in PowerPoint. Everything was built in Illustrator and finalized in PowerPoint.