There’s a moment I love in minimalist art.
A single stroke of ink.
A lone line across a page.
One curve, one gesture, one fragment… and somehow it says everything.

Think of Hokusai’s spare brushwork.
Think of Ellsworth Kelly’s single arc of colour.
Think of the way a charcoal sketch can suggest an entire landscape with only three lines.

Minimalism isn’t emptiness.
It’s precision.
It’s restraint.
It’s mercy — because your eye knows exactly where to rest.

Your audience deserves the same mercy.

💡 ONE IDEA WELL

The most generous thing you can do with a slide is to give it one job.

One idea.
One moment.
One message to land.

Most slides try to be everything at once — the whole talk squeezed into a single rectangle.
That’s when the eye scrambles, the working memory panics, and the audience does the mental equivalent of dropping all their groceries on the kitchen floor.

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There’s neuroscience behind this.

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Miller’s Law (1956) famously suggested 7 ± 2 bits of information — later revised downward by Cowan (2001) to more like 4.
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Four pieces of information before the whole thing collapses.

A slide with eight bullet points isn’t just a design choice.
It’s a cognitive threat.

Mayer’s Multimedia Principles say the same thing more politely:
when a slide tries to carry multiple messages at once, learning suffers.

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But I don’t want this newsletter to be about science.
I want it to be about art.

Because art teaches the lesson more elegantly.

Minimalist art doesn’t shout.
It whispers.
It trusts your eye to follow the line and understand the shape it suggests.

A good slide does the same.

One message per slide isn’t about minimalism.
It’s about directing attention where it needs to go — without forcing the audience to fight their way toward meaning.

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🎨 A TALE OF TWO ARTWORKS

Take a look at these two paintings.

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1. The Overcrowded Canvas — Rubens

When you look at Rubens’ The Battle of the Amazons (1615), the eye doesn’t land — it ricochets.
Horses rear, bodies twist, water churns, steel flashes.
Every inch of the canvas competes for your attention.
It’s magnificent, but it’s exhausting.
This is what a text-heavy slide feels like: a visual battle scene where every idea is fighting for survival.

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2. The Single Gesture — Sesshū Tōyō

Now place it beside Sesshū Tōyō’s Landscape (1495).
A few strokes of ink suspended in a sea of intentional white space.
Mountains emerge through suggestion, not detail.
Your eye knows exactly where to rest.
Your mind doesn’t have to fight.
Nothing competes.
The message is singular.

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Rubens gives you a hundred stories and nowhere to put them.
Sesshū gives you stillness — and one clear idea.

And that’s the point:
A slide doesn’t need to be a battle scene.
It can be a brushstroke.

🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGE

When you design your next slide, ask it a single question:

“What is the one sentence this slide exists to deliver?”

Then remove anything that competes with that sentence.

Your slide should feel like a brushstroke, not a battle.

🧭 ASK YOURSELF THIS

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Speak soon,

Andy

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PS If you want help turning your slides into clean, focused brushstrokes, reply with one and I’ll walk you through a redesign.