Christina has an interesting article about poorly designed memos. In particular, the poorly designed memo that the president received about the terrorist threat.
Greg Storey also talks about this brief. He even created a redesigned intelligence presidential brief.
Now I understand that there generally isn't a lot of time to get these things together to the president. I get that. But seriously, how about a template folks? There has to be some way to create something that can improve upon what we have currently.
I guess my main point is that even in really time-sensitive matters, there still should be time for some basic design. In this case, the design and usability should have been done previously, and then had templates and standards set.
My favorite quote from the two articles is from Greg.
“USA Today made it easier for a nation to monitor the weather through good design, why not give design a crack at making it easier to stop terrorism?”