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Stop Being an Adobe Snob
Good design is about the designer, not the tool
At an Apple event held in the Steve Jobs Theater on September 10, 2019, most of the slides were as you would expect from Apple: a few words in white text on a black slide, or a slide that was filled with a picture of their latest product release.
Then there was this:
Record screech! I’m sorry, what? Apple, who has often been lauded as a design gold standard for their high-impact presentations, slipped from grace (at least a step) in one slide. At this point in the event, Apple was summarizing the features of the latest Apple Watch, clearly trying to get at the idea of “a lot” by cramming too much onto a disorganized slide.
We have likely assumed that Apple is good at design because they have good designers and good design tools. Keynote, probably; definitely not PowerPoint. But do you think Apple’s graphic designers suddenly switched software for one slide? Of course not. Bad design is possible in any software program.
Which, of course, means you can make good design in any program, too. You just have to know how.
