Ever heard a designer sigh at the mention of PowerPoint? If you’ve been around creative circles, you might have caught wind of the frustration that can accompany using this near-universal business tool. But why does PowerPoint get such a bad rap among designers, and more importantly, how can we turn this around to make it a more harmonious relationship?
The love-hate relationship with PowerPoint
Let’s start with the positives. PowerPoint is undeniably popular, making it a necessary choice for collaboration, especially in large organizations. Its wide adoption and integration into office products mean that almost anyone in business can contribute to presentations, creating inclusivity and shared ownership and bringing together many talents and stakeholders in the creative process — all in real time.
However, the dark side of PowerPoint emerges when designers are tasked with cleaning up slides. It can feel like being handed a paintbrush to fix someone else’s mural — frustrating and not the best use of your skills. This issue goes beyond personal gripes; it’s a question of resource allocation, where highly trained specialists are diverted from meaningful design work to menial tasks.
Another source of frustration is PowerPoint’s design capabilities or lack thereof. Let’s be honest: PowerPoint was not built for high-end design. Its default features feel amateurish, outdated, and awkward to control. Achieving elevated design often requires time-consuming workarounds, and the interface is so weirdly bloated and non-intuitive that it leads to inefficiencies and mounting headaches.
Designing under pressure
One of the biggest challenges designers face with PowerPoint is the pressure to deliver exceptional work under tight deadlines. Stakeholders often expect presentations to “wow” audiences, which can create undue stress and compel designers to prioritize speed over quality. It’s like being asked to perform a magic trick with one hand tied behind your back — it’s not impossible, but it’s certainly not easy.
The solution itself may require more proactive thinking in advance, without deadline pressure, to create the environment we want for design success while garnering support from your teammates on a new and better approach.
Changing the game: tips for designers
- Streamline Your Process: To reduce the effort for design cleanup, invest time upfront in creating well-designed master slides, templates, and design patterns. These templates should not only establish basic structures but also anticipate real design needs and provide a variety of options for slide layouts and systematic patterns. For more details on these solutions, please refer to my follow-up article, “A Step-by-step Guide to Creating a “Design System” in PowerPoint“.
- Establish a “Design System”: Unlike Figma, PowerPoint lacks any real atomic system, but you can create a faux “library” of design patterns such as tables, cards, and basic geometry, to align with your brand’s aesthetics. Used as sticker sheets to pull from, these patterns can be made available for non-designers to create on-brand slides from your specified examples (not from PowerPoint defaults). Your art direction upfront can reduce the likelihood of design inconsistencies or other quality issues popping up later.
- Leverage Keynote: In most cases, you can use Keynote to create your most complex slides with a faster, more intuitive interface. Once you’ve designed your slides in Keynote, you can easily convert them to PowerPoint, saving time and effort when it really matters.
- Focus on Simplicity: Remember that the goal of a presentation is to convey information clearly and effectively. Avoid overcrowding slides with unnecessary elements and focus on using visuals to enhance understanding. This can and should be a key tenet of your design thesis.
- Promote Best Practices: Encourage your team to adopt best practices for presentation design, such as keeping slides simple and easy to understand. Provide them with the tools and resources they need to create high-quality presentations consistently through the patterns you’ve created.
In conclusion, while PowerPoint may have its limitations, especially in the modern era of design automation, it remains a popular tool for organizations. From a designer’s perspective, embracing PowerPoint’s challenges can lead to practical solutions for a better design process, streamlining workflows to avoid churn, and focusing more on elevating design quality.
So, the next time you open PowerPoint, embrace the opportunity to design not just a better presentation, but a better way of working with your whole team. For more practical advice on how to achieve better workflows, please read my accompanying article, “A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a “Design System” in PowerPoint.”
The article originally appeared on Medium.
Featured image courtesy: Jim Gulsen.
