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.

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.

The term “slide” (as in PowerPoint) comes from the old, 35mm film slides. An alternative to getting your film developed as prints, They consisted entirely of the image itself turned into a transparency. No text. No bullets. No animations. Just visuals that could be projected while the speaker spoke. Often about his summer vacation.

In some ways it seems like we’d be better off if we went back to this format.

Humans are really good at understanding verbal and visual input, like full-screen images with a speaker speaking to them. So the old, 35mm presentations worked perfectly.

Humans are really pretty bad, though, at processing more than one stream of verbal input at a time. We really can’t read a slide and listen to the speaker at the same time. One of the signals has to get ignored.

PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, and all the other slide creation tools give us the ability to do so many amazing things with slides. But it’s important not to lose sight of how an audience learns effectively and make sure we take advantage of that.

Using full screen images and eliminating as much text as possible is what I’ve found to be the most effective.

A segment from a recent episode of This American Life featured a story about Kristen Finch, a speech therapist whose work with children with Asperger’s syndrome led her to wonder if her husband might have Asperger’s, too. Finch’s husband often struggled with being emotionally distant, being a slave to his routine, and not picking up on social cues. At one point in the story, after being diagnosed (he did have it) and learning about Asperger’s and how to deal with it, Kristen’s husband remarked that “it was as if someone had finally handed me a user’s manual for myself.” I have to say that reading Jonah Lehrer’s new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, made me feel that, at least in some small way, the same thing had happened to me.

Imagine is about something that has been shrouded in mythology and speculation for centuries: human creativity. Even the most creative among us are frequently unsure of where their ideas come from. They often attribute their moments of insight to some otherworldly source, like a muse or genius which takes hold of them. Lehrer’s premise is that recent studies have helped us to now understand and explain a lot more about how creativity works than most people, even the professionally creative, might think.

As a graphic designer, I have to be creative every day. And yet, despite my familiarity with the process, there have always been certain parts of “being creative” that have always made me uncomfortable. For example, early on in every project when a client would describe their needs to me, there would come a point when I felt like I had NO IDEA what to do and I would get a sinking feeling in my stomach. Of course, the client wasn’t looking for a solution yet. They fully intended to tell me the problem then let me go work on it for a bit. But the initial feeling of uncertainty made me feel awful. This feeling would sometimes last for days. It led at times to feelings of doubt in my mind. “Maybe I’m not cut out for creative work, because I’m sure “truly creative” people don’t feel like this,” I would say to myself. I hoped and hoped that as I got used to doing creative work that this frustrated, no-idea-what-to-do feeling would go away. But it didn’t.

One of the first things Lehrer reveals is that before there can be a breakthrough, there must first be a block. An obstacle. A seemingly insurmountable problem which we wrestle with and lose. Only then will our brain be forced to search for clever alternatives. It’s this shift into a completely new and different thought process that lies at the heart of creativity. And it’s impossible to get there without first being frustrated.

Eureka! In an instant that very same feeling of frustration which before had caused self-doubt and trepidation was shifted, almost magically, to being a good thing and an indicator that what I was doing was not only not bad, but meant that I was on the right track!

And this was only the first chapter. Lehrer goes on to discuss other stigmas of creativity including how to keep creative teams from stagnating, why hot showers and cups of coffee are good for creativity (but not at the same time), and that it’s possible to cultivate creative genius much like we currently train athletes.

With so many industries changing radically everyday, it’s in everyone’s best interest to harness the power of our own creativity. The good news from Mr. Lehrer is that it’s possible for all of us to do so, whether we currently think of ourselves as creative or not. I wore out my highlighter reading Imagine. It’s a book I’ll be reading again and again in the coming years, right up there with Dan Pink’s Drive and Malcolm Galdwell’s Outliers. If you are or have a vested interested in helping other be as creative as possible, Imagine is a must read.