I am a practitioner of good enough design. I focus on a question: does this remove effort for the viewer? Clear hierarchy, nothing to decode, no hunting for the point. In my darker moments, I’ve been counting on good enough design to keep me employed. I can make complex things simpler.
This week I got access to Copilot.
I started by improving an old deck. Fonts, weights, alignment were right almost immediately. It passed the test. I found it easier to navigate. Not better than me, but much, much faster.
Then I went heavy with real work. It misses small things: the choices that direct the eye. One slide gave its conclusion nearly the same weight as a point about process. I resized and reweighted to get the hierarchy to my taste. Give me unlimited time and I’d win. With the minutes I actually have, I don’t. This isn’t Chip Kidd or Dieter Rams, but it doesn’t need to be.
Taste is knowing what good enough looks like, not necessarily making the thing good enough. But to the degree I have any design taste, I got it by making.
My favourite mistake is never killing my darlings. I still want the viewer to see all my hard work. It took years of overloaded slides to learn the empathy of design. One idea per slide. A story where each idea follows from the last. Only what the viewer needs.
Copilot rarely makes that mistake. It gives you restraint as the default. A junior analyst rarely builds the overloaded slide, feels why it fails, or learns to cut.
This week, the good enough design moat I thought I had feels like a damp ditch, dug one bad slide at a time.
If only the slide matters, those bad slides were never needed. If the maker matters, the loop that taught me is gone, and something has to replace it.