I love these new AT&T commercials with the businessman talking to a bunch of kids. I still can’t decide whether I think they’re scripted or not. If they are, those kids are great little actors. If they aren’t, well, those kids are hilarious. But that’s beside the point.

Those commercials made me wonder if presentation design isn’t just as “not complicated.” If you sat some kids down and asked them the following questions about designing slides, how do you think they’d answer?

“Which is better? Words or pictures?”

“Larger pictures or smaller?”

“Facts or stories?”

“Crowded or not crowded?”

“Boring or exciting?”

It’s funny how when you say things that way, it’s obvious what’s wrong with most presentations.

Maybe next time you build an important sales deck, ask a six-year-old for help.

A recent episode of 99% Invisible mentioned that basketball existed for 10 years before someone decided to cut the bottom out of the net so the game didn’t have to stop every time a basket was scored.

In a blog post this past week, Jon Acuff shared that even though dipping sauce containers have been around since the early 1980s it wasn’t until a year or so ago that they did the same for ketchup.

And right now KFC is advertising boneless original recipe chicken. Colonel Sanders opened his first restaurant in 1952. Did no one think of this until now?

All those ideas seem so obvious. Of course they have that. Why wouldn’t they have that.

Great design feels like that. Like it was inevitable.

And yet, as examples like these illustrate, great design — great, innovative ideas of any kind really — are elusive. It’s really, really hard to step back from what we already know to come up with ideas that are truly revolutionary.

In her book “Practical Charting Techniques,” Mary Eleanor Spear wrote in 1969 that creating excellent presentation visuals required three highly-skilled professionals: the Communicator, the Graphic Analyst, and the Draftsman.

Microsoft changed all that in 1990 by releasing PowerPoint. The implication was that now the average business-person could do what it once took three highly-trained people to do.

Unfortunately, even though business people now had the tools to create incredible visuals, they lacked the training and experience of professional graphics analysts and draftsmen. Which brings us to the current state of presentation visuals, which are really more like projected Word documents and speech outlines.

So, should we retreat to the old ways of having teams of highly trained people build slides for us? I think for some this is a good answer, but this can be expensive.

Should we instead help business people learn some of the basic design skills they lack? Should we teach design to new business students? This is certainly a less expensive route, but many business people may simply lack the desire to learn these skills.

I wonder if there’s maybe a third option. One that relies neither on completely outsourcing your slide building, nor relying completely on non-designers to do the work.

And so I sit here thinking about what that new role is. It’s a search for the next presentation design revolution. Like the basketball net, ketchup packet, or boneless original recipe, the answer’s probably so obvious it’s embarassing.

What do you think? Any slide designers out there found a niche in some third kind of arrangement? Or how about business people. Do you have an idea of how you wish things worked but no one offers it? If so, leave a comment. I’m all ears.

Just like Little Bunny Foo-foo, one day you can be bopping field mice and taking names on your business and the next, the well runs dry. Pesky Good Fairy.

When I was trying to get started digging up freelance work, I was reading everything I could get my hands on. I was blogging all the time. I was tweeting like a madman.

But then a few projects came along. Suddenly I was neck-deep in work. It was all I could do to get things done on time. Everything non-essential took a backseat. Things like reading and blogging and tweeting.

But then, something unfortunate happened. In focussing so hard on the here and now, I forgot for a few minutes that blogging and tweeting and sharing what I know were what got me that work in the first place. And I didn’t realize that by letting those things drop, I was setting myself up to be out of projects when my current projects were complete.

Creating and sustaining a business is easier than ever. Ubiquitous tools that used to be scarce. Social media connecting you to people you never would have had access to before. And lots and lots of generous folks with lots of experience who are giving advice away for free.

The problem is that those same resources are available to everyone.

The advantages you have today that make you so special to your clients may very well be the norm or even basic expectations tomorrow. What are you doing to make sure you maintain that stellar headstart you have now?

