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.

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.

I think one of the most important things I’ve learned in my short and winding road that has been my professional career so far is to always be playing.

What do I mean by playing? Like playing video games?

At all of the jobs I’ve had, there have always been occasional times when there isn’t something super urgent to do. I’m a curious guy, so during these times I like to experiment with something I’ve seen that I think looks interesting. Maybe it’s a tool, or a new process, or a more efficient way of handling email.

While I was at NASA, I spent some downtime learning about wikis, even though at the time I wasn’t sure I’d ever use the stuff I was learning. It was just something that looked interesting that I thought I wanted to know more about. Pretty soon I was finishing my work as fast as I could so that I’d have a few minutes at the end of the day to keep experimenting with wikis.

I eventually got good enough at designing wikis that that became a major part of my job. I even got to speak at that particular wiki developers annual conference. But all of it just started as messing around.

Play is how I got started learning Photoshop. And Illustrator. And web design. All of these have helped me tremendously in my current career as a graphic designer and freelance presentation designer.

So by playing I mean experimenting in an unstructured, informal way with things I’m interested in that aren’t necessarily currently part of my current job. I look for things I think I might enjoy doing if it eventually became part of my job.

The funny thing is that no one ever gave me permission to look into these things. I just realized my job afforded me a little freedom to choose how to spend my time and I used it to try doing something I thought might be useful, or at the very least, fun. I think this practice more than any other is one I can point to and say, “That’s why I’m where I am now. That made a huge difference.”

I don’t know if it’ll work for you, too, but it might be worth a shot.

Paperman is the animated short that was released by Walt Disney Animation along with Wreck-It Ralph last year. It was released for free on YouTube just a few days ago.

The cute and touching short is beautiful and features a brand new animation process which is a hybrid of traditional hand-drawn animation techniques and modern computer generated imagery. You can read more about the technique here.

The thing that excites me about the short, though, is the idea that rather than supplanting them, new technologies can be used to enhance and supplement more traditional techniques. I love the look of the old, hand-drawn Disney films, and this definitely hearkens back to that time, while doing things that would be very difficult without the help of computers.

Like Common Craft’s hand-drawn explanation videos or artists who can turn vector graphics into physical objects, I’d love to see presentation designers experiment with hybrid techniques like this rather than just creating the computer-generated shapes and word art that are native to PowerPoint.

Do you know of some examples of presentations that incorporate both old and new techniques? I hope you’ll share them in the comments.

As someone who didn’t think of himself as creative until relatively recently, I completely understand the mission David Kelley talks about in that video. I can remember learning that everyone(!) is creative (including me!) and suddenly feeling special. Like I had a secret power I hadn’t been using. Like Luke Skywalker discovering the Force.

And now I feel kind of like the kid from The Sixth Sense sometimes.

“I see creative people. Walking around like normal people. They don’t know they’re creative!”

You’re creative, too! I mean it. You are. You always have been but just like the kid in the story, someone convinced you you weren’t.

And you can get it back! You knew you were creative when you were a kid. It never left! You just have to start exercising those old creative muscles.

It might be uncomfortable at first, but it gets easier as you go. I promise.

Will you create this weekend? Something small? Something big? Anything! Just do it! Remind yourself that you’re creative and what creativity feel like. This is what I’m trying. I just bought my first canvas…ever.

Knowing you’re creative feels good. And will spill over into so many other areas of your life. Even areas you don’t think of right now as ones needing creativity.

I hope you’ll give it a shot.