In this series of images taken from the "charts" section of the City of Work site, Lewy toys with imagery ideas borrowed from typical PowerPoint presentations about things like "leadership" and "success." Then he twists them until they tell a disturbing truth about a life devoted to productivity.

As the slideshow progresses, the charts become more weird. Is all of time collapsing? What do today and tomorrow even mean?

As silly as these diagrams are, they also have an air of sadness and desperation to them. A cloud of failure hangs between all beginnings and ends, and every arrow leads through that blob of failure.

Slowly, the charts themselves begin to lose shape entirely. I love this one, where the bar graph crumbles into an unreadable, incomprehensible haze where you can't tell the difference between enthusiasm and false enthusiasm.

At last, the charts become crazy, abstract shapes that suggest bar graphs or pie charts that have melted into some kind of PowerPoint twilight zone.

There's a lot more weirdness and social satire to enjoy on Lewy's City of Work site, including advertisements for fake TV shows and bizarre letters that Lewy has exchanged with the "Human Potential" division of the city. He's recently added a bunch of new stuff, and he continues to build out the site. For anybody who has had to sit through presentations on getting jazzed about cubicle drudgery, City of Work will feel uncomfortably and hilariously familiar.

City of Work [official site]
The 9 to 5 Artist [via Brainiac]

Jumping off from ideas he raises in his recent book, Clear and to the Point, Kosslyn explained that the four rules of PowerPoint are: The Goldilocks Rule, The Rudolph Rule, The Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule. Here's how they work.

The Goldilocks Rule refers to presenting the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image. As an example, Kosslyn showed two graphs of real estate prices over time. One included ten different numbers, one for each year. The other included two numbers: a peak price, and the current price. For the purposes of a presentation about today's prices relative to peak price, those numbers were the only ones necessary.

The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details — the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers' and led them. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not make the data of interest a different color from the list? Or circle it in red? "The human brain is a difference detector," Kosslyn noted. The eye is immediately drawn to any object that looks different in an image, whether that's due to color, size, or separation from a group. He showed us a pizza with one piece pulled out slightly, noting that our eyes would immediately go to the piece that was pulled out (which was true). Even small differences guide your audience to what's important.

The Rule of Four is a simple but powerful tool that grows out of the fact that the brain can generally hold only four pieces of visual information simultaneously. So don't ever present your audience with more than four things at once. This is a really important piece of information for people who tend to pack their PowerPoint slides with dense reams of data. Never give more than four pieces of information at once. It's not that people can't think beyond four ideas — it's that when we take in the visual information on a slide we start to get overwhelmed when we reach four items.

The Birds of a Feather Rule is another good rule for how to organize information when you want to show things in groups. "We think of things in groups when they look similar or in proximity to each other," Kosslyn pointed out. Translation into PowerPoint? If you want to indicate to your audience that five things belong in a group, make them similar by giving them the same color or shape. Or group them very close together. This sounds basic, but it often means taking your data apart and reorganizing it. Kosslyn's co-panelist, Stanford psychologist Barbara Tversky, explained that one of the fundamental principles of data visualization is, ironically, misrepresentation in order to get at the truth.

Even these goofy names for each rule of PowerPoint follow a principle from cognitive science: it's always easier to remember an unfamiliar idea if it's named after something familiar.