Balancing Creativity and Consistency in Restrictive Style Guides for Presentation Design
AWS Case Study
About AWS
AWS—Amazon Web Services—is a global organization that is very well known even to the general public, not just the business community. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers around the world. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, the largest enterprises, and major government agencies—use AWS to reduce costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
The Problem with Restrictive Style Guides for Presentation Design
We were involved in a visual enhancement project for a sales presentation that a certain department was using for corporate clients.
The Solution
In this case, just as with the “blue organization,” we weren’t allowed to touch the narrative or the content elements. Our goal was to refresh the design. The AWS guidelines are very clear and comprehensive, in the sense that they provide solutions for a wide range of scenarios. To be more specific, they’ve created hundreds of slides that anticipate every possible communication need. They also have a huge number of icons that can help you present information visually more easily. One specific aspect is the use of a black background. This choice has very clear branding reasons, but it also makes the presentation team’s job even harder. That’s because it’s much harder to display photos on a black background, as well as colorful logos. You can’t use too many colors or too much text (though this area is regulated by the style guide anyway).
We found ourselves facing a presentation with dozens of slides where the rules were quite strict and were strictly followed. What can you do in this case? How can you create visual impact and, above all, how can you tell a story (obviously, within the limits of the established narrative, if there is one, and the content)? There isn’t much you can do. However, to support both the audience and the speaker, we chose to better structure the information on each slide.
Following the rules in the style guide, for each slide, I organized the information into clusters, used multiple headings and subheadings, took advantage of the option to use bold text, and “made liberal use” of the available icons. Also, wherever possible, I presented the information in the form of bullet points.
It was a challenging exercise; I actually felt like I didn’t bring enough added value to this presentation design project. It’s also worth noting that these projects require a lot of time to understand the brand identity and then the brand’s visual identity (which implicitly includes the presentation design style guide). Often, at least in the case of large organizations, the general style guide runs to thousands of pages, and the section dealing with presentation design runs to hundreds of pages. You simply can’t work on it without knowing all the rules very well. In these projects, the joy comes from finding the perfect harmony between the design guidelines and the message—with its story—that the presentation conveys.
