When I was just a wide-eyed student attending design school, I had an instructor who used to hammer into us that if our design wasn't centred around the content, that we were just "cake decorating". In other words—just making something look pretty without regard to the structure as a whole. "Lipstick on a pig" would be the other, less flattering way to describe it.

It’s insane to have to talk about this in the year of our lorb 2019, but here we are. People are still out here putting together presentations that are utterly ineffectual and—more importantly—make my heart hurt. You don’t have to be a designer to make a decent presentation. You just need to embrace minimalism and try to follow as many of these rules as you can.

You might be wondering why it’s important to brand your plucky band of misfits and murderers. Well if you have to ask that question then you probably aren’t fit to lead such a group, and a coup is imminent. So I’ll direct this to your successor (hey—good job on the coup!): make no mistake, the post-apocalyptic world is still a capitalist one—in fact perhaps more so than before we blew it all up.

Somehow in the years that I’ve been freelancing, I’ve managed to give the impression that I have a clue what I’m doing. Fascinating! So rather than dole out advice one email at time, I was encouraged by a friend to put this seemingly common sense advice out on the internet where everyone can publicly declare how silly and misinformed I actually am. Sounds great, let’s do it!