An explain article

PowerPoint dressed as a funny piñata at a children's birthday party.

Who doesn't know them, the funny friendship books from elementary school days. Everyone in the schoolyard was allowed to fill a double page with colorful gel stickers, glitter pens, and lots of "HDGDL." Here you could really let loose creatively. No valuable time was wasted on guidelines for the correct use of fonts, colors, and design grids. Understandably so with only a 15-minute break.

Of course, something like a corporate design was as foreign back then as buying beer at a gas station for the first time. However, what we wanted to achieve there was to grab attention.

It must stand out!

Create something unique, even squeeze a piece of our identity into this little book. Almost every company now has its own Corporate Design Guidelines in their repertoire. Something like the holy grail of every marketing person. When these guidelines resemble a book in scope, it's quite a challenge to navigate through them. Everything beautifully documented, so that even an untrained "designer" shouldn't have a problem with it. Among the use of logos, fonts, and colors, the right image look for social media, extensive instructions for creating print products of all kinds, even the smallest name tag is not overlooked. After all, the brand's appearance must be presented consistently across all channels.

Looking at how companies present themselves internally, there is hardly any "brand" left. This is particularly noticeable in the medium of presentation, which is often completely neglected and thus hardly regulated. If mentioned at all in the Corporate Design Guidelines, the topic is covered on just one or two pages. So every employee draws on their creative skills from elementary school days. Whether it's a kick-off meeting, departmental presentation, regular meeting, or status updates on the fly: The presentation hangs like a piñata on the wall, and everyone takes a swing at it with whatever they have. A bit colorful, a bit animated, and the exterior scarcely reflects the content. What was state-of-the-art PowerPoint ten years ago, still suffices for most today. The drive to create something visually unique seems to have scarcely waned since the schoolyard days.

This might still be amusing internally. But presentations also find their way to the public, especially at events. The employees become brand ambassadors. They embody and represent the heart of a company, especially when they present. And what already causes eyestrain on the small monitor of the meeting room or as a small projector projection does not get any better on a high-resolution LED wall with ten meters in width – quite the opposite.

Especially when we increasingly talk about purpose – the purpose of a brand. When products or services alone are no longer enough. When it is crucial to inspire people both internally and externally. That's when you can hardly avoid a presentation.

For everything to work properly, one should take more time for the undertaking of the presentation. If we dare to explore this new territory, we need time to orient ourselves and question the familiar. It takes time to detach from the print medium. The development on the web is a great example here. Not long ago, it was standard to find Flash-animated catalogs, which are hardly seen today. The distance from the familiar CMYK print medium has become more than evident by now.

This rethink is also imperative for our context because print is not the same as PowerPoint, and vice versa. Take a large hall with a stage, a massive screen with lots of lights and booming sound, place a speaker on stage, and fill it with a few thousand people. If you then make the effort to develop a thoughtful and fitting design, you ideally get a grand presentation and enthusiastic participants. Whether this would work with an oversized mutated piñata is debatable. However, if you intend to share something important with the outside world, it probably makes sense to leave the piñata in the stable.