The second problem with presentation design is too much decoration. And as you might have already guessed, this is, once again, a problem of balance. There could be such thing as too little decoration. This is probably overkill. There's too much stuff going on and It repeats on each and every slide in this particular presentation. But then if you have stuff like this, this is just way too boring. Somebody didn't do his or her job properly. This is just an indication of very little motivation on part of whoever did this. So the common problem is too much, we have too much boarders, too much shadows, too much shades, too much gradients, too much reflections, etc, etc. But sometimes you do have not enough, sometimes we just have very bland and boring design, which is not attractive enough. And how do you know where to stop and where to begin? Where's the balance? Well, a few years ago, I was doing a seminar in a food retail, chain company. And what they asked me is to provide them with a reference card. They said, we have this practice of distributing reference cards after seminars. Please send us your text and we will create a design according to our company's design guidelines. And this is the text that I have sent to them and this is the design that they've sent me for my sort of consideration and approval. And I thought my God, no, no, no, this is I cannot distribute those kinds of cards to my audience at my seminars because this is everything I'm fighting against. And then this is a design that I have created. But then I thought, wait a second, this is designed for, I don't know, pharmacy, right? This is a design for the context where people know what they want. This is optimized for readability. People don't buy pharmaceuticals because of the bright and dazzling colors. Or hopefully, I don't know. But in retail, in food retail, things are different. You have to grab the audience's attention. The thing has to have a shelf presence. This is how they call it. And, more often then not, you don't want your audience to read the contents of the packaging. So this does work for retail packaging, but of course, it doesn't work for presentation design. So this is design, it's just out of context. This is much more appropriate. And this is what I'm trying to teach my audience to do. So yes sometimes you're talking to large groups of unmotivated and uneducated people and you have to dazzle them with colors and shapes and sizes, etc, etc. But oftentimes you are speaking to a highly motivated and highly knowledgeable group of people who do not need all this visual eye candy. So, you have to moderate yourself. People, especially highly motivated people, create those kinds of things. And I ask them why did you choose this strange composition? And they say to me you know, Alexi, this way It is just, you see there, this is a design from a design textbook, it's really, really beautiful. This is what they are looking at when they are trying to create stuff like this. And what they say to me, they say, well you see there all kinds of you know, fonts, and shapes and sizes here and it all kind of works. And this is what are we trying to create. We're trying to be different, we're trying to be interesting, we're trying to be creative, we're trying to create beautiful things. These are the words that I hear. But unfortunately, what those people often don't realize what they think is boring and what they think is creative is actually more or less the same. Because what they don't see, they don't see the hidden scaffolding, they don't see the hidden structure. And this is what design is all about, design is not decoration. Design is about creating structures. And the structure can be quite complex, like this for example. And of course, if you look at this professional design, you will be able to see this quite complex structure. It's not very creative, that's my point. This is German design, it's just, you know. [FOREIGN] So I've tried a lot to apply any kind of grid, scaffolding to this particular slide. And I succeeded after a while. But of course this is entirely unintentional. The professional designers have this wonderful ability of looking at boxes of texts as just empty boxes. They can distance themselves. Analysts and engineers and specialists do not have this ability and I think this is an ability you ought to have if you want to understand something about design. This is chaos. What's not chaos, well, this is not chaos, this is not chaos, this is not chaos. This is chaos. And if you distant yourself from the text, you can see this very clearly. And what you need to do as a designer which you are by the way, as well as a typist, or I don't know, scribe. [LAUGH] Because you can write, right? And you can type. So as a designer, you should be working on your structure first and decorations second. So, the problem is not too much decoration. The problem is lack of structure. Work on your structure first. Designers sometimes have very complicated grids. You should be using much simpler grids. But go ahead and use some kind of a grid. I think this is one of the most important principle of design, as far as I'm concerned. You have to structure first, decoration comes second and then you moderate yourself as far as decoration is concerned. Sometimes you need a lot of decoration but again, structure comes first.
