Redtails deserve better

The United States government excels at compiling mountains of data, but they don’t always do a good job of displaying it. This month’s slide is from a presentation about the Tuskegee Airmen by the National Museum of the United States Air Force.

I was drawn to the subject because of the incredible spirit displayed by these groundbreaking individuals. And I was pleasantly surprised by the overall layout of the deck and the use of large images. Unfortunately, the large images were causing some problems in the presentation.

Before

I like the use of the single large image on this slide. The problem, though, is that the image resolution is very low, too low for this use. In the original file it’s clear that this is a small JPG image stretched to fit the slide. Here’s a detail of the image so you can see what I mean:

Now it’s easy to see how poor the image quality is. Imagine this projected onto a screen. Yuck.

Another problem with this slide layout is that the blue bars on the top and bottom of the slide take up 2/5 of the available real estate, which is way too much to devote to a title and a logo.

After

In just five minutes I was able to locate this higher-resolution image on Wikimedia Commons. Because of the generic title and the unknown origins of the old and new pictures, I didn’t have a problem using a different image. It is meant to be illustrative, not an exact depiction of a specific training session. And since the photo is the work of a US Airman or employee it is in the public domain and may freely be used without attribution.

Here’s en enlarged detail of the new image:To give this image more room to shine, I reduced the size of the logo and placed it into the lower right corner of the slide to get it out of the way and put the slide title in a smaller box filled with a transparent shade of the same dark blue as before.

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