Victoria Nece - PRISM PowerPoint Redesign - girl made a judgement call

amid all the media-ring-nose-led furore associated with ‘whatever the hell this recent Edward Snowden whistleblower event is or might be, graphic designer Victoria Nece has taken it upon herself to rework the decidedly 1990′s retro feel of the thus-far-leaked pages of the NSA’s PRISM intelligence template that seems to be applied to all Corporate War Machine ‘product’s (to use parlance from the Bradley Manning trial).

Here are her own words from the relevant page of her website where the rest of the reworked graphics are hosted:

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.

Very nicely done, Victoria. Oh, wait, somebody knocking at the door…