Minimalism

Minimalism is the practice of only using what you need.

When it comes to visual communication, the main goal of being minimalistic is to avoid visual clutter, which can make documents and presentations unattractive and difficult to understand. Visual clutter is anything that distracts people away from the most important information you are trying to communicate.

The key to avoiding visual clutter is to remember that the more things you give people to look at, the less they will look at any single thing.

For example, if you have a presentation that's full of charts, but there is only one chart that you want people to focus on, you should remove the other charts.

If you have a document that is full of photos, but there is only one photo that you want people to notice, you should remove the other photos.

By eliminating the other photos and charts, you avoid distracting people away from the most important thing you want them to look at.

People tend to be hesitant to remove anything from their work, usually because: the more you have worked on something, the more you want to show what you did. Under most circumstances, there's nothing wrong with this instinct, as the reality is people can only acknowledge work once they see it.

For example, if you spent the last month hard at work analyzing data, and came up with dozens of charts that demonstrate how hard you worked, the thought of reducing a month's worth of work down to a single chart can seem career-limiting, as a single chart tends to imply that there wasn't a lot of work done, and people may question what you have been doing for the past month.

One approach to resolving this conundrum of wanting to give importance to a single chart, but also wanting to demonstrate your hard work, is to present your work in two formats: a minimalistic format, and a detailed format.

Let's say you wanted to give a minimalistic presentation that only had 3 slides: A title slide, a slide with 1 chart, and a slide that asked the audience for questions. While your audience would initially believe it was only a 3-slide presentation, after the 3^rd slide you might include dozens of additional slides, each of which helps answer questions that you anticipate your audience might have. When you are asked a question, you would simply skip to the relevant slide, thus demonstrating your work. If you are asked no questions at all, it could be argued that your 3-slide presentation was exactly the right length.

This same approach can be used in documents, where an executive summary may include the single photo that is the most important, with each subsequent page adding additional photos that people might be interested in.

In addition to adding more charts and photos than people need, there is sometimes the temptation to add ornamental visual elements in an attempt to improve aesthetics, even though these visual elements convey no important information, and would not be missed by your audience if they were omitted. Ornamental elements include unnecessary headers, footers, borders, background colors, section dividers, image captions, and chart labels.

There also tends to be a huge temptation to add ornamental photos in the name of making a document or presentation more attractive. Ornamental photos are photos that don't communicate any useful information, and serve no real purpose. In most cases, these are stock photographs that consist of a person or a group of people standing around doing something vaguely work-related. If this is the stylistic choice encouraged by your company's brand guidelines, then you should follow convention, but even in this case, you should try to use a photo that is not ornamental, but actually conveys important information.

For example, if you were preparing a document that communicated project status, instead of including an ornamental stock photograph you found online showing random people working together in an office, take a photo of the actual project team and use that instead. Even though the photo may not be as high quality as stock photography, it will be more meaningful, and it will make sense as to why it was included.

To be truly minimalistic, everything that distracts from the most important thing you want people to look at needs to be removed - without exception. In our previous example of a 3-slide presentation, we might only make it one slide that contains the chart, omitting the title slide, and the slide that asked the audience for questions.

Further, if the chart showed increasing revenue over time, it might not need labels for individual months or incremental dollar amounts. Instead, a single line that trends upwards with a label for the starting and final amounts and the starting and ending months may be sufficient.

If ever you remove something, and realize that your audience wouldn't know what they are looking at unless you add it back, then add it back. The key to minimalism is to strip everything down to the bare essentials, and only add things back when you feel you took too much away.

When we have mastered minimalistic visual communication by removing all unnecessary visual clutter, our resulting documents and presentations should look clean, simple, and elegant.

What you may find is that there is a lot of empty space, which might make you uncomfortable if you feel that empty space is wasted space. For example, the single chart in our single-slide presentation might look lonely when surrounded on all 4 sides with nothing but empty space, but graphic designers have a name for this empty space: white space.

Whitespace is space with nothing in it that draws attention to whatever it surrounds. The empty space serves the function of framing the content, and guides someone's eyes towards what you want them to look at. This is why all documents and presentations have margins, as the margins act as whitespace. Becoming comfortable with minimalism also requires that you become comfortable with whitespace, because when you remove everything else, what remains is most important.