Can your slides be too well-designed?

That was the subject for today’s Dilbert cartoon. The captions are:

Pointy Haired Boss: Your slide deck is too well-designed.

It suggests you spend too much time on things that are not important.

Asok (the intern): You don’t give me important tasks.

Pointy Haired Boss: That’s no excuse for good design.

Sometimes you can’t win. His design presumably looked better than usual for that company. But if Asok spent less time and created a bad design, then he also would be criticized. Since interns are disposable, he eventually might be eliminated via The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome.   

Back on September 1, 2012 I blogged about PowerPoint Flaws and Failures: Rules Commonly Broken. That post linked to a long magazine article by Stephen M. Kosslyn and his colleagues which discussed eight cognitive communication principles for designing effective slides.