Poetic License of Design

Let’s say you have to make slides for tomorrow’s big meeting. Your boss wants five strategy points on one slide. You know that’s too much to be put on one slide, but it’s being insisted. “This gives a complete picture of our strategy”. “We can’t split it up.”

You think there is another way. You spread these points across five clean slides, one point per slide, and you still receive a pushback. They worry it waters down their message. You’re stuck between what works and what your bosses want.

In my current worldview, I would err on the side of clarity.

Ideas are only as good as our ability to communicate them. We might have the best possible product strategy, and it still needs the messenger to have delivered the message right, for the reader to chew and digest it.

So, I would pull a magic trick up my sleeve. I call it the ‘Poetic UX license’. This is inspired by poetic license, a popular literary tool often used by the legends to deviate from conventional tools of language in certain situations. Take Shakespeare. When he wrote “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears,” he left out the “and” to make it sound better. Or think about “Treasure Island,” where the author used fake pirate talk like “shiver me timbers” to make the story feel more real.

Just like writers can break grammar rules to make their writing stronger with poetic license, designers can break presentation rules to make ideas clearer using a similar, poetic license of design. The goal isn’t to follow rules—it’s to make sure people understand.

Here’s what I mean: Instead of cramming five points into one messy slide (too dense) or spreading them across five slides (too long), why not merge them into three clear points on one slide? It’s like finding the sweet spot between too much and too little.

Think about it this way: most people only remember about 10% of what they see in a presentation. If that’s true, we should make those few takeaways count. Three strong points stick better than five rushed ones.

In this example, you might have the best strategy in the world, but it’s worthless if no one gets it. It’s like having a great joke but messing up the punchline—the delivery matters as much as the content. This isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about making ideas shine through.

Sometimes you have to break the rules to create clarity. And clarity comes from subtraction, not addition.

I will always pick clarity over completeness. And good clarity comes from subtraction, not addition.

The ability to create clarity when there’s no shortage of chaos, opinions, and competing priorities is a rare skill.

In any reasonably competent company, this skill alone will help take you quite far, fairly quickly.

Concretely, this means creating clarity on the main problems,…

— Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas) January 13, 2025