Authenticity is something that is very easy to loose once you start doing something. I have great respect for people at Ethos, their Meet Henry is iconic. But this one is overproduced. Too slick. Inauthentic.
Seth Godin is one of the very few people who can illustrate blog posts with pictures that actually add something. Most of the time people use the same plastic photos from StockExchange which add just visual noise — all because someone told them that they need to “keep visual”. This is lame. But Seth — Seth is different. He creates diagrams. Here’s one from his recent piece:
The same applies to slide design. If you want to do it sucessfully, either do it slick or don’t do it at all. White background, black Arial font — fine. Black background, white Courier font (think Lawrence Lessig) — fine. Blue background with stars and stripes, 3 different fonts in 4 colors plus some cheesy wordart — inauthentic, low-frequency, single-digit, lame and just plain ugly.
And of course it’s hard to be slick, it takes time and practice and you do a lot of ugly things on your way there. This is all not to discourage you from doing “design”, this is just for you to realise that most of the time you (and me!) are stuck between “real” and “slick”. We seek for more sophistication — but we are mostly not sophisticated enought. Yet.