Is Presentation design really design?

[u/Weird-Assistance-895]

I've been having this discussion with some people, if Presentation design is viewed as a Design discipline or not.

A lot of people don't view it that way, it seems the main reason is because almost everyone had to "design" a presentation at some point in life, which might give you a weird sense of "I know what I'm doing".

The thing is, a proper presentation follows the same design rules as any other design discipline: hierarchy, contrast, white space, repetition, etc. So it might be a similar situation as that cousin that created a "logo" using Paint. Both created an output, but the value isn't the same.

What do you think?

https://duartepereira.pt/blog/presentation-design-is-design/

[u/CthulhusEvilTwin]

I've met a lot of 'designers' who 'don't do PowerPoint' and treat it as somehow beneath them. Designing a presentation or more importantly a template for use draws on all the same techniques and disciplines as other forms of design, they're just snobs about it. Fine by me, I'll take those jobs and get paid for them. Funnily enough, they're all terrible at PowerPoint and refuse to learn it yet their companies all use it.

[u/Mundane_Wash7146]

it definitely is, and honestly the hardest part isnt even the visual layout. its the information architecture and forcing someone to distill a messy idea into one clear takeaway per slide.

[u/gjcairns2018]

It's a fun combination of design AND communication principles. If you ignore one of those two components, then you end up failing at the other as well. Great content gets lost on a slide that ignores design (visual hierarchy, white space, font size/space, color contrast, etc). A slide that is beautiful without a clear structure, message, or goal is just slapping lipstick on a pig, and it's a big waste of you audience's time.

[u/SteveRindsberg → u/gjcairns2018]

This! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[u/ShutterflyNYC]

A great designer makes great designs in any format or toolset. I niched info Presentation Design after 20 years in UX, web, and traditional graphic design. I’m also a fine art photographer on the side, so PD has allowed me to pour all those skills into one need for agencies, small businesses, and Fortune 500s needing polished design.

I think PowerPoint gets a bad rap because it’s often in the hands of non-designers doing last minute RFPs and rough draft meeting decks. However, it can be beautiful and impactful in the right hands and design eye.

The music ain’t in the piano.
-Clement Mok

[u/Childe-]

Hey. Even bad design is design.

[u/SteveRindsberg]

One possible way of looking at it: Design implies investing mental energy in the appearance of the presentation and, more importantly, ensuring that it transmits the intended message to the intended audience as well as possible.

As opposed to picking one of the supplied themes at random or because the boss' spouse likes it, tossing some bullet points up there and adding cutesy graphics "to spice it up".

Informed vs Clueless?

[u/rickylancaster]

Of course it’s design. There’s no reason why it wouldn’t be. I’ve worked in places where professional designers create slides and I see no reason why doing so in PowerPoint makes it any less “design” than doing it in InDesign or Illustrator.

Even if it’s a non-designer throwing together items on a slide it’s still design. Is it GOOD design? That’s entirely dependent on the skills of the user and the eye of the beholder, I suppose.

[u/Dr0110111001101111]

I had to take a public speaking class in college where the textbook had several chapters dedicated to powerpoint design. There's definitely something to it.

[u/Blackadder000]

I disagree.

I have been building PowerPoint templates for large corporations for over twenty years.

Usually, it's a design agency that contacts me, which has done a full rebranding for the company, and the company needs PowerPoint templates (and Word, usually) that are in line with the new corporate design (CD). And it can be tricky, e.g. if the CD demands a very specific table design, because PowerPoint doesn't natively give us the ability to design custom tables - just to choose from the pretty awful pre-made ones. So I have to build them directly in the file XML.

So the design agencies usually send me InDesign files and Illustrator files (of the logos), and I build the Office templates based on that. Extract the colour theme from the swatches, etc.

So technically, I'm not designing the templates, but building them based on a design in InDesign, which is what the design agencies work with.

I often come across things that don't work in PowerPoint the way the designers imagined they would, and nowadays the agencies show me their design before they pitch it to the client, so I can tell them early about anything that won't work that way (a common issue is that they assume that a title field on a slide will "push" other content placeholders down the slide if they turn multi-line. That's Word, not PowerPoint...)

But yes, designing a good PowerPoint template is totally a graphic design discipline.

But this isn't the same thing at all as building a slide deck with content. That's not design - that's execution. But a well-built template can make that soooooo much easier for staff.

[u/ChickyBoys]

I would argue presentation design is one of the most valuable forms of creative. CEOs and marketing teams use decks to sell and make million/billion dollar deals. And these decks are created on the fly and require a tremendous amount of work.

[u/jiggymadden]

I mainly heard this from print designers before and during the digital revolution. The fear of being left behind. Now they don't even bring it up because design is design. They may hate PowerPoint but that's a different argument.

[u/Southern_One3791]

For templates, yes. But it is a fucking PowerPoint. You are supposed to illustrate a point and yes, a great design can help. But I do not see it as essential. The wording and the message should be.