One of the major American political parties shared this on their social media accounts this weekend.
I saw this post not in its original form, but from critiques of it. And it deserves those critiques.
The design emphasizes (the appearance of) quantity over quality. This is not for reading. It is meant to look busy.
I was struck by how much this reminded me of many conference posters: no overarching narrative or message and dense to the point of being unreadable.
The one good thing that this does is that the headline is big and readable. But the headline conveys no key point. It announces that it is a list and nothing else. I cannot stress enough the importance of having a singular narrative.
What might that singular narrative be? The first three points on the list suggest a better headline:
- Every House Democrat voted against Trump’s budget that slashes Medicaid.
- House Democrats introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act to permanently protect the American people’s data from Elon Musk and Trump.
- Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit to stop Elon Musk from accessing Americans’ data.
All of them concern the federal government. Two individuals are mentioned twice. A more powerful headline might be, “How Democrats fought to protect Americans from Trump and Musk last month.” That’s a headline I wouldn’t even rate as good. I would rate it as barely adequate. But it’s better than, “Here’s a list.”
Likewise, there are 32 bullet points. Pick just the ones that reinforce the headline. The three above are probably enough. There are more points that begin, “Every Democrat voted against...”. Those could be combined into “Every Democrat voted against Trump’s [adjective] cabinet choices.”
Yes, focusing on the federal government in this graphic means ignoring the state governors here, but so what? Make more graphics. One for each state if you must.
Sometimes, we get so caught up in our own research and the academic way of doing things that we are maybe too forgiving of these problems. I am hoping that when you see someone else making these decisions, it’ll be easier to recognize how ineffective the result is.
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