So I’m not sure why anyone was really shocked by the whole PRISM thing — I can’t be the only person who just assumed this was happening all along?

But wow, those slides are terrible. Yikes. For something designed to find important information buried in a lot of nonsense, it makes doing exactly that a lot of work for the viewer.

A lot of it isn’t even about layout (though the layout’s indeed awful): Slate did their own redesign with a pretty timeline, but their version maintains many of the original presentation’s more serious information design problems: unrelated facts in boxes, logos for no reason, unreadable visualizations.

First off, let’s start with the PRISM logo:

What is this, a shareware space game for Windows 95? Come on, guys. You can do better than this! There’s obviously some powerful cutting-edge tech behind what you’re doing, so why not look like a slick web startup?

While we’re at it, let’s make them seem a little friendlier (after all, secret government data miners are people too!).

That’s better.

And now, the revised PowerPoint.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

There’s no reason this had to stay the same number of slides, so I reorganized the information to make more sense. Took out a lot of extraneous details, too. Makes it so much easier to focus on the whole “spying” thing!

EDIT: Big versions of the slides are here.