It’s easy to forget to keep yourself sharp. And the best way I know to do that is to constantly be focussed on consuming new ideas, books, blogs, podcasts, magazines, and presentations. And to then find ways to share those ideas with the people around you and be part of the conversation.

It’s great to read and consume and create generously when you don’t have anything else to do. But it’s perhaps even more important to make time for those things when you don’t have time. Because if you let it go for too many days in a row, you may end up with more free time to catch up on it than you want.

Don’t be like Foo-foo. Heed the warning before it’s too late.

I listened to an interview today with Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. Chris is now the CEO of 3D Robotics, a company that designs, builds, and sells unmanned air vehicles, or drones, to various military and civilian clients for a fraction of the cost that large aerospace companies charge. They manage this by taking advantage of the way that digital technologies (open-source CAD software, 3D printers, and iPhone processors and accelerometers, for instance) are revolutionizing the manufacturing industry.

At one point in the interview the interviewer asked Mr. Anderson if he was worried that what they were doing was so easy that someone listening to the podcast could get the same tools, order from the same suppliers, and compete with him. Chris’ answer was interesting.

He said that he wasn’t worried about that at all.

In fact, he actually recently published a book about how he and his team do what they do, encouraging people to join the DIY drone community.

The manufacturing world used to be hard to learn, and even harder to master. The digital revolution has made it easy for anyone to learn, but the mastery part is still tricky. Chris and his team aren’t worried about the democratization of the tools, because access to the tools isn’t what makes what they do valuable.

Think about painting. Anyone can go to their local art supply store and pick up high-quality paint supplies for a fairly low price. We can get books about painting from the library, and take a class on it at the Y. The cost of entry is very low. The tools of painting are available to everyone. And it’s been that way for a long time.

But the fact that everyone has access to the trappings of a master painter, doesn’t make the ability to paint a masterpiece any less valuable. Having access to the tools is different than the ability to produce something of value with those tools.

It’s easier than ever to get your hands on the tools of graphic design and presenting. For a few bucks a month you can lease Adobe’s Creative Suite. Every business person in the world has PowerPoint installed on their computer. But having the tools is different from being able to produce quality slides or give a compelling presentation.

It’s that ability to wield the tools that is so valuable. And that ability still takes time and commitment to develop.

In the modern digital world, everyone can be a manufacturer, painter, master presenter. But not everyone will.

Will you?

I feel like quitting.

Not all the time. But at least once a day.

But in his book, the War of Art, Steven Pressfield told me to use feelings like that like a compass.

The Resistance we feel when we try to do creative work is wonderfully predictable in that it always becomes greatest when we’re confronting the things that we really should be doing but are afraid of for some reason. For me, it also gets really loud right before I have a creative breakthrough, too.

No matter how often I think about this and reassure myself of this truth, it’s still difficult to act in the face of such overwhelming emotion.

“This is hard. This hurts. Do something else. Check your email. Go to the bathroom. Check your email again. Clean up your desk. Have a snack.”

My inner voice has a great way of coming up with really important, really urgent other things to do whenever I’m uncomfortable.

And every time, it seems like the brilliant idea I’ve been wrestling to get to is beyond my current level of endurance. It feels like it’s probably a million miles away. And it’s hard to steel yourself to walk another million miles when you’re already tired and frustrated.

But in most of these cases, success wasn’t a million miles away. Usually it was just a few minutes farther down the path than I thought I could make it.

And like a reward for hanging in there just a little longer than I thought I could stand, the idea, or inspiration, or answer I was searching for appears out of nowhere.

For some projects, though, you really have to go the distance with the Resistance. It’s at work for a long time before the reward comes. Seth Godin calls this The Dip.

But endurance is like a muscle and by straining every day the thing that’s telling us to give up, we can increase our stamina and thereby hold out just a little longer next time. And hopefully we’ll be that much more ready when a bigger, scarier, more rewarding task comes along tomorrow.

As it always does.