“Good Design Is as Little Design as Possible”
– Dieter Rams
In other words, form follows function. That simple but powerful guiding principle has informed the students of modern design for decades, be they architects, painters, or furniture designers. It’s the philosophy that has given us the beautiful Guggenheim Museum,
the moving art of Frida Kahlo,
and so much more. It is also perhaps the most effective style of presentation design, given its emphasis on legible, high contrast coloration and uncluttered, simple frameworks. For all its virtues, it’s not always crystal clear what exactly constitutes modern design. Here are a few tips.
“Modern design is the planning and making of objects suited to our way of life, our abilities, our ideals.” – Edgar Kaufmann Jr, owner Fallingwater
Handcraft.
Stock images and photography are useful for a variety of reasons and purposes, but the truth is that even a new, contemporary stock image is highly unlikely to be as modern as something illustrated. The real world just doesn’t always come in clean lines and bold colors, so even a highly appropriate photograph can be a downgrade from art that is totally customized to your needs.
Flatten out
We’ve written here before about how flat graphics make for more modern presentations, but that was perhaps within a different context. Yes, a more illustrated design is sensible and efficient given the constant advances in display technology, but those graphics also lend themselves well to a “modern” aesthetic. Take the image we used for our blog post for example:
The “flat” side is a good lesson in how contrast, angularity, and focus can improve a design’s clarity. Even the no-frills metadesign of the text is indicative of the way modernism can work for presentations.
The devil is in the details.
One of the virtues of modern design is its intensive, deliberate focus on the little things. When there isn’t bombastic art or an overwhelming amount of content to wrestle with, naturally some of the smaller elements of the design will be able to come to the fore. It might be a certain brush stroke on a Gaugin, or the industrial simplicity of an electric fruit juicer — in our case, it’s most likely the core message of a presentation, undiluted and unobscured by some other less essential visual information. Regardless, a modernist approach to presentation design will invert the typical information hierarchy, to the benefit of your audience.
Don’t lose the thread
“Good design makes a product understandable. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.” – Dieter Rams
When designing a presentation (or outlining a speech), it is easy to reach for big, bold notions and get carried away with things that don’t really matter. We know the details are important when it comes to modern design, but nothing should take precedence over the purpose.
Conclusion
As you decide on what your deck will look like, or what you will sound like explaining it, stop and imagine a hypothetical scenario. Imagine that you are not able to give your talk, and that technical issues prevent your deck from being displayed to your audience. Will your replacement speaker, given your notes and a printout of your slides, be able to understand your purpose? Will she be able to communicate it clearly to the audience?
That should be your goal — to create something that is so essential that it becomes inessential. Your presentation should aim to be only what needs to be, such that if it is doing its job correctly, anyone can figure it out, yet no one would ever miss it. That is a modern presentation.
