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.

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?

Have you seen the new soda fountains? The ones with the touchscreen that let you mix all kinds of syrups with something like a gazillion possible flavor combinations?

I remember when I first saw those fountains thinking they were really cool. Unlimited options! But after trying them out a few times, I quickly realized something unfortunate. With great freedom comes great potential for creating something pretty terrible. Cherry Coke is awesome. Strawberry Sprite? Not a fan.

PowerPoint (or any piece of software for that matter) gives you lots of control over every aspect of your file. This is great. It allows for some incredible things. But it also means you can do a lot of things that you probably don’t really want to do. Things that won’t taste good to your audience. Strawberry Sprite slides.

Fortunately, when you’re using the new soda machines, you can always revert back to the tried and tested flavors that we know work. Classic Coke. Barq’s. Mr. Pibb. (At least some people think Mr. Pibb tastes good.)

The PowerPoint equivalent of tried and tested ready-made soda flavors is the presentation template. PowerPoint comes pre-loaded with lots of these. The trouble is that many of these templates produce Strawberry Sprite slides.

We assume that these templates were created by people who knew how to create great slides. But the truth is the modern slide full of bullets on one side and a small image on the other were created by the original developers of PowerPoint back in the 1980s, who weren’t trained in creating effective presentation visuals.

So, is PowerPoint a poor tool because it lets you do things you probably shouldn’t do? Not any more than the new soda fountains are poor for giving you the ability to create something you won’t like.

It’s good to have the flexibility to do whatever we want. But we need to make sure that we’re aware of what works and what doesn’t so we can avoid creating slide that taste like Strawberry Sprite.

My wife, Erin, does an excellent job decorating our home. She has a well-honed sense of style and much of the time when she goes shopping for decor she knows exactly what will work and what won’t when she sees it. Occasionally though she needs a little help.

On one particular shopping trip she had a particular space she was looking to fill on our mantle, right in front of a colorful piece of wall art. She just wasn’t having any luck finding anything, so she asked one of the store stylists for help. My wife described the space and showed the designer a picture of the painting. Just a few moments later the stylist had carefully plucked a few items from different parts of the store. The disparate items didn’t match, but they worked together very well. Individually, the items were not pieces my wife would probably have chosen on her own. But seeing them together she was delighted with the result and couldn’t wait to purchase them and bring them home.

My wife, who is usually a marvelous decorator on her own, had been stumped. Rather than feeling ashamed that she couldn’t figure this out on her own, she had the courage to ask an expert for help. And the results of that collaboration turned out to be better than what she would probably have come up with all alone.

Sometimes your vision will be clear and all you need is someone to help you execute it. This is the perfect time to hire a designer.

But an equally perfect time to hire one is before the idea has come into focus.

It’s nice to work on things when the path is clear. But some of the best (and most unexpected) results come when great ideas are developed and refined through collaboration